On Thursday 31 May 2001 10:11 pm, Anthony Hilton wrote:
> I am asking on NetBSD mailing lists because that is the Unix-like OS I
> have.

Now this is one very complex question, but I got asked this at the Wakefield 
show...

> What are the main differences between NetBSD and Linux?
The license, NetBSD is BSD license (mostly) linux is GPL

The core of NetBSD is centrally managed, IE the code for libc is in the same 
repository as the kernel, as vi, as share, etc.  Linux glibc, the kernel, the 
programs are generally sourced from different places, and the distributions 
pull them all together.

Due to the above it's a lot easier to track development of things.  If an API 
changes the API changes will be done everywhere needed, there's no, well we 
did this API changes, program X hasn't updated it yet.

Note that the above is less true for the sitros as they track all the things 
and keep them in sync.

NetBSD is NetBSD, be it from foundation, wasabi, one I burnt at shows. 
There's about 100 distros of linux these days.

Linux is better supported in some areas, as lots of companies are jumping on 
the bandwagon.  But NetBSD benefits from this as a lot more linux/unix apps 
are written which we can then port (see pkgsrc, it's now over 2000 packages :)

NetBSD doesn't tie you to installing things a particular way, eg I used SuSE 
linux a while back, and was stunned to find that they included gtk libs but 
no real headers etc, which meant I couldn't compile gvim.

I'm sure others can give more points

> What areas does each have strengths compared to the other? (I am aware of
> many distributions of Linux - does that mean that different flavours of
> Linux compare differently with NetBSD?)

Some linux distros are targetted at specific things, I'd say the closest 
to netbsd is possibly Debian in it's support for many platforms.

Cheers,
Chris