vern said:
Considering the a lot of BSD apps is "ripped" was originally only available on Linux platforms, what does that say about BSD? What can BSD that Linux can't? What makes BSD more of an OS than Linux? Linux is merely the kernel ... but Linux is one kernel. With all the flak being thrown by NetBSD and FreeBSD at each other ... which BSD is better than Linux?
Many of the tools currently used on FreeBSD are indeed GNU apps, that is because it is useless to have two different groups of people developing two compilers, when they might as well combine resources, and work together.
Also, most of the tools were not first available for just Linux, they were available for Minix, and any other OS that bothered to port them, they were introduced by Stallman for unix. Unix was based on a system named Unics, and was written by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson.
"The year 1969 has often been heralded as the peak of good times in the 20th Century (at least for America). The main significance that it has for hackers, however, is that 1969 was the year that Unix was born."
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http://www.crackmonkey.org/unix.html
BSD is known as the Berkeley System Distribution, which was based on code the schools licensed from AT&T.
"Enter UC Berkeley in the late 1970's. UCB was a licensee of the Unix source code, and they used it extensively for research projects and development. Pretty much the whole of the Cal CS department was hacking Unix at one time or another during the late 1970's and early 1980's. The Computer Systems Research Group had hacked virtual memory into it in order to make the Franz LISP system more useful. This attracted the attention of the Defense Department, and they were soon working on DARPA projects for things like networking."
http://www.crackmonkey.org/unix.html
A big legal battle later, and AT&T had to give the schools their code, and they could not sue for infringement because they used the BSD's code in their Unix. So now we have 4BSD-LITE which is empty of all the code AT&T said was theirs, so now most of the OS had to be rebuilt from scrap. This is when NetBSD (1994, two years earlier Linus showcased some of Linux) comes out. FreeBSD soon forked from NetBSD (Not sure about this, can't find info). FreeBSD soon becomes the main stream BSD.
"The BSD code-base can be traced back to the early 80s at UC Berkeley." -
http://www.netbsd.org/Misc/features.html#stability
The BSD code base is mature because of the fact that it is so old. After Theo de Raadt got pissed off at NetBSD for not allowing him rights to the CVS, he spun off OpenBSD in 1996. DragonFlyBSD was created in 2004 as its creator was not happy with the way the FreeBSD-5 release line is going. And FreeBSD-4 would soon be gone.
Red-Hat 1.0 (Mother's Day), November 3, 1994. This is the first available Linux distribution i could find.
There some history for you people.
Now on to your questions. Once again, most apps were not ripped, the history says it all. They were rightfully used under the GPL.
The BSD's can't do anything more than Linux, other than the fact that they can emulate Linux, and have a Linux compatibility mode so that Linux programs work perfectly, also, they are more secure and mature because of their development methods, and the fact that most of them do stringent checks through the source for security issues, and have a longer release path, which means bugs get squashed quicker. This is a disadvantage as newer hardware can take longer to get fully supported, and there is never such a bleeding edge that it will not work, unless you follow -CURRENT, but even that is somewhat guaranteed to leave your system in tact.
What makes BSD more of an OS? Well linux is just the kernel like you say, an operating system needs more than just the kernel. It needs tools that are maintained by the programmers who maintain the kernel (Which is why the base distribution of any BSD, and the source you can download, always include all the tools that are needed to compile and install a fully working system, not just the kernel). Also, there is more consistency, the boot loader is written by the same people who maintain parts of the kernel, in linux you have grub, you have lilo, and several other small projects. There is only one. Distributions that use Linux have to bundle whatever applications they want, there are several versions of ls available, they have to pick one out, and distribute it with their stuff. In BSD ls is part of the base distribution, and is maintained by the BSD people, so there is more consistency.
The flak being thrown between FreeBSD and NetBSD should not be seen as a minus point, they are not competing, they share so much code, that probably half of FreeBSD is based on NetBSD in some way, and OpenBSD throws some stuff in as well, like pf, and FreeBSD throws in it's superior whatever, and you get OS's that are mixed, which is what creates such stable OS's. The flak being thrown around is the same as that being thrown between distributions of linux. It only gets more press, as in general the projects are nice to each other, and it is encouraged to share code. The more the code gets seen by all the BSD groups, the more bugs will get fixed, the more features will get added, and in general the more stable things get.
Personally I prefer FreeBSD, but i have used OpenBSD, NetBSd, and DragonFlyBSD, as well as millions of versions of different Linux distribution. I have also worked with Solaris 2.6 (version number might be off), and have worked with Unix from AT&T.
My history might be off a little, my first two quotes from the website
http://www.crackmonkey.org/unix.html provides a really good explanation.
I hope that answers your questions. I am not saying Linux is bad at all, but i feel that it is inconsistent for my needs, does not have the maturity and stability that i have come to expect of an OS. There are many less security problems found in BSD than in Linux, and even if there are security problems, most of them are not kernel related, and are fixed relatively fast with another patch level. Recent slashdot articles showed that getting people to include a patch in some part of Linux is a pain, and the only way they could get it fixed according to them was to release where the code was broken.