[buug] Hello, I'm new.

[Bonkers the Evil Admin (Matt Bockman)]

Wow... I like this mailing list. Well, would you think that BSD would be 
better then a Linux system for my circumstances? I mean, I don't know 
where to go with this.

~Matt Bockman

Rick Moen wrote:

>Quoting Bonkers the Evil Admin (Matt Bockman) (bonkers at thetechbox.com):
>
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>>I'm new to this UUG.... I've been wanting to get into a lot of Unix or 
>>Linux based groups so I can learn lots. I'm in SDLUG and this, so I hope 
>>to learn a lot. I host my own mandrake server which seems pathetic, I 
>>want to change it to Unix, or change the Linux distro, I don't like RPMs 
>>very much. 
>>    
>>
>
>Welcome.  You've fallen into the clutches of a mixed BSD / Linux crowd,
>hereabouts.
>
>If you're physically in the Bay Area, you might want to attend the 11th
>anniversary Linux Picnic, this coming Saturday in Sunnyvale.  Free of 
>charge, but you should RSVP.  Reservation on-line form, and full
>details, are at http://www.linuxpicnic.org/ . 
>
>There's also, of course, the IDG LinuxWorld conference starting tomorrow
>at Moscone Center in S.F.
>
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>
>>Anyway, I was just wondering what the main diffrences were between
>>Unix and Linux?
>>    
>>
>
>First, you'd have to decide what "Unix" is in 2002.  And whether you or
>anyone else cares.
>
>It used to be reasonably clear what Unix is, and also that people cared.
>These days, the concept's a bit muddy, and also there's little reason to
>care.
>
>To elaborate:  AT&T Bell Labs was of course originally responsible for
>the thing, which started out being a copyrighted codebase plus a
>trademarked name to go with it.  UC Berkeley's Computer Science Research
>Group gradually made the codebase bearable, without ever having rights
>to the trademark.  (That codebase was of course the ancestral BSD.)  In
>the process, CSRG replaced literally all AT&T code.
>
>Both the AT&T and Berkeley codebases, through 30+ years of tangled
>history, gave rise to innumerable offshoots.  Plus there were
>independent reinventions based on the same ideas with either little or
>literally no AT&T code.  But everyone with at least a little common
>sense borrowed _Berkeley_ code, because it was permitted to do so, and
>because that code failed to suck.  (Note that this _is_ a Berkeley
>mailing list.)
>
>As a result, current direct descendents of CSRG's BSD -- FreeBSD,
>NetBSD, OpenBSD, Apple Darwin, Apple Macintosh OS X, Tenon MachTen, and
>probably some others I'm forgetting -- can claim to have their kernels
>and some of the surrounding code be _descended_ from "Unix" (meaning
>AT&T's copyrighted codebase)l, but in fairness can say they _are_ "Unix"
>only in a sort of homeopathic sense of the essence of Unixness clinging
>to it even after the last AT&T molecule was long gone.
>
>Systems built around the Linux kernel (which may be what you mean when
>you say "Linux") have a kernel codebase written independently (more or
>less) of both AT&T and CSRG, plus a small amount of surrounding code
>that's ideosyncratic to the Linux kernel, plus a great deal of code
>surrounding that that's _literally_ the same as on common BSD-descended
>systems and other *ix-ish systems.
>
>Speaking of *ix systems, there remain all manner of non-open source
>*ixes that are Not Dead Yet.  People often say "*ix" as a slightly
>mocking concession to the lawyers who at times have tried to maintain
>with a straight face that "Unix" is a valuable trademark.
>
>That trademark was tossed from AT&T to Novell, which lobbed it over to
>The Open Group when Novell sold the (who-cares-it's-now-worthless)
>legacy AT&T Unix codebase to SCO, Inc. -- which in turn was absorbed
>into Caldera, Inc.  So, if you literally want to call your *ix "Unix",
>you have to put up with whatever anal-probe techniques The Open Group
>has in mind for that purpose.  
>
>But that brings me back to the original point:  Nobody really cares
>whether one may legally call something "Unix".  Largely, nobody really 
>cares whether something _is_ Unix in any non-lawyerly sense, either:
>Lookng from a functional perspective, those are irrelevant, and what 
>matters is support for more-or-less standard system calls and other
>conventional system architecture that allow easy portability among 
>members of the *ix family.
>
>In short, wrong question.  ;->  However, welcome.
>
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