[NBLUG/talk] Roundtable discussion on FreeBSD

S. Saunders sms at sonic.net
Fri Dec 16 20:59:37 PST 2005


First off... great talk the other night!  Thanks and kudo's all 'round
(and not only to the presenters, but to the NBLUG officers who keep
it all going, O'Reilly for the space, etc!).

On Fri, December 16, 2005 20:14, Rick wrote:

> I think I heard Julian say that there are four *BSD variants, including
> FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD.  I don't recall the fourth?  A quick
> Google search turns up several additional *BSD distributions.  Does
> anyone know which one he meant?

Some folks consider the Mac's "OS X" (Darwin) a BSD; personally, I'd
consider it more of a variant (as compared to the other 3) because of
the CMU Mach kernel...  Others MMV, and I'm certainly not so informed
on the subject as our BSD speaker was!

There's also "BSD/OS" and "Dragonfly BSD" which at least some folks
consider "main" BSD's...

Personally, I consider Free&, Open&, + Net& to be "the main" freenix
BSD's these days.

I quote Wikipedia's BSD page:
   "It should be noted that the above is a brief outline
    of popular perception and development focus, not
    a set of hard and fast rules."    ;-)

<frowns>
Yanno, it suddeny strikes me that the hackerly goal of precision in
speech, and the desire to avoid stating errors-of-fact via "easier-to-
say-and-almost-right" language, yields some almost lawyerly
weasel-words on occasion....   ;-)


- Steve S.





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