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BSD is everywhere! The Berkeley Software Distribution of Unix is a high-quality advanced computing platform with a rich history and a very impressive track record. BSD is an excellent choice for almost any application, from the hacker's garage to the world's largest particle accelerator to the smallest mom & pop
shop to the largest intranet or by curious individuals that would like to explore the Internet and computing the way they were meant to be.
BSD has some impressive features that make it well-suited both as a workstation and as a server operating system. BSD is…
Arguably the most appealing feature of the BSD platform is that it is not only freely available and redistributable but also free of charge. Moreover, it is free of any royalty or contractual obligations. Most high-quality applications that run on BSD are also free. For non-trivial applications, you need only pay the price of consulting, hardware and support. This results in a reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) than commercial platforms; Linux's effect on TCO is also felt by BSD users. But more important than a reduced TCO, is the substantial value that BSD brings to the table.
BSD was one of the pioneers of the concept of open source, a software engineering paradigm that typically produces software of higher quality than its closed counterparts. However, open source is not The Next Big Thing—it is a tried and true methodology. The BSD community has always recognized the value of open source and subsequently, BSD has been distributed in source form since the software's inception in 1977!
The BSD license is a very minimal yet sensible license that provides all the flexibility and power of open source licensing without the wordiness and conditions such as those found in other open source licenses, such as the GNU Public License (GPL) or its derivatives. It can be summarized into 3 components: 1) a copyright and a mandate of the retention thereof, 2) a permission requirement for the author's endorsement of or promotion of derivative works and 3) a disclaimer of warranty. So what it really boils down to is that BSD-licensed artifacts afford some basic protections to the author while coming with only one string attached: a requirement that distributors simply give credit where credit is due! How could you possibly reach a larger audience without placing your work in public domain?
Operating systems such as Linux and companies such as Apple, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have recognized and reaped the benefits of what BSD has to offer. BSD-derived code can be found in just about every operating system in use today, from Linux as well as commercial Unix to IBM's midrange and mainframe operating systems to Microsoft Windows and Apple's Mac OS X.
Some extremely important developments in the field of computing were pioneered on the BSD platform by some particularly outstanding individuals. Furthermore, some of the most useful, influential and cutting-edge tools and features have been developed on and initially distributed as part of BSD, including tcpdump/libpcap, OpenSSH and Systrace. A FreeBSD cluster was used to render the special effects seen in the film The Matrix.
The BSDs are distributed with a suite of networking protocols based on the 4.4BSD TCP/IP stack, the reference implementation of TCP/IP. And with the wide adoption afforded to Berkeley sockets, it has had many years of exposure and testing. BSD's particular implementation is widely referred to as …probably the most robust and capable TCP/IP stack in existence…
. It is also extremely fast.
Likewise, the various virtual memory systems (VM and UVM) have undergone many years of development by some of the brightest developers in the field, resulting in highly optimized, stable memory managers that other projects are scrambling to compete with.
Though each of the BSDs employ excellent security models, especially worthy of note is OpenBSD, which has been praised as the most secure operating system in existence
on more than one occasion. One consequence of its security-focused goals and policies is the recording of only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 8 years!
While many organizations that make use of the OpenBSD operating system do not publicize the fact for security reasons, here are some instances where OpenBSD has proved itself.
A number of OpenBSD security R&D initiatives have been supported by DARPA and the Air Force Research Laboratory, Air Force Material Command, USAF and also in cooperation with the POSSE project at University of Pennsylvania.
An industrial-strength platform that performs gracefully under staggering loads, FreeBSD can be found lurking at the core of such operations as:
mirrorson the Internet and the current uptime champion
As a further testament to its excellent design and years of rigorous testing, BSD continues to dominate uptime surveys. With this degree of reliability, you can count on FreeBSD to shine in mission-critical applications.
BSD has thousands of ported applications that run native to the operating system. In fact, most applications distributed in source form (such as those written for Linux) will run on BSD with only minor adjustments, if any.
If source code is not available, highly sophisticated binary compatibility is built right into the BSD kernels, enabling them to run most applications built for Digital Unix, HP-UX, Linux, SCO Unix, SunOS and Ultrix. Additionally, NetBSD runs on more platforms than any other operating system and sports a very impressive binary emulation system of its own!
Contrary to popular misconception, open source platforms such as Linux and BSD are not lacking in application support—quite the opposite, in fact. The open source world is literally overflowing with software and BSD is fully capable of making use of that abundance. Astonishingly robust applications such as such as Apache (which enjoys nearly 70% of the Web server market), Jakarta, Mozilla, OpenLDAP, PostgreSQL, and Samba, afford BSD a high degree of interoperability. Through this software, BSD can serve to and communicate with both new and legacy systems seamlessly.
BSD is available in a handful of different (but related) flavors, including:
As documented by Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick and further illustrated in Éric Lévénez's Unix history diagram, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are direct descendants of 4.4BSD-Lite, Release 2. This was in turn derived from the original Sixth Edition (V6) Unix code developed at Bell Labs (now Lucent Technologies). While BSD cannot be referred to as Unix due to legal reasons, the BSDs nonetheless are far closer to true Unix than most flavors, and those comfortable with Unix will find BSD to be familiar territory. Contrast this with Linux, which is actually a complete rewrite of Unix originally designed to be a Minix-lookalike.
The end result was an operating system kernel entirely free not only of Minix code, but of the original Unix code as well. Moreover, it was (and still is) developed without a userland of its own (hence the need to choose from over 300 Linux distributions).
One important development that was pioneered on BSD is Berkeley sockets, which has remained the most popular API for interfacing to the TCP/IP networking stack, the de facto standard for transmitting data on computer networks, including the Internet. Other BSD innovations include: UFS/FFS and their robust optimization mechanisms, job control, the vfork(2) system call, the C shell and the vi editor, to name a few. Chances are, your operating system is using parts of BSD and you may not even realize it!
BSD is really whizbang. Try it. You'll like it. ;-)
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Copyright © 2004 GUBUG. All rights reserved. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted subject to terms described in the BSD license. BSD Daemon Copyright 1988 by Marshall Kirk McKusick. Used with permission. All Rights Reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respected owners.
$Id: bsdfaq.php,v 1.2 2004/11/09 16:50:45 acc Exp $
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