On Mon, 01 Mar 2004 13:10:42 -0300 Pedro Fernandes Macedo <webmaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> This is another open source OS. It`s not as widely used as linux , but
> is also a Unix system , created by the folks at Berkley... FreeBSD is
> one of the available BSDs... There`s also OpenBSD and OpenBSD ...
> BTW , if I said something wrong , dont blame me.. I`m a linux user , not
> a BSD user ;)
we'll forgive you (i have clients using both openbsd and various
flavors of linux, myself, and so run both on my own network.)
what follows veers between ontopic and offtopic, some of what
follows may help illuminate some of the underlying issues in the
SCO lawsuit family, insofar as the settlement between AT&T's
USL and the UCB CSRG is alluded to.
technically, Unix is a trademark belonging to an industry association,
and neither the modern *BSD family nor Linux are authorized to use
that trademark, so you should probably avoid calling them Unix
systems.
the BSD family predates Linux by some years; they derive from the
development work at the UCB Computer Systems Research Group,
which was responsible for the very important 4.x BSD series of Unix
releases beginning in the early 80s. i remember installing 4.1BSD
on the RPI Computer Science Department VAX 11/780 back
in 1982...
one of the important descendents of this Unix line is the original SunOS,
which forked from BSD Unix tree shortly before 4.2BSD was cut. the
last development in this series was SunOS 4.x. Solaris 2
(Solaris 2.8->Solaris 8, Solaris 2.9->Solaris 9), a somewhat
complex merger of Sys V with SunOS, replaced SunOS 4.x (aka
"Solaris 1").
as the CSRG's unix effort wound down, one of the last things they
did was prepare an x86 release with no proprietary AT&T code
(previous versions derived from v7 (32v) AT&T releases of Unix,
and a license from AT&T was a prerequisite if you wanted to use
one of the BSD's which derived from AT&T code.) 4.4Lite was
about to be released when AT&T's Unix Systems Lab hit UCB
with a lawsuit intended to prevent release of 4.4Lite. the
lawsuit was eventually settled out of court, but not before AT&T
tooks some serious licks. the result was that 4.4Lite needed
only minor modifications to make it to release, but it was also
delayed a year. some argue that this one year delay is the
reason why Linux is the best known open source system of
its type today, rather than one of the *BSDs.
today, there are three main flavors of *BSD, and a number of
minor ones. the main ones are the original NetBSD, and the
two NetBSD spinoofs FreeBSD and OpenBSD. NetBSD focuses
on stability across a wide variety of architectures. FreeBSD
focuses on the x86 platform with lots of software ports. OpenBSD
runs on a smaller set of architecture than NetBSD, and focuses
on security as well as stability. there is considerable cross
polination; useful code advances in one of the *BSDs often
move sideways into the others fairly quickly.
there is one other notable BSD derivative, Mac OS X. the
derivation is somewhat involved; Next built an OS, NextStep,
which used a Mach micro-kernel with a significant amount of
FreeBSD code. Mac bought Next Computers and inherited
NextStep, and chose to use it as the basis for OS X.
richard
--
Richard Welty rwelty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Averill Park Networking 518-573-7592
Java, PHP, PostgreSQL, Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security
