[Ryan Whelan] >> I'm really curious why those that chose BSDs chose them?
[The Fungi] > Chances are there will be as many different answers as there are > users, but I can at least give you mine... Indeed. I am not, at the moment, running any Soekris boxen. But I have in the past, and I may again in the future. If I were running one today, then, absent some reason to do otherwise (like running third-party software that's picky about its underlying OS) I would use NetBSD. My principal reason would be familiarity. I got into open-source Unix variants back in the '80s when I worked at a university; we had VAXen running 4.1c BSD briefly, then later 4.2 and 4.3, eventually mtXinu 4.3+NFS. While not open source by today's standards (I carried a copy of the University's V7 source license over to the place I picked up our original tapes), even source-available was a big jump over the VMS and, later, SunOS that preceded it. And, within the academic and research communities, it was pretty close to today's "open source" in many practical respects anyway. (We actually had source to VMS, but on microfiche, not anything machine-readable; I spent a nontrivial amount of time reading it on a few occasions.) After having got used to having source, when I got a SPARCstation on my desk (instead of an ASCII terminal with a serial line), I went looking for a source-available OS for it. At the time, NetBSD was pretty close to the only choice; it certainly was the only one I found. I've stuck with it ever since, initially because of its portability across hardware, then because of its familiarity. Now that I've worked a bit with Linux (each of my jobs, though for different reasons and in different ways, pays me to work with Linux), I can add other reasons: I find the code cleaner, design better, and the community less annoying. Versus the other BSDs, OpenBSD I avoid because of Theo (with whom I've had a dustup or two, leading me to avoid anything he is important in) and FreeBSD I avoid because...well, originally, portability; now, familiarity (and possibly portability - I don't know how wide a variety of hardware Free runs on these days). Beyond that triumvirate, I know little about the various other BSD variants (Quasijarus, Dragonfly, those are the only names that come to mind, but I'm sure there are plenty I know nothing about). In recent years, NetBSD has been moving in directions I don't like, and recently the drift has turned into a somewhat of a precipitate lunge; I really need to start poking about for alternatives that actually fit the niche I am part of - or, if I can find the time, to see if I can create something suitable myself. So, like Ken Hornstein (whose note I read but didn't quote), my principal reason, albeit hypothetical at the moment, would be familiarity, with an admixture of uniformity (ie, same as all my other machines, meaning most/all of my own tools will Just Work). /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [email protected] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
