On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 12:37 PM, Odhiambo Washington <odhiambo@gmail.com> wrote:

10 differences between Linux and BSD

How often do you hear people lumping together Linux and any of the BSDs? I've done it on occasion, and I hear it all the time. Of course, there are plenty of similarities between Linux and BSD: They are both based on UNIX. For the most part, both systems are developed by noncommercial organizations. And I must say that both the Linux and BSD variants have one common goal -- to create the most useful, reliable operating system available.

Still, there are significant differences as well. And when people overlook them, the whole BSD community shivers with anger. So I thought I would do my best to help my BSD brethren out and explain some of the ways Linux differs from BSD. 

Are you comparing the Linux *kernel* project to those (kernels) from any of the xBSD projects? Or are you comparing complete GNU/Linux *systems* to xBSD systems? Or are you comparing the GNU/Linux *way of doing things* to the xBSD way of doing things?

Note that in the GNU/Linux world, there's the GNU *philosophy*, and there's the "Linux" philosophy. Also note that GNU/Linux *distributions* are independent projects, and do things very differently from each other. Also, distributions include packages from not only the GNU project [1] and the Linux kernel project.

And there is some interesting cross polination in the works, from projects such as Debian GNU/kFreeBSD: <http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/>, and Nexenta: <http://nexenta.org/>.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GNU_packages>