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

[Daniel Hagerty]

Bob Keyes <bob at sinister.com> writes:

> 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.

    Several vendors have shipped commercial appliances around *BSD.

    The *BSD equivelent of busybox is called crunch; they have some
other tools, but it's been a long time since I've been here.

    Note that busybox + linux's typical GPLed userland + proprietary
software is a recipe for GPL'ed no longer pproprietary software; an
obvious problem for some applications.

    While there exist escape techniques to avoid the viral GPL
problem, they're directly opposed to producing the smallest possible
embedded system.  No need for us to go into the religious issues of
licensing; just pointing out that different people with different
needs have been here, and there are more tools than you seem to be
aware of.