[openbeos] Re: JPBE changes (was: Re: news: development mailing list, distro guidelines )


Am 23.05.2007 um 23:19 schrieb Urias McCullough:


Is that true? - I always thought it was about choice and forking
(forking isn't always a bad thing).
No, that's not what distro's are about. FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD were forks where the source was changed for essentially philosophical differences. I believe the splits were somewhat acrimonious at the time but importantly compatbility of utilities was maintained. Distro's are when someone is trying to make money, or not. Enter Marketing. So RedHat and Novell vs. Debian and Slackware. Or more recently Sun, IBM and Oracle vs. RedHat. NB. that some distro's have deliberately introduced incompatibilities: didn't François point out recently that you can't get root on one of them? :-/ 


I mean, as a "disto consumer", I don't go looking for a Linux distro
because I want to throw money at someone or not - I go looking based
on the community around it, how well it works, what software it comes
with, and whether it will meet my needs. Slackware vs. Ubuntu for
example - night and day for many even if it's the same underlying
OS/kernel.
Well, yes because it's Un*x and this is effectively the argument of the GNU: different kernels but the Borg's utilities. My point is that you don't get any of these discussions with the *BSD's. It doesn't matter which one you have as the configuration, location of the libraries, etc. is all the same. A whole heap easier for all concerned, if you ask me. The question is whether the lack of distro hell is down to anything that the FreeBSD lot do or simply because nobody thinks it'll fly. I've still not sussed why you don't see many routers, etc. with customised FreeBSD cores (apart from Cisco's IOS). 

Charlie

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