View Single Post
Old 21st May 2008
TerryP's Avatar
TerryP TerryP is offline
Arp Constable
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: USofA
Posts: 1,547
Default

At my last encounter, NetBSD felt to me more like what I would expect the old BSD releases to behave as if I fired up an emulator. When compared to how different modern FreeBSD is at least.


I've always thought of FreeBSD, as being the one modern BSD with the "We've been using this thing for decades, no reason not to keep evolving" attitude.

My first time setuping up NetBSD was quite interesting hehe.


Quote:
Originally Posted by ai-danno View Post
- The source code is untainted by licensing issues or commercial binary blobs (no GPL code, it's all BSD-licensed. No NDA's with companies.) In other words, it is truly free.
Not really, even in OpenBSD there is _still_ GPL code. I know FreeBSDs source tree as a contrib and a gnu directory, I see a gnu one in OpenBSD. Even with the changes to GCC in OpenBSD, GCC is still essentially GPL'd.


BSD in one form or another has had GPL code for years, I believe GNU's C Compiler became the systems standard C Compiler in 4.4BSD. Which probably means all of Free, Net, and Open BSD's CVS-recorded lives.

A number of utilities also slip through between the *BSDs (more of them in FreeBSD then OpenBSD imho) but they are often ones you'd rather not have to rewrite and maintain yourself, especially when on occasion you might have to be compatible with the GNU softwares or complicate the ports system.


I'm not partial to GCC, but you'll have to pardon me... I'm a bit of a technical-bastard when it comes to details :|
__________________
My Journal

Thou shalt check the array bounds of all strings (indeed, all arrays), for surely where thou typest ``foo'' someone someday shall type ``supercalifragilisticexpialidocious''.
Reply With Quote