Most people know what GNU/Linux is, but fewer know about BSD and fewer still have actually used one of the major free BSD variants. Ed Hurst, a writer and a long time GNU/Linux user, decided to give FreeBSD a try. Will Ed join the ranks of happy FreeBSD users? Find out at OfB.biz.
A Linux User Migrates to FreeBSD
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Very good point. A monopoly in which everyone can join is not necessarily a bad thing!
Okay, there may be a myriad Linux distros, but that’s irrelevant. There are five “main” distros (six of you count Gentoo): RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake (which follow the LSB), Debian and Slackware. And they are mostly kernel compatible. Now, it seems to me that BSD is indeed more fragmented, because they are [not?] kernel compatible at all. But I still fail to see how this is a problem. To each his own.
I guess wasted efforts are irrelevant for you. I believe GNU/Linux would be much better if it had less fragmentation.
As far as I can tell, neither WebSphere nor DB2 nor Lotus Domino is GPL’d, nor are the “trade secrets” open.
I know that, but AFAIK they ain’t open-source nor free either.
If you want to make money off of software sales, then don’t base your code on existing GPL code. You can still link to libraries which, as you say, are mostly LGPL.
[…]
Then don’t use the GPL for applications! It’s as simple as that! The fact that the OS is GPLed is completely irrelevant!
I understand that… I just think it’s a bit stupid that developers have to reinvent the wheel if they want to use their code. Btw, I’m fully aware that the licence of the OS is irrelevant. Did I said something against the Linux kernel because it’s GPL? Nope. I just think it’s bad for some applications and libraries… and there’s not THAT many libraries using the LGPL.
You might not care about the Windows monopoly, but I do think that the way Microsoft abuses it is detrimental to competition and innovation.
That’s okay, I respect your choice… but it’s not because you don’t like their tactics that all UNIX users are anti-Microsoft (read your original quote). I don’t agree with their tactics but it’s not necessarily why I’m using alternatives to their OS.
I’m not sure if NVIDIA license stuff from other companies and includes that stuff in their driver. Do you have any examples or are you – yet again – playing Devil’s advocate?
Macrovision and probably some other stuff that you and I don’t know. It’s not because we don’t know it that it doesn’t exist.
If the GPL bothers you that much, why haven’t you switched to a BSD yet?
Because I just claim that the GPL is not commercial-friendly? It’s not because I’m not a Linux missionary starting crusades to convert “unenlightened” people that I’m against GPL…
FWIW. It was a while ago.
* Sound didn’t work at once. Had to recompile my kernel.
* KDE was not stable.
* PPPD was not easy to setup. I missed a wvdial-alike.
* Terminal settings when for example SSH’in or Irssi’in
Currently, my major complaint would be:
* No ALSA.
Do i care about this? Yes! Competition is important. GNU/Linux needs opensource desktop competition, not only closedsource desktop competition. Opensource must not become a ‘GNU/Linux only’ idea, it must imo become a philosophy in which the choice of OS is possible between various opensource projects, for various targets (ie. desktop, grid, webserver, etc).
if updating the whole userland in FreeBSD (w/o compiling) would beas easy as apt-get update; apt-get upgrade
portupgrade -arR
you can swith then..
You make updating FreeBSD sound simpler than it actually is. I think that in FreeBSD you rather do something like:
cvsup -g -L 2 ports-supfile
portsdb -Uu
portupgrade -arR
pkgdb -fu
And this only updates applications from ports-tree, not the base system. In a well-kept Debian box you can actually update the whole system, including kernel, by just doing:
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
Not to speak of that it takes ages to update the whole system from sources – compared to that, installing Debian binaries is a snap.
for that you need to synch world
cvsup -g -L 2 cvsupfile
make buildworld
make buildkernel KERNCONF=NAME
make installkernel KERNCONF=NAME
mergemaster -p
mergemaster
make installworld
On my system it takes 15 min to update sources and 30 min (1.2Gz AMD) becasue everything is done in RAMDisk.
I like portupgrade for the ability to add any possible switches while upgrading. And I dont it difficult to run seven instead of two commands particularly if in return I am getting way more flexibility.
My grip with debian and all is security: even immunix and engarde have more security problems than FreeBSD. Debian has 22 security advisories only for the September.
I prefer to have more commands to run for update than read each day that I need to update this or that(I know that one does not have to run all of them but it is quite rediculous). But this is personal choice of course.
System security depends partly on the OS and partly on the sysadmin’s skills but, unfortunately, there’s no such thing as an absolutely secure system.
I agree that FreeBSD’s ports system is more flexible than Debian’s APT, because you can choose different options from makefiles before compiling and this just isn’t possible with binary packages.
All right, I’m sorry, I misinterpreted the nature of your criticism re: the GPL. I also don’t think that it’s appropriate for all software. As I have said, we couldn’t possibly make GPLed 3D console games and stay in the black – there’s just too much work involved, for a product that has a relatively short shelf life. Well, the engine could be GPL, actually, but the game programming and the art couldn’t be, at least not until the game is considered to have outlived its commercial life (which can happen quite quickly for bad games – but then who cares, they’re bad!).
I also think that libraries should be LGPL, and I think most new ones are.
But I still think that fragmentation is a false problem. I see it as competition in action, as every distro tries to outdo the others. Sure, there’s some wasted efforts (you get the same kind of wasted work in the commercial software area, when an app is dropped due to slow sales), but in the end it’s the users that win!
Also, the actual differences among distros is rather minimal – the great majority of the programs they include are the same for all of them. Once you’ve configured Apache on Debian, it’s not too hard to configure it on Mandrake…
And I’m sure it’s not that different to configure it on the BSDs as well! (Does Webmin run on FreeBSD?)
of course it runs on BSD. But it has very poor security record.
Do you mean, for remote administration? Or just in general? I find myself using Webmin for a lot of local configuration as well.
Remote. I prefer to use ssh, even if it is more cumbersome.