by Jane-Ellen Long

Managing Editor

<[email protected]>


For the holiday season, we offer you a (particularly) contentious issue. On the kindly end of the spectrum, Peter Salus offers his annual top 10 list of 1999 books: are yours among them? Do you have a cherished app, philosophy, approach? An OS you love to hate? Read on. . . . All riled up? Write us a reply. Here's an example:

From Simon J. Gerraty
<[email protected]>

Thanks for the BSD related info in "Musings" (;login: October 1999), though my NetBSD bias compels me to badger you about it.

A casual reader of the article would conclude that the recent BSD family tree was something like:

For the full picture see: <ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/share/misc/bsd-family-tree> You'll see that NetBSD 0.8 (April 1993) was actually the first split off from 386BSD, the first FreeBSD release (Dec. 1993) more closely coincided with NetBSD 0.9 (Aug. 1993) by which stage NetBSD was already being ported to at least Sparc and HP300 platforms. The NetBSD 1.0 release (Nov. 1994) was the first based on 4.4BSD-Lite (fallout from the AT&T lawsuit) and include support for sparc, hp300, amigas, some 68k based Macs and of course i386.

OpenBSD split off from the NetBSD project sometime after the NetBSD-1.1 release, as I recall. The above btw is all gleaned from a couple of minutes' browsing from <http://www.au.netbsd.org/Misc/history.html>.

As you can see from <http://www.au.netbsd.org/Ports/index.html> it is no accident that NetBSD's slogan is "Of course it runs NetBSD." For an extreme example check out: <http://www.au.netbsd.org/Ports/hpcmips/index.html>.

I've not yet worked out why you'd want to run UNIX on your Win/CE hand help—other than "because you can." I don't have one of these things so can't comment, perhaps they are actually faster than a Vax (which also runs NetBSD—of course).

I do like to see credit where it's due, after all that is one of the prime motivators in the free software world. Despite the oft cited "personality issues," the various *BSD projects do coexist quite happily these days—personally I've had a good working relationship with both the FreeBSD and Linux java porting teams.

NetBSD does not put nearly as much effort into supporting its user base as FreeBSD does—it is true that the average NetBSD developer is more focused on -current, but that does not mean that NetBSD is not a solid platform. Myself and many others have run production systems on it for many years now.

I received several emails about this, and confess to accepting just one view of the history of *BSDs, rather than digging deeper. Thanks for the correction.
Rik