Hi all: As this year comes to an end and the next one is ready to herald Open Source to yet another level of glory, it is a good time to pause and reflect on what some of the Open Source geeks had to say few years ago.
In 1999, Marshall Kirk McKusick wrote an essay titled 'Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix' that talks about the innovation and how BSD happened. Please take a look at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/kirkmck.html FreeBSD 7.0 will be released to the world in another two weeks. BSD pioneered core Operating system features and has a history of innovation for the last 25+ years. The TCP/IP stack as we know it was first implemented by BSD. The concept of fsck, soft updates in a file system were designed and implemented by Marshall Kirk McKusick many years before these features became common in UNIX. Does anybody use BSD ? Have you heard of Nokia ? Juniper ? Xtreme Networks ? ... Most of the appliance vendors have product lines based on BSD. Yahoo uses BSD, Hotmail used to run on BSD etc. There are variants of BSD like FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, PicoBSD and PC-BSD. Each of the BSD versions has a unique offering for the customer. FreeBSD Large number of packages, java-jre support, rich file system support for x86, x86_64 systems. Used as internet servers. NetBSD When you want the same kernel code base to work on the largest number of hardware platforms. Very well designed support for PCI, PCI-X among others. OpenBSD When you are paranoid about security and want a system that is designed for security. Each piece of code that gets into the kernel is subjected to code review from a security perspective. DragonFlyBSD Led by Mathew Dillon, BSD designed for scalability and uses message passing semantics within the kernel design. PicoBSD When you want to fit your OS installation into a single 1.44MB floppy PC-BSD When you want to run a powerful, stable OS with a intuitive and easy to use to Desktop environment. What also makes *BSD unique among its Open Source OS peers is the professional documentation that comes along aka. the *BSD Handbook Want to know more, What can FreeBSD do ? http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/nutshell.html Have a nice day ! -- thanks Saifi.
