[buug] (no subject)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting william benton (webenton at hotmail.com):

> If I want to put a unix os on a pc(not linux), is a unix os(not linux)
> available as freeware? what is the best source? Is berkeley unix
> available as freeware? Is BSD berkeley unix? I mean is it exactly like
> what you would get if you went to the university and logged on to their
> machine?

1.  There are a variety of modern, PC-compatible operating systems that
are fairly classifyable as Unixes.  They fall into a number of families.

2.  The term "freeware" is ill-defined.  If you mean "available without
expenditure other than download time", the answer is yes, you can do
that.  Note that downloading isn't often a really efficient way to
acquire very large codebases, but whatever floats your boat, and that is
certainly situation-dependent.

3.  You might wish to consider that whether you can initally acquire
something at cost is an orthogonal question to the much more
interesting question of what you and others are then permitted (and
enabled) to do with it.  For that reason, it's common nowadays to
distinguish _two_ orthogonal scales of gradation.

One is costs a great deal, costs little, costs nothing.[1]  Which might be
the spectrum you're thinking of when you say "freeware".  

The other is proprietary on one end, various types of open source (aka
"free software") on the other.  This is a metric of how much freedom
(and source code availability) you and others enjoy to redistribute, to
independently modify and develop and release variation.

4.  The various BSD descendents are indeed Unixes in any useful sense of
the term.   That is also true of Unixes based on the Linux kernel, and
Unixes based on the OpenSolaris kernel, and so on.  Tastes Differ[TM],
of course.

5.  I'm having a difficult time parsing your question "What is the best
source?"  If you're asking where's the best place to acquire
installation media, etc., then it depends.  You may need to get a better
idea of what you want to try first, before that question can be usefully
answered.

The fact that you're still stuck on the quaint "Is it really Unix"
question suggests that you might need to back up a bit.