[NCLUG] FreeBSD versus Linux?

[jbass at dmsd.com]

Alan Silverstein writes:
> Could anyone here please give me a brief education on how FreeBSD
> relates to Linux?

Back in the late 80's the guys at UC Berkeley decided to start re-writing
the AT&T UNIX portions of the V7/V32 kernel known then as 4.3BSD UNIX.
They ran into the same clean room legal snags that are in the SCO/IBM
litigation, and with some luck (due to trade secret/copyright botches)
got away with most of it. In the settlement, they pulled a few files,
which were later re-written from scratch and presto the first almost
open source UNIX came to light as the team left school.

It splintered into several releases ... but is still largely the
re-written V7/V32 4.3BSD kernel ported to several architectures.
It's a small, lite, fast ... and aging OS architecture. It has some
advantages, such that some ISP's have adopted it ... one is that
it is not a widely adopted as Linux, so the security flaws when
discovered are frequently fixed before widely exploited. It's also
small enough, that on of the BSD teams was able to do a complete
security code review from end to end.

Linux originally was equally small, lite, and fast ... but has grown
in leaps and bounds, often leaving the legacy UNIX interfaces behind
so that back porting to FreeBSD can sometimes be painful.


John