>> [...the whole thread re BSD vs Linux...] > [...] Eventually, the die-hards will die hard, and the lack of new > competent BSD hackers will seal the coffin...the BSD sysadmin will be > sent packing
I've seen it said that ego will be the death of BSD. The more I see of BSD the more I believe it. In most respects I don't care much for the GPL, but this is one of the really good effects it has: it keeps people from using "you gotta splash my name all over everything" licenses on their stuff. I just looked at the INSTALL.txt file from the most recent NetBSD/sparc release - a rough eyeball count found 79 individuals' names in the "legal mumbo-jumbo" section; I may have skipped a few or duplicated a few, but I'm sure the count is well over 50, probably over 70. And that's not counting institutions, just individuals. I consider that totally ludicrous. (Hackerdom is a gift culture; you attain status by giving away, not by attaching strings.) Given their common heritage, I imagine the other BSDs are similar, though I haven't specifically checked (NetBSD just happens to be the one I know well enough to be able to find the relevant file quickly). Of course, Linux's use of the GPL ensures that OS hackers who want that kind of egoboo won't go there; thus, they end up with the BSDs, because there isn't much else in the open-source OS world. Pity, too, because the BSD world has a lot to offer, technically, but it's shooting itself in the foot, socially and legally, by permitting this sort of chest-beating. >> To the original poster: This kind of posting is very unhelpful. If >> you want to learn about the different systems, subscribe to some of >> the mailing lists for each group, and watch for a while so that you >> can build your own understanding of what is going on in the >> respective groups. Arrogant and unhelpful as this is, there is a grain of truth lurking in it: nobody but you can ever tell you quite what the difference is for your purposes. Asking what the differences between Linux and BSD are is a bit like asking what the differences between automobiles and pogo-sticks are: sometimes you want one and sometimes you want the other, and nobody can tell you what the relevant differences between them for you are, except by chance, without knowing what differences you care about. But it does strike me as a singularly unhelpful way to put it. The original question can - and in this case quite likely did - come from a degree of ignorance that doesn't even know yet what questions are sensible to ask, and while I can't claim to speak for any of the projects in question, it does seem to me that such people are exactly the people whom the projects need most to welcome. Of course, I've also seen it said (privately) that the original message could well have been a troll. If so, it was rather well-done, and even if it it was, that doesn't invalidate the legitimate discussion that arose as a result. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
