tlug: FreeBSD News issue 2

[craigoda@example.com]

Hello,
I just downloaded and read FreeBSD NEWS, Issue 2, Summer 1998. 
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/newsletter/issue2.pdf.   It
is a twelve page PDF format document.  In our spirit of entente among
open source code groups, I thought that TLUG people might want to 
read about another UNIX PC OS.  In addition, the newsletter is
quite good.  I thought that FreeBSD No1 for ISPs gave some good
information on disk I/O, RAM and processor considerations.  Going
back to issue 1 where FreeBSD was featured as the almost exclusive
OS for Yahoo, I felt a wave of nostalgia.

Since I'm a Linux lover, I can't send this e-mail off without some
comments on why FreeBSD is used as the OS for older ISPs and why
this is changing.

In the early 1990s BSD ruled the Internet.  I didn't know too
much about the Internet until 1993 when a group of us launched 
an ISP on a DEC VAX running VMS.  It soon became evident that we needed
to move to UNIX, so several systems were evaluated over a period
of months.  The world of UNIX was split between BSD and SysV.  While
SysV is supported by most major UNIX manufacturers now, it was
not clearly known then which way the world would go.  Sun's customers
were openly hostile to SysV based Solaris and were ordering Sun's
older BSD based SunOS product.  People were reading The Design
and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System written
by Leffler, McKusick, Karels, and Quarterman.  Most of the TCP/IP
portions of all UNIX implementations are BSD based and in 1993/4 BSD 
worked and outperformed Linux on the TCP/IP networking side.  

In 1993, PPP was an obscure way to connect to the Internet.  MacTCP
was a commercial product.  Windows '95 did not exist and people used
Trumpet Winsock on 3.1.  Netware ruled the PC networking world.  We were
sending patches of the 0.9x Linux kernel around by e-mail in attempt to 
the Linux port of pppd to work.  The pppd system was ported from BSD.

Jump to 1998.  Linux is in wider use than FreeBSD and definitely
gets more press.  The networking side of Linux is now equal to
BSD.  I don't have any statistics on this, but I don't
hear complaints about Linux networking performance any more.
Users of computer systems should pick the best tool for their
needs.  Five years ago, the accessibility to the Linux community
was a big reason I used Linux.  Now, with the increased reliability
of PC hardware, the Linux kernel, and the tools that are used with
Linux, I think it is the best choice in many cases, regardless
of price.  When costs are considered, Linux is the right choice
in even more areas.  

The community that produced Linux supports a wide variety of 
distributions.  I think that the main unresolved issue that 
prevents Linux from being used in circumstances where it is the 
right choice in a wider range of areas is the danger of Linux
splintering.  Simply put, a software package like Japanese Applixware
must be able to be installed on every Linux distribution, regardless
of file structure.  Splintering filesystems results in directories
like /usr/jp /usr/local/jp /usr/lib/canna /usr/local/lib/canna.

IMHO, this is the challenge of Linux.  A comparison of 
FreeBSD and Linux shows that they are about equal in terms
of networking performance.  Linux has an edge in general 
applications.  Linux is also gaining popularity faster than
FreeBSD.  However, FreeBSD comes in a single distribution with
a single filestructure.   When Linux resolves the issue of
different filestructures, it will be poised to dominate over
NT in the enterprise. 


Regards,
Craig

----
Craig Oda   craigoda@example.com   http://tlug.linux.or.jp/~craigoda
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