[Techtalk] Linux and *BSD

[Brenda Bell]

Quoting Rasjid Wilcox <rasjidw at openminddev.net>:

> I've often wondered why the *BSD's (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD) seem less
> 
> popular (and are certainly less well known) than Linux.

Interesting question -- and one that I can't answer -- but here's my
perspective anyway :)

The chart at the bottom of http://www.netbsd.org/Misc/history.html might
give you some interesting insights, particularly when you look at where the
different *BSD's started to diverge during the 93-95 time frame.  While
Linux certainly has its many distros, I'm not sure it's historical path
looks quite so much like breeding rabbits -- it's possible that all of the
*BSD splits is disturbing for some admins.

As for me, my primary network server is and will always be Linux.  But I
wouldn't trade my NetBSD firewall for love nor money.  It took me less than
an hour to install it on some old hardware that wasn't good for anything
else and less than an hour to get a good configuration up and running.  I
did spend hours upon hours researching what a good configuration looked
like, but that was because of my lack of knowledge about firewalls in
general -- I would have had to spend the same hours and hours with a Linux
solution.

-- 
Brenda
http://opensource.theotherbell.com