Date: Wed, 1 Dec 1999 12:06:30 -0500 From: "Christian Gruber" <Christian.Edward.Gruber@gmx.net> To: "Dave Barr" <barr@visi.com> Cc: <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>, <misc@openbsd.org>, <netbsd-users@netbsd.org> Subject: RE: Why so many BSDs? Message-ID: <NDBBJIOLGLBIIOHBGLAOAEGOCJAA.Christian.Edward.Gruber@gmx.net> In-Reply-To: <38454D5E.8E166B93@visi.com>
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And how exactly does name-calling, in the name of moderation, benefit the cause of Free-UN*X unity? One of my big problems in the wars between OS's is not that facts are distorted, as those facts can be countered by better facts, but rather that the rhetoric and religion flows thick, preventing anyone from even getting to factual arguements. Theo's being a nut or not is irrelevant to the facts you mention. Secondly, Theo was paraphrased without references, so holding him to the statement is like hearing someone say, "I heard that Clinton (Dole... whoever) hates black people," and then replying "What a bastard" instead of "Quote your source." It's bad science, so to speak. Mostly this personal thing really pisses me off, because even if Theo were as nutty as you ascribe of him, you contribute to extremism in the issue by calling him so. A few points: > 1. SuSE, RedHat, Debian, Slackware are the big 4. > They account for the vast, vast majority of the > installed base. 1. Windows has most of the install base, so the arguement of 80/20 may make some sense, but has a real problem when taken too far. > 2. Many so called "separete distributions" are > either total image copies of the above or the > above plus some amount of branding or additional > software packages. To say they are a "separate > distribution" to the same degree this has > meaning as say, RedHat versus Debian, is a lie. 2. Agreed, but you must remember that if I use one distribution, which is red-hat-like, and they change at v.X to use a slackware style packaging system, I have a choice. I can change distributions blah blah blah. However, the fact that they can alter their distribution without synchronizing modifications, means that they're different enough. From a Project-management and Product-management standpoint, these issues of revision control show up as a severe quality assurance hassle. Linux has the wonderful advantage of having people who will rip-off any good changes from such an altering distrubution, and merge them into the whole, and will probably ditch any distribution en-masse if that org makes mods which render their version incompatible... but to use the software in a commercial or other setting where stability and security are required, some level of stability needs to be guarranteed. Now paying red-hat some money will probably guarrantee it, and that's one legitimate way... pay for the service, and Red-Hat's reputation requires them to be careful. But that's a different dynamic than an actual approach which encourages stable merging. Which is a better system, BSD or GNU? Who the heck knows, but in one you get fewer branches, and stability from the process, and the other, you get more branches, and stability from commercial demand. Take yer pick. > 3. Given the same criteria that Theo no doubt uses > to get the 240 or 260 number, one cannot say that > there is only 3 versions of BSD. You'd have to > get a number in the 60-100 range. (add all the > *BSD flavors, multiply all the branches they > have, multiply all the architectures they support, > add all the non-integrated driver development, > etc). It's easy to inflate the numbers using > meaningless criteria. 3. Agreed, such inflations are unreasonable, if they include architectures, and "branches within a project", but there are fewer independant groups working on OpenSource BSD-based operating systems. I know of but a few, including OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Darwin. There are some specialized OS's for real-time computing, massively parallel stuff, but these bill themselves quite differently, and I think the number is quite small. I think that the arguement about numbers of distributions is entirely a red-herring. It's more, if anything, about process control, and too often, about ideology. regards, Christian. Original: Well, Theo is a nut, in more ways than one. You can inflate the numbers to suit your own agenda, as apparently Theo is (and others are) doing. [snip] To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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