Commercial Distribution?

[Scott W]

Tillman Hodgson wrote:

>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
>
I know this one may be seen as sacrilege to some, but think about this:

1.  *BSD uses a fairly significant amount of GNU and GPL licensed 
(opposed to the BSD license) code in it.  gcc, Perl, XFree86, Apache, 
GNU Make, autoconf, mysql, PostgreSQL, etc etc.  While it can be argued 
many/most of these are not part of the core OS, what about:  gcc, 
objective c, libreadline, cvs, diff, tar, sort, patch and friends?  
(from /usr/src/gnu and /usr/src/usr.bin )

2.  It can be argued that the 'core OS' (kernel and _required_ system 
tools) in *BSD are mostly BSD licensed versus GPL (Linux), but I'd wager 
a significant number of driver developments, kernel code (or perhaps 
design), as well as many programs required by most systems running 
either OS(insert distro here if you're offended), at least share bug 
fixes and new developments to some respect.  If I'm not entirely wrong 
(which is certainly possible) I thought Alan Cox of Linux kernel fame 
has also done some work on the BSD kernel(s?)?

Note that I don't entirely disagree with the response- IMHO, RedHat and 
SuSe are in fact merely distributions, but Linux as a collection of 
kernel + core programs is certainly an OS, in the same manner as *BSD 
is.  Even RH AS/ES 2.1 is little more than a RH tweaked kernel + a few 
'commercial' apps (stronghold, not sure of others offhand, haven't ever 
needed them!), on top of RH 7.3, which is really a Linux kernel + tools 
snapshot (many of which programs are at least heavily driven by Linux 
development in the first place), + RedHat or SuSe 'themes' and defaults, 
some customized rc/init scripts, and an installer. 

Anyways, I realized I may now be totally missing the point here so am 
going to now shut my mouth/keyboard...my comments still apply, but I'm 
not sure whom I'm disagreeing/agreeing with right now.. ;-)

Scott