Why userland , basesystem and Kernel are together?!

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 02:19:04AM +0100,
 Simon Barner <barner at in.tum.de> wrote 
 a message of 101 lines which said:

> If you have a look at all this, you will easily understand why there
> aren't multiple FreeBSD distributions (like in the Linux world):
> The FreeBSD Project provides more than a kernel - it also maintains
> the base system and almost 10000 ported third-party applications (the
> so-called ports collection).

You are comparing apples and oranges. Linux is a kernel, not an
operating system. "Distributions" is a specially ill-choosen word in
the Linux world. There are several operating systems, Debian, RedHat,
Mandrake, which only have in common to use the Linux kernel. Forget
the word "distributions" which seems to imply that an operating
system is defined by its kernel.
 
And there are several operating systems based on a BSD kernel, too:
FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, there is even now a Debian/BSD which uses a
NetBSD kernel instead of Linux.