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Old 1st June 2009
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snes-addict snes-addict is offline
Real Name: Ken
BSD gamer
 
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Minnesota, USA
Posts: 34
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The reason that the BSDs have not joined forces to become a super-terrific-happy OS is that it is simply far too difficult to do so.

Claim 1: The overall central goal of each group of developers is different, and many developers have ideologies which would conflict with each other if they needed to work together (an obvious yet crucial example would be whether or not to include binary blobs in the source tree). Progress in this environment would be extremely frustrating to developers when such simplistic decisions cannot be made.

Claim 2: This has been stated previously, but I'll state it again; each BSD has diverged significantly from the common starting point (386BSD and 4.4BSD-lite) and thus merging the systems together from their current states would be impossible without relinquishing some functionality, reliability, speed, portability, or security. Each BSD project focuses on a specific, limited set of desired goals, and each project excels at its chosen goals.

One could attempt to write a BSD-based OS which possesses all of the merits of the current systems, but that is no easy task. Look at the most common desktop OSes; many of them try to succeed at perfection (or at least that is what they would have their users believe), and they can never quite get all of it right.

This query is very similar to discussions I've heard on game emulation forums: why can there not be an emulator which is speedy, accurate, and lightweight on resources all at once? Because writing the perfect emulator is a relatively impossible feat. It is the same answer for an operating system; none can be perfect for everything, but they can be darn good for a few tasks. They do not reinvent each others' wheels; they craft entirely different ones.
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