The differences between all of these are generally driven by differences in philosophy or specific legal matters. They're all pretty good.
But here's my 2-second comparison: OpenBSD is the most stable and secure of the lot, because their philosophy generally favors stability, and slower releases of new support for newfangled things like USB. They're famous for an independent line-by-line security audit. NetBSD is somewhere in the middleground of the BSD's. FreeBSD is the most advanced of the BSD's, and although it's a very stable secure OS, it might be argued that it's less stable & secure than either Net or Open, in exchange for better support for newer hardware and stuff. Linux distributions have as many different flavors and more. But since some linux distros are individually more widely deployed than any of the BSD's, linux distros are able to cover some ground that the BSD's don't. If you require the newest bleeding edge, it's common somebody's built it and written a webpage about it for Linux, but not for any BSD. Just cuz it's more popular. Also most linux distros have better software availability than the BSD's. (By software availability, I'm talking about precompiled, readily available binary packages specific for your OS. Because sometimes building from source is very hard.) Put simply, linux is more popular because it's more popular. > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of Scott Ehrlich > Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2007 11:31 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: [BBLISA] Comparison of BSD vs Linux? (here goes the flame > war!) > > I'm in a class at Usenix/Lisa and the instructor is a BSD fan and hates > Linux. > I'd like to get insight from the list of viewpoints, security, > comparisons, > package availability, etc, of the differences between the basic worlds > of > UNIX-like distros. > > Second, what are the differences among Open/Free/Net BSD? > > I'm not calling for any wars. I'm looking for genuine education to > understand > the worlds between Linux and BSD, and then among the BSD distros. > > Thanks. > > Scott > > _______________________________________________ > bblisa mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
