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Date:      Thu, 22 Jul 1999 15:25:08 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Jeremy Shaffner <jer@jorsm.com>
To:        Bob.Sullivan@MSNBC.com, sgd@tfm.com
Cc:        freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org
Subject:   MSNBC Article
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.3.95q.990722143613.11007I-100000@mercury.jorsm.com>

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Hello,

I was reading the article at http://www.msnbc.com/news/292376.asp and was
suprised to see:

                          No matter, says Diercouff. Soon, the various
                   BSD distributions will be able to run Linux
                   applications, including office productivity suites
                   such as StarOffice.


Linux emulation has been available for FreeBSD via kernel modules for a
good long time.  I run many Linux applications, including StarOffice and
WordPerfect under Linux emulation on FreeBSD.  The second sentence on the
OpenBSD homepage says "OpenBSD supports binary emulation of most programs
from SVR4 (Solaris), FreeBSD, Linux, BSDI, SunOS, and HPUX."  I don't know
about NetBSD and BSDI but it wouldn't be hard to find out.  A little bit
of research goes a long way.

And since most software for Linux is open source, it can usually be
compiled on most any other system as well.  The FreeBSD ports system used
by FreeBSD (shared with OpenBSD) currently has 2502 applications
(http://www.freebsd.org/ports/master-index.html), many of which are
originally Linux programs.  I realize this point is a bit more technical
than the article, but it matters in the eyes of those who wouldn't know
otherwise.

Was this a misquote?  Did Stephen forget himself?  Did Mr. Sullivan just
plain get it wrong?  Alot of people will read this article and those who
would switch, or choose *BSD over Linux as their first Unix system, won't
because of this inaccuracy.  Is it possible to correct this before further
damage is done?  Otherwise it was a good article. 

Thankyou for your time.


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System Administrator             7 Area Codes in Chicagoland and NW Indiana 
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