Nacho-BSD

[Steve Bergman]

Walter Vaughan wrote:
>
> Thus I wonder why all the fuss about Linux, when we have real 
> BSD-unixen with all the work in the past few years designed around 
> making the OS work better in a future world of multi-processing 
> servers, rather than a *nix-like OS that really wants to be Windows2000.
That's really a bit of a mischaracterization of Linux.  But I really see 
*BSD, Linux, OpenSolaris, et. al. as being complementary to each other. 
(And didn't FreeBSD just vow to become a W2K clone^W^W^W^Wcatch up with 
Linux on the desktop within a year?)

What Linux brings to the table is momentum, name recognition, and mind 
share.  We've been selling and supporting point of sale, manufacturing 
accounting,  and business accounting for a long long time.  We used to 
use SCO Open Server, but have transitioned to Linux.  The BSD's are 
non-starters for these applications because not a one of the products we 
sell has support for any of them.  I would wager that Linux's popularity 
has increased *BSD's absolute mindshare.

I'm quite happy with Linux, and so don't use BSD's anywhere.  Not that I 
don't think that they are good solid OSes.

I believe that Linux is getting ready to benefit from OpenBSD's 
excellent work reverse engineering wireless chipsets to create binary 
blobless drivers.  So the benefits go both ways.  Perhaps, in time, 
OpenSolaris will benefit other posix-like OSes.  ZFS and Dtrace sure 
look nice.  Perhaps some day the new McNeallyless Sun will address the 
licensing issues.

-Steve