Re: Commercial Distribution?

From: Scott W (wegster_at_mindcore.net)
Date: 01/07/04

  • Next message: Peter Leftwich: "Re: fixit" 
    Date: Tue, 06 Jan 2004 22:46:02 -0500
To: Scott W <wegster@mindcore.net>

    Scott W wrote:

    > Tillman Hodgson wrote:
    >
    >> On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 09:14:41PM -0500, David D.W. Downey wrote:
    >>
    >>
    >>> And how is that different from Linux? FreeBSD is an Operating
    >>> System, so is
    >>> Red Hat, Debian, Stampede, SLS, Slackware, and on and on. FreeBSD
    >>> does the
    >>> same thing. FreeBSD didn't develop OpenSSL but it includes it, nor
    >>> did it
    >>> develop SSH or swat, but it includes them. Just as linux
    >>> distributions do.
    >>
    >>
    >> That's somewhat incorrect in my view. See
    >> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/explaining-bsd/index.html
    >>
    >> for details.
    >>
    >> My attempt at a summary:
    >>
    >> RedHat et al may /distribute/ an operating system, but they did not
    >> write it. An analogy in the motorcycle world are the custom bike shops
    >> (some of which make extremely nice motorcycles!) versus Harley-Davidson.
    >> The custom bike shops carefully (one hopes) select components from the
    >> open market and put the polish on the resulting product. H-D may also
    >> use open market products (electrics *cough*, carbs *cough*) but are
    >> considered a /manufacturer/.
    >>
    >> Both sell motorcycles (operating systems). There is a distinction,
    >> however.
    >>
    >> -T
    >>
    > I know this one may be seen as sacrilege to some, but think about this:
    >
    > 1. *BSD uses a fairly significant amount of GNU and GPL licensed
    > (opposed to the BSD license) code in it. gcc, Perl, XFree86, Apache,
    > GNU Make, autoconf, mysql, PostgreSQL, etc etc. While it can be
    > argued many/most of these are not part of the core OS, what about:
    > gcc, objective c, libreadline, cvs, diff, tar, sort, patch and
    > friends? (from /usr/src/gnu and /usr/src/usr.bin )
    >
    > 2. It can be argued that the 'core OS' (kernel and _required_ system
    > tools) in *BSD are mostly BSD licensed versus GPL (Linux), but I'd
    > wager a significant number of driver developments, kernel code (or
    > perhaps design), as well as many programs required by most systems
    > running either OS(insert distro here if you're offended), at least
    > share bug fixes and new developments to some respect. If I'm not
    > entirely wrong (which is certainly possible) I thought Alan Cox of
    > Linux kernel fame has also done some work on the BSD kernel(s?)?
    >
    > Note that I don't entirely disagree with the response- IMHO, RedHat
    > and SuSe are in fact merely distributions, but Linux as a collection
    > of kernel + core programs is certainly an OS, in the same manner as
    > *BSD is. Even RH AS/ES 2.1 is little more than a RH tweaked kernel +
    > a few 'commercial' apps (stronghold, not sure of others offhand,
    > haven't ever needed them!), on top of RH 7.3, which is really a Linux
    > kernel + tools snapshot (many of which programs are at least heavily
    > driven by Linux development in the first place), + RedHat or SuSe
    > 'themes' and defaults, some customized rc/init scripts, and an installer.
    > Anyways, I realized I may now be totally missing the point here so am
    > going to now shut my mouth/keyboard...my comments still apply, but I'm
    > not sure whom I'm disagreeing/agreeing with right now.. ;-)
    >
    > Scott
    >
    Ok, sorry for following up to myself- below is in fact what my above
    comments are directed at:

    ls, while certainly useful, and part of the core OS (as are many
    others), could not in fact be built without the use of gcc, and
    GNU/GPL'ed compiler (and associated friends, ld, nm, gas, etc), so I
    really believe the below to be basically propogated and repeated without
    much thought, but incorrectly...not in that FreeBSD (and Net/OpenBSD)
    have a higher content of 'pure' (meaning written explicity for the
    specific OS) code in the core OS, but in that the
    distinction/differences in reality qualify FreeBSD to be an 'OS' while
    Linux (not RH, SuSe, other distros) is not...

    Scott

    David D.W. Downey wrote:

    >> > You're touching on a big difference between Linux and FreeBSD; FreeBSD
    >> > is an operating system, whereas Linux is a kernel which can be packaged
    >> > with different programs. You can make do anything you want with
    >> > FreeBSD, modify it all you want, release it (or not) along with the
    >> > source code (or not), but you can't claim it''s FreeBSD any more...
    >
    >

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