[BBLISA] Comparison of BSD vs Linux? (here goes the flame war!)

[Edward Ned Harvey]

The differences between all of these are generally driven by differences in
philosophy or specific legal matters.  They're all pretty good.

But here's my 2-second comparison:

OpenBSD is the most stable and secure of the lot, because their philosophy
generally favors stability, and slower releases of new support for
newfangled things like USB.  They're famous for an independent line-by-line
security audit.

NetBSD is somewhere in the middleground of the BSD's.

FreeBSD is the most advanced of the BSD's, and although it's a very stable
secure OS, it might be argued that it's less stable & secure than either Net
or Open, in exchange for better support for newer hardware and stuff.

Linux distributions have as many different flavors and more.  But since some
linux distros are individually more widely deployed than any of the BSD's,
linux distros are able to cover some ground that the BSD's don't.  If you
require the newest bleeding edge, it's common somebody's built it and
written a webpage about it for Linux, but not for any BSD.  Just cuz it's
more popular.  Also most linux distros have better software availability
than the BSD's.  (By software availability, I'm talking about precompiled,
readily available binary packages specific for your OS.  Because sometimes
building from source is very hard.)  Put simply, linux is more popular
because it's more popular. 



> -----Original Message-----
> From: bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org [mailto:bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org] On
> Behalf Of Scott Ehrlich
> Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2007 11:31 AM
> To: bblisa at bblisa.org
> Subject: [BBLISA] Comparison of BSD vs Linux? (here goes the flame
> war!)
> 
> I'm in a class at Usenix/Lisa and the instructor is a BSD fan and hates
> Linux.
> I'd like to get insight from the list of viewpoints, security,
> comparisons,
> package availability, etc, of the differences between the basic worlds
> of
> UNIX-like distros.
> 
> Second, what are the differences among Open/Free/Net BSD?
> 
> I'm not calling for any wars.   I'm looking for genuine education to
> understand
> the worlds between Linux and BSD, and then among the BSD distros.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Scott
> 
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