On Sun, 5 May 2002, Russell Hires wrote:
> And thus my question. If *BSD is so good, why don't we all love *BSD? Is it
> philosophical? Practical?
>
> What does Linux need to do better to get to be as good as *BSD?
>
> Russell
>
> PS I'm going with the hypothesis that this is true, that Linux isn't as good
> as *BSD. I don't have any way of knowing...
What does Linux need to do? Well, being about 20 years older would be a
good start. :) BSD has roots closer to the original Bell Labs unix. The
packet filtering code in OpenBSD is more mature than the good packet
filter we finally got with the 2.4 kernel.
We did this topic a few months ago. I'm running both
Linux and BSD, I like both, both are good. Arguments about one being
superior to the other tend to be religious. The main thing that sets
Linux apart from the BSDs is the way Linus Torvalds has handled things
from the beginning. The BSDs have always been kind of cliquish. They
have their resons for that, not the least of which is a concern for the
quality of the software and distrust of unkown persons to not muck it up.
(Some say they also fear forks.) Linus, on the other hand, basically
invited the world to lend a hand. It remains a much more open
community. To be a FreeBSD contributor you need to be on the "commiter"
list. It's the list of people who can commit changes to the CVS tree.
You get on the list through the approval of a commitee. It is a
somewhat formal process. To be a Linux contributor you need to post some
code to the mailing list. (If you really want Linus to include your patch
in the next release, it would help if it was good code. :) ) The BSD guys
say, "Who are you and why do you think you are worthy of contributing to
BSD?" Linus basically said, "Send me some code. I'll compile it, and
we'll see if we can make something run." This open development style
spread to many other projects that make the software that makes a
kernel useful. All those developers were users too. They talked it up
to their friends. More folks started making more apps. Things grew.
More people are running Linux all the time. Contrast this with BSD's
comparatively small, yet stable (some might say stagnant) market share.
Linus' true genious was that he saw how a chaotic process could yield
orderly and elegant solutions. There might be an analogy here between
allowing chaotic market forces to allocate resources among the members of
a society and a communist-style command economy, but that's getting us
back to politics and religion.
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