On Thu, Feb 03, 2000 at 12:55:35PM +0000, alison wrote:
> My simple question is this: does NetBSD (or any BSD, for that matter)
> have its own utilities, or is it mostly a separately-licensed kernel
> with lots of Gnu utilities a la Linux?  By this i mean, does it have
> "traditional" tar, compress, bc/dc, cc, ls, mv, rm, sh, cat, awk, grep,
> ed, ex/vi, sed etc. without all the Gnu "enhancements"?

BSD has traditionally always been a complete distribution of kernel
and userland utilities. So our source tree is a complete BSD tree,
including those userland utilities. We strive to use as many
BSD-licensed code as possible. But sometimes there is no real alternative
to the GNU ones, so we use those.

The GNU utilities currently used (you can easily spot them; they are
in the gnusrc source package, or in /usr/src/gnu if you have an
unpacked source tree):

	* the toolchain (compiler, linker, assembler, debugger, etc)
	* diff
	* bc/dc
	* cpio
	* grep
	* groff
	* gawk
	* gzip
	* rcs
	* sort
	* rcs
	* tar (although this can be replaced with the BSD-licensed pax(1))
	* uucp

All the rest in our source tree is BSD-licensed.

> (Okay, just for completeness' sake: i find NetBSD the most attractive
> of the three open source BSDs because i like the cross-platform ideals -
> it's just a shame the JDK is lagging behind Solaris and win32.)

The JDK for NetBSD is at 1.1.8. The people working on JDK for NetBSD
have asked for permission to distribute 1.2 under a less restrictive
license (like Blackdown got for Linux), but no go so far. It's
pending on that.

- Frank