Commercial Distribution?

[Scott W]

Scott W wrote:

> 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
>
Ok, sorry for following up to myself- below is in fact what my above 
comments are directed at:

ls, while certainly useful, and part of the core OS (as are many 
others), could not in fact be built without the use of gcc, and 
GNU/GPL'ed compiler (and associated friends, ld, nm, gas, etc), so I 
really believe the below to be basically propogated and repeated without 
much thought, but incorrectly...not in that FreeBSD (and Net/OpenBSD) 
have a higher content of 'pure' (meaning written explicity for the 
specific OS) code in the core OS, but in that the 
distinction/differences in reality qualify FreeBSD to be an 'OS' while 
Linux (not RH, SuSe, other distros) is not...

Scott

David D.W. Downey wrote:

>> > You're touching on a big difference between Linux and FreeBSD; FreeBSD
>> > is an operating system, whereas Linux is a kernel which can be packaged
>> > with different programs.  You can make do anything you want with
>> > FreeBSD, modify it all you want, release it (or not) along with the
>> > source code (or not), but you can't claim it''s FreeBSD any more...
>  
>