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Since this story is the second time this month I saw prominent begging for donations on a *BSD, suggesting that one or both projects are on life support - I won

by pekk 14y ago

Since this story is the second time this month I saw prominent begging for donations on a *BSD, suggesting that one or both projects are on life support - I wonder why these projects can't be better unified (or one eat the other's lunch). Is this essential to purpose or just historical?

cperciva 14y ago
A lot of NetBSD code ends up being imported into FreeBSD. Same goes for OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD -- I wouldn't want to run any of them myself, but I'm glad they're out there.
wipt 14y ago
The projects have branched over feature politics. FreeBSD is by far the most popular and advanced, NetBSD is very clean and easily ported. OpenBSD was a later fork that emphasises security, and omits binary "blobs". Generally code is exchanged between the projects. Dragonfly BSD is probably the smallest notable fork (there are more). It's relatively recent and is a "logical continuation of FreeBSD 4.x". FreeBSD moved towards a new system for SMP in 5.x.
- flomo 14y ago
  My understanding is the BSD projects originally forked over personality/political issues with the defunct 386BSD project, and only later did they begin to focus on certain feature sets.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    NetBSD forked from 386BSD, which is the PC port of the Net/2 4.3BSD source code release. FreeBSD is, in some vague sense, the continuation of the 386BSD project. It's a fork, but a fork in which the parent died out. OpenBSD is Theo de Raadt's fork of NetBSD. Theo was one of the NetBSD founders and had a falling out with the NetBSD core team. The origins of all three projects are basically accidents of fate, but FreeBSD has taken up a role as the "optimized for x86/x64 servers" BSD, OpenBSD (obviously) as the "secure" BSD, and NetBSD is the "portable" BSD. In practice, NetBSD sees some use in embedded/appliance scenarios, although Linux has pretty much taken over the world there.
tedunangst 14y ago
We should go ahead and merge gnome and kde while we're at it.
- pekk 14y ago
  Gnome and KDE do not have their hats out for donations to keep them alive.
  - tedunangst 14y ago
    My comment was really about the technical feasibility, but I can see that's not obvious if you're not already thinking it.

by pekk 14y ago

cperciva 14y ago

A lot of NetBSD code ends up being imported into FreeBSD. Same goes for OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD -- I wouldn't want to run any of them myself, but I'm glad they're out there.

wipt 14y ago

The projects have branched over feature politics. FreeBSD is by far the most popular and advanced, NetBSD is very clean and easily ported. OpenBSD was a later fork that emphasises security, and omits binary "blobs". Generally code is exchanged between the projects. Dragonfly BSD is probably the smallest notable fork (there are more). It's relatively recent and is a "logical continuation of FreeBSD 4.x". FreeBSD moved towards a new system for SMP in 5.x.

flomo 14y ago
My understanding is the BSD projects originally forked over personality/political issues with the defunct 386BSD project, and only later did they begin to focus on certain feature sets.
- tptacek 14y ago
  NetBSD forked from 386BSD, which is the PC port of the Net/2 4.3BSD source code release. FreeBSD is, in some vague sense, the continuation of the 386BSD project. It's a fork, but a fork in which the parent died out. OpenBSD is Theo de Raadt's fork of NetBSD. Theo was one of the NetBSD founders and had a falling out with the NetBSD core team. The origins of all three projects are basically accidents of fate, but FreeBSD has taken up a role as the "optimized for x86/x64 servers" BSD, OpenBSD (obviously) as the "secure" BSD, and NetBSD is the "portable" BSD. In practice, NetBSD sees some use in embedded/appliance scenarios, although Linux has pretty much taken over the world there.

tedunangst 14y ago

We should go ahead and merge gnome and kde while we're at it.

pekk 14y ago
Gnome and KDE do not have their hats out for donations to keep them alive.
- tedunangst 14y ago
  My comment was really about the technical feasibility, but I can see that's not obvious if you're not already thinking it.