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Linux is fine for ordinary computing and many specialized tasks but some areas are better served by BSDs. If you require the integrity guarantees offered by ZF
by corv 10y ago
Linux is fine for ordinary computing and many specialized tasks but some areas are better served by BSDs.
If you require the integrity guarantees offered by ZFS and still want the efficient resource allocation of containers you will not get around FreeBSD or a Solaris based distribution.
If you need a system that is secure by default you will not get around OpenBSD.
If you need the portability of Linux coupled with a license that lets you freely redistribute in order to sell an appliance you will be hard pressed to get around NetBSD.
By the way, ZFS will run fine on small VPS since the RAM cache can be turned off. You still get instant snapshots and rollbacks, efficient replication and integrity guarantees.
- icebraining 10y agoIf you need the portability of Linux coupled with a license that lets you freely redistribute in order to sell an appliance you will be hard pressed to get around NetBSD. It's perfectly legal to sell an appliance with Linux, people do it all the time.
- teacup50 10y agoYou can't "freely redistribute" it though. You have to comply with the viral decidedly non-freeing provisions.
- mjg59 10y agoYou can redistribute it as much as you want, providing you permit recipients to do the same thing. Entire industries have found this to be completely reasonable.
- rbanffy 10y agoThe only freedom you give up by using the GPL is the freedom to screw your users over by denying them access to the source code. All you are demanded is to let others enjoy the freedom you enjoy. That, surely, isn't too much to ask.
- blihp 10y agoWhile I can appreciate that point of view (i.e. as a vendor), the definition does depend on whose POV you are looking at it from. From an end-user (individual or business) POV, the GPL is absolutely 'freely redistributable' what you're talking about is your inability to limit that ability. That's the GPL doing its job.
- m_mueller 10y ago> That's the GPL doing its job. It also makes it really hard to earn a living with actual software (not services) that depends on GPL.
- lisivka 10y agoBuy commercial licenses from authors of GPL code, so they will earn something too.
- blihp 10y agoYes, you're absolutely correct. The GPL, and resulting GPL'd software, does not exist for the benefit of commercial software vendors. While some business models are viable under it, that's a side-effect rather than an objective of it.
- m_mueller 10y agoi.e. it's condemned to be a hobby for almost everyone involved, besides some key players who can live off of donations or those who sell services based on mostly other people's software.
- mjg59 10y agoNetBSD runs on a subset of the hardware that Linux runs on, other than supporting a very small number of systems built in the 90s that have never been supported by Linux. NetBSD's portability was a strong point in the past, but the massive industry acceptance of Linux means that there are giant numbers of shipped systems that came pre-installed with Linux and which have no support in the NetBSD kernel. There's a bunch of great reasons to choose NetBSD, but comparing its hardware support to Linux isn't one of them.