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Date:      Sat, 4 Apr 1998 00:19:07 +0100
From:      Nik Clayton <nik@nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk>
To:        Joey Garcia <bear@pacificnet.net>, freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: BSD Utopia?
Message-ID:  <19980404001907.09828@nothing-going-on.org>
In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19980402225400.00698fd4@pacificnet.net>; from Joey Garcia on Thu, Apr 02, 1998 at 10:54:00PM -0800
References:  <3.0.1.32.19980402225400.00698fd4@pacificnet.net>

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On Thu, Apr 02, 1998 at 10:54:00PM -0800, Joey Garcia wrote:
> Well, I've been thinking....sometimes that can be a bad thing. *grin*  But
> anyways, I was wondering why you guys have chosen FreeBSD over the other
> *BSD's (OpenBSD and NetBSD).  

Historical reasons (hysterical raisins :-) )

Late 1994, early 1995 I was working on a project at university to 
broadcast the student radio station around the campus network. Of Linux,
FreeBSD and NetBSD, only FreeBSD supported multicasting in a useful 
fashion.

It also helped that it was pretty close to SunOS 4.1.3.

I've used OpenBSD (it runs on one of the Alphas at work, doing nameservice).
I chose OpenBSD over NetBSD because (as far as I could tell) the 
installation process was simpler, and I didn't have the time to get 
involved in a very complex install.

> Anyways, I was wondering why there is such a choice in *BSD's.  

Look at it as being a little like the Linux distributions. There is 
one 'Linux', but you have the 'Redhat', 'Debian', 'Slackware', 'Caldera',
and other distributions.

In the same way, there's one BSD, but it comes in 'FreeBSD', 'NetBSD',
'OpenBSD', and (if you want to pay for it) 'BSDi' distributions.

> I was wondering what would happen of all the BSD project would unify 
> in order to create one Free/Open BSD.  

Nice idea. The snag is (basically) the personalities involved. Some 
people don't want to work with other people (and this applies across
all three camps).

It's (IMHO) a bit of a shame, but it's the way things are. Searching
comp.unix.bsd.* at DejaNews will probably turn up a bunch of threads
along these lines (along with messages from people who can express the
strengths of having three different BSDs better than I can).

<snip history stuff, other people have answered it>

N
-- 
Work: nik@iii.co.uk                       | FreeBSD + Perl + Apache
Rest: nik@nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk    | Remind me again why we need
Play: nik@freebsd.org                     | Microsoft?

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