Commercial Distribution?

Tillman Hodgson tillman at seekingfire.com
Tue Jan 6 19:21:06 PST 2004


On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 09:14:41PM -0500, David D.W. Downey wrote:
> And how is that different from Linux? FreeBSD is an Operating System, so is
> Red Hat, Debian, Stampede, SLS, Slackware, and on and on. FreeBSD does the
> same thing. FreeBSD didn't develop OpenSSL but it includes it, nor did it
> develop SSH or swat, but it includes them. Just as linux distributions do. 

That's somewhat incorrect in my view. See
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/explaining-bsd/index.html
for details.

My attempt at a summary:

RedHat et al may /distribute/ an operating system, but they did not
write it. An analogy in the motorcycle world are the custom bike shops
(some of which make extremely nice motorcycles!) versus Harley-Davidson.
The custom bike shops carefully (one hopes) select components from the
open market and put the polish on the resulting product. H-D may also
use open market products (electrics *cough*, carbs *cough*) but are
considered a /manufacturer/.

Both sell motorcycles (operating systems). There is a distinction,
however.

-T


-- 
Being generous is inborn; being altruistic is a learned perversity. No
resemblance.
	- Robert Heinlein


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