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The BSD family tree

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Re: The BSD family tree

#11
post #9

"4.4BSD Lite2 -> OpenBSD 2.3" What happened with the 4.4BSD lite to OpenBSD fork? The next OBSD is a parent of NetBSD.

The openbsd 2.3 label is duplicated to prevent too many lines.

thx @tedunangst probably should have duplicated the txt diagram with a proper diagram. A jump could be shown with a "<" or "(".

Re: The BSD family tree

#12
I love the BSDs. I just took a personal tour of the current state of affairs in BSD-land. I can't get WiFi to work with OpenBSD on an old Thinkpad T60 I recently got, so I've been trying all the other BSDs on it to see what works. A couple of them won't boot at all. WiFi works best with FreeBSD and HardenedBSD, which is unusual on laptops in my experience.

Re: The BSD family tree

#13

Heh. Between NetBSD 1.4 and Darwin/Mac OS X there's an entry that just says "(?)". It's probably pretty well-known that question mark is NeXTSTEP, which was built at NeXT, the company that Steve Jobs founded after he left Apple the first time around. NeXTSTEP was built around BSD mostly because of Avie Tevanian's involvement in CMU's Mach kernel project.

there's incredible similarity under the hood between the first version of OSX 10.0 server and nextstep. How this was missed in the diagram is puzzling to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server_1.0

Re: The BSD family tree

#14

Heh. Between NetBSD 1.4 and Darwin/Mac OS X there's an entry that just says "(?)". It's probably pretty well-known that question mark is NeXTSTEP, which was built at NeXT, the company that Steve Jobs founded after he left Apple the first time around. NeXTSTEP was built around BSD mostly because of Avie Tevanian's involvement in CMU's Mach kernel project.

Wikipedia mentions Rhapsody being developed off 4.4BSD

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#Unix

Re: The BSD family tree

#15

Heh. Between NetBSD 1.4 and Darwin/Mac OS X there's an entry that just says "(?)". It's probably pretty well-known that question mark is NeXTSTEP, which was built at NeXT, the company that Steve Jobs founded after he left Apple the first time around. NeXTSTEP was built around BSD mostly because of Avie Tevanian's involvement in CMU's Mach kernel project.

I was wondering about that; didn't realize it was NeXT. A friend of mine still has his original NeXT box for the short time he worked on it.

I was also surprised at the origins of DarwinBSD. I never really looked up the history and didn't realize it forked some of the code off FreeBSD.

It's interesting to note that the PS4 OS is also a forked FreeBSD variant as well.

Re: The BSD family tree

#16

Heh. Between NetBSD 1.4 and Darwin/Mac OS X there's an entry that just says "(?)". It's probably pretty well-known that question mark is NeXTSTEP, which was built at NeXT, the company that Steve Jobs founded after he left Apple the first time around. NeXTSTEP was built around BSD mostly because of Avie Tevanian's involvement in CMU's Mach kernel project.

I was wondering about that; didn't realize it was NeXT. A friend of mine still has his original NeXT box for the short time he worked on it. I was also surprised at the origins of DarwinBSD. I never really looked up the history and didn't realize it forked some of the code off FreeBSD. It's interesting to note that the PS4 OS is also a forked FreeBSD variant as well.

Jordon Hubbard even worked at Apple for a bit.

Re: The BSD family tree

#17

Heh. Between NetBSD 1.4 and Darwin/Mac OS X there's an entry that just says "(?)". It's probably pretty well-known that question mark is NeXTSTEP, which was built at NeXT, the company that Steve Jobs founded after he left Apple the first time around. NeXTSTEP was built around BSD mostly because of Avie Tevanian's involvement in CMU's Mach kernel project.

This is a bit complicated because NeXTstep didn't use a BSD kernel, using the Mach microkernel instead. Much of the layers above were taken from BSD, so it definitely had a BSD feel to it, but it wasn't a BSD kernel so maybe couldn't really be called a BSD derived OS?

Re: The BSD family tree

#18

Here's a much bigger one that takes lots of Unix variants into account: https://www.levenez.com/unix/unix.png (from here [1]). Also available as a big PDF. Edit: Updated with newest version. [1] https://www.levenez.com/unix/

Wow, looking at the family tree above - I can't help but think how this has fractured the BSD development community.

Unlike Linux, with has a viral license which essentially forces people to work on the same code base - BSD doesn't, which from a technical standpoint causes way more forking and less contributions back to a main tree.

Re: The BSD family tree

#19

Here's a much bigger one that takes lots of Unix variants into account: https://www.levenez.com/unix/unix.png (from here [1]). Also available as a big PDF. Edit: Updated with newest version. [1] https://www.levenez.com/unix/

Wow, looking at the family tree above - I can't help but think how this has fractured the BSD development community. Unlike Linux, with has a viral license which essentially forces people to work on the same code base - BSD doesn't, which from a technical standpoint causes way more forking and less contributions back to a main tree.

How would a GPL license have prevented any split between the open source variants of BSD? Why would it have made Theo happy to stay with NetBSD?

Also, Linux have longstanding forks, the Android kernel and the real-time tree to take two prominent examples.

Re: The BSD family tree

#20

Here's a much bigger one that takes lots of Unix variants into account: https://www.levenez.com/unix/unix.png (from here [1]). Also available as a big PDF. Edit: Updated with newest version. [1] https://www.levenez.com/unix/

Wow, looking at the family tree above - I can't help but think how this has fractured the BSD development community. Unlike Linux, with has a viral license which essentially forces people to work on the same code base - BSD doesn't, which from a technical standpoint causes way more forking and less contributions back to a main tree.

I don't think the situation is that different. Linux being the kernel, there are lots of "Linux distros", some of which are almost as different from each other as FreeBSD and NetBSD. For example, consider the many package managers (deb, rpm, Nix, etc.), init systems (SysV, Upstart, Systemd, etc.), graphical environments, etc.

The BSDs have a different philosophy where the kernel and userland go together as one package. Linux distros reuse the same kernel and rely on GNU for many tools, but are otherwise free to do their own thing, just like the BSDs.

I doubt the GPL is what really keeps Linux together. Rather, since the Linux kernel is developed separately from everything else, and is such a huge thing, there's little incentive to fork the kernel along with userland. You develop a new userland (as with Android) and keep the kernel.

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