Re: The case for FreeBSD

On Wed, Feb 09, 2005 at 09:04:56AM -0700, Ryan Sommers wrote:
> Tobias Roth said:
> > My favorite quote from that article:
> >
> > "In addition, the project is also working on porting baselayout to
> > Gentoo/FreeBSD in such a way that makes the management of startup
> > services as easy as in Gentoo Linux."
> >
> > They cannot possibly be serious...
> 
> Personally, instead of laughing at them I think we need to embrace their
> efforts.

I still prefer to lauch at them.

> Corporate development and backing is one area Linux has the clear
> advantage over FreeBSD and something like the Gentoo name coupled with
> FreeBSD can help spread the word.

Gentoo doesn't exactly have a reputation for being an industry-strength and
stable GNU/Linux distribution. It's more like the cutting-edge hacker type
distribution (which can be a nice thing, of course).

In my opinion, the effect this will have is more like:
"Hmm, portage on FreeBSD. I guess the FreeBSD ports system must be inferior
to portage, or else they wouldn't attempt to port portage to FreeBSD."
(dito for the init system)

> I applaud their effort to merge FreeBSD with their own projects.

If they would have tried the other direction (ie, FreeBSD ports/init system
with a Linux based system), I would applaud as well. This killer combo for
everyone who wants/needs a Linux kernel would instantly wipe out all other
general purpose GNU/Linux distributions.

> While I
> think they might be a little stuck in the Linux way of seperating userland
> and kernel, "In a separate effort we are also looking into porting the
> glibc and GNU userland to the FreeBSD kernel". We might be able to
> convince them to our side of the BSD vs GPL fence.

It's not possible to convert GPL-licenced code (eg glibc) to a BSD licensed-
one.

cheers, t.