On Mon, 13 Sep 1999, Reinoud Koornstra wrote:

> BSDI offers support contracts as well as a truly advanced and robust
> operating system for the x86 platform.  FreeBSD was developed to be the
> most stable and robust operating system on the x86 platform.  Work has
> begun on Alpha and Sparc ports.  NetBSD is designed to be a common
> operating system for multiplatform research.  NetBSD may run on more
> architectures and processors than any other operating system.  OpenBSD
> split from NetBSD to provide an industrial strength secure operating
> system without the pressure of United States export authorities. 

  What you see here is an attempt to resolve "we're all one big happy BSD
family" with "my OS is better then yours."  This probably origionated from
either FreeBSD or OpenBSD.

  NetBSD is a very secure and stable system (and, yes, portable too).  Now
that crypto source is divided between "us" and "intl" (though I don't
think the intl crypto has been released yet), NetBSD will have all the
advantages of outside-US crypto while still letting US developers work on
the US version.

  I do not know of any attempts to objectively compare the security,
stability, or performance of these systems (though a reasonable 
performance comparison wouldn't be that hard), so it really is mostly hand
waving at this point.  What you can do is check the change logs and bug
reports for each project and see how many bugs in release versions would
affect your expected use of the system.

Matthew Orgass
darkstar@pgh.net