Greg Lehey said on Apr 27, 2000 at 13:17:38:
> I'm writing a "white paper" to describe BSD to people who know Linux.
> You can find it at http://www.lemis.com/bsdpaper.html.
> 
> I'd like feedback on the following aspects:
> 
> 1.  Have I forgotten something?
> 2.  Is it accurate?
> 3.  Is it fair?

Section "Why isn't BSD better known?"
       product contained AT&T copyrighted code. The case was settled out
       of court in 1994, but the spectre of the legislation continues to
                                                ^^^^^^^^^^^
       haunt people. As recently as March 2000 an article published on
Should be "litigation", I imagine.

Some additions on "why use BSD instead of linux": 

* Linux users who're buggered by the difficulty of cleanly upgrading
  their system (a major kernel upgrade or C library upgrade may require
  upgrades to 10 or 20 other components, and may in addition break some
  packages) may like the ease of BSD's "cvs/cvsup / make world" way of
  upgrading, and the greater continuity in major upgrades (eg FreeBSD
  3.x -> 4.x was I believe a fairly smooth change, though I haven't done
  it yet, but glibc 2.0 -> 2.1 on linux breaks a lot of stuff, and  
  libc5 -> glibc 2.0 broke even more). 

* FreeBSD's ports collection is also a major plus point, though I've 
  heard that Debian's pkg system is comparably good and there are
  now some tools for auto-tracking RPM dependencies too.

* FreeBSD's binary compatibility with linux.  I can run
  linux-Netscape 6 and the Mozilla linux builds on FreeBSD, and they
  work fine, but I can't run them on our linux machines because I
  haven't worked up the courage to upgrade to glibc 2.1 yet.

* OpenBSD's reputation for security, for security-critical situations
  or for the paranoid.

On the whole, a very nice article which boosts the BSD's without
FUDding linux or sounding patronising towards it the way so many 
BSD users like to.  

Rahul.