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

[Bob Keyes]

On Thu, 15 Nov 2007, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:

> 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.

I should point out that many Linux applications can be run in FreeBSD (and
I think the other BSDs as well, but I am not sure) under Linux emulation.
This isn't as slow as running a virtual machine - the actual Linux
libraries are installed into BSD and used. This can be very useful.

The note about Linux being more popular because it's more popular is true,
but there's also more to it than that. The differing licenses, BSD and
GPL, appeal differently to different people. It appears that more
developers prefer GPL. But this is not to say that BSD is not popular or
successful. I would say that both BSD and Linux camps would say that they
have succeeded.

What I am working on right now involves embedded systems. Once you start
dealing with some really small systems (8mb of flash and 16mb of ram)
Linux really wins out over BSD. FreeBSD can be gracefully minimized for
smaller systems, but only to a point. Linux, with uClibc and busybox, does
what BSD seems to be unable and unwilling to do. I will freely admit that
embedded systems are pretty much the opposite end of the scale of
interest to most people on this mailing list.