Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

Turning Plan 9 from open source into Free had plenty of teething troubles, getting the lawyers from Bell-Labs then Lucent then Lucent-Alcatel into the idea took years. Originally Plan 9 was paid for software with full source included. Then from v.3 it was a free download but with its own license which included a "if you make modifications you must send your changes back to Lucent".

Then it was lobbied for change and to comply with US munitions law Lucent included the export restrictions proviso OpenBSD's Theo so eloquently argues against :

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.plan9/browse_thread/t...

Ironically the compiler suite became available under GPL / MIT via Vita-Nuova who bought the rights to Inferno.

Licensing helped keep Plan9 away from developers at exactly the same time GNU/Linux and OSS exploded on to the scene in much the same way early adopters got interested in GNU/Linux it during the BSD / AT&T lawsuit.

How our computing landscape would be different if we all valued freedom.

* FreeBSD has better performance than Linux? This is, as you almost concede, no longer true.

* Lack of kernel modules an advantage? Hardly. Linux loadable kernel modules produce no extra performance overhead, but make life a lot simpler for everyone. The only extra 'bloat' is having ~100MB of drivers of which you probably only need 10% or so. If this an issue for you (ie, you're running an embedded system) you can of course cut down the modules to only those required, or even compile into the kernel just as with FreeBSD.

* The GCC compiler and toolchain aren't optimal, and I fully expect a major Linux distribution to switch to Clang/LLVM in the not too distant future. If this is a success (and I expect it to be), I wouldn't be at all surprised to see most/all Linux distros switch. This isn't a Linux vs FreeBSD issue, this is GCC vs Clang/LLVM - a battle I believe Clang/LLVM will win.

* As far as I'm aware TrustedBSD offers no more features than SELinux, and the Linux ACL system, but maybe I'm showing my lack of BSD knowledge here.

* Xen and VMWare virtualization is there but not 100% in FreeBSD. They're rock solid on Linux, which also has KVM, a very viable alternative to the two.

* The development branch/stable kernel approach is irrelevant - people don't use Linux, they use a Linux distribution (OK, OK, a GNU/Linux disitribution :)). In most distributions point releases are binary and API compatible with .0 releases (RHEL 5.5 binaries are guaranteed to run on RHEL 5.0).

In conclusion, is FreeBSD good? Undoubtedly. Is it better than Linux? It's hard to make a case for that. It has less device support, less software support and a massively smaller user base.

FreeBSD is nice to tinker with, but it doesn't offer enough benefits to justify putting production software on it. It's great to learn about the old school UNIX way of doing things, but that's not what I want to be doing on a live server.

Other than that, my experience with FreeBSD is that it was absolutely rock solid and bullet proof, uptimes of many years with machines pumping out data at a pretty decent clip for the time we're talking about.

*BSD is not always as fast with supporting the latest hardware or adding a new feature or technology but what's done stays done. Linux tends to yoyo for a bit before settling.

Personally, I like both OpenBSD and Arch Linux.