On Mon, 6 May 2002, Greg Schmidt wrote:
> 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.
>
I forgot to mention, for Linux in the Tampa, FL area there is this thing
called SLUG. It's really cool. They have a mailing list where you can
get expert help. They have a nice website with a very informative FAQ and
lots of useful links. They have a handful of meetings each month all over
the area and look like they're soon adding another in St. Pete.
Trying to subscribe to the Tampa BSD users group mailing list got me the
same error it did a few months ago:
----- Transcript of session follows -----
procmail: Quota exceeded while writing "/var/spool/mail/bangheadhere"
550 bangheadhere@bangheadhere.org... Can't create output: Error 0
I got that email address from the freebsd.org site in their list of user
groups where it has been saying for at least a year that the Tampa group
is forming. They once had a web site with broken mail links, but I can't
find it anymore.
Orlando has a BSD group. Their website http://bugo.zepa.net isn't very
impressive, but I could subscribe to their mailing list and retrieve some
archived messages. They have 407 messages. The most recent was some spam
on April 16. Message 406 was dated April 3 and looks like someone
actually trying to help someone else.
Google's categories lists 276 entries under Linux user groups and less
than 2 dozen under BSD user groups.
Now why did we like Linux again?
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