Linux vs. BSD Unix

What is a BSD Unix?

BSD family of Unix systems is based upon the source code of real Unix. The contemporary BSD systems stand on the source code that was released in the beginning of 1990's.

BSD is behind the philosophy of TCP/IP networking and the Internet thereof; it is a developed Unix system with advanced features.

Except for proprietary BSD/OS, the development of which was discontinued, there are currently four BSD systems available: FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Mac OS X, which is derived from FreeBSD.

Differences between BSD and Linux

• BSD license allows users/companies to modify a program's source code and not to release changes to the public. Linux uses GPL license for most of the time. With a GPL-licensed program anybody can change the source code, but he or she MUST share it with the Open Source community to make sure that everybody will benefit from such a change.
• BSD has the so-called "core system" (without packages). The core system consists of basic utilities and anything beyond this is strictly seen as an add-on. Linux is usually packaged as the whole system where this difference is not seen.
• BSD systems have also their stable version. With FreeBSD, for example, you have a FreeBSD-Release (a version that can be used normally), FreeBSD-Stable (system more profoundly audited for bugs and security holes), and a development version - Current, which is not stable and not recommended for a regular use. Some Linux distributions started to imitate this philosophy, but with BSD systems this way of making distributions has become a rule.
• BSD has FFS file system; it is the only file system on BSD's contrary to Linux, where you can use dozens of file systems like ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, etc.
• All BSD systems have a Linux emulation support. Running BSD binaries on Linux is a little harder.
• BSD systems have less support from driver vendors, thus they lag behind in this view (they are not worse, but many vendors support only Microsoft and Linux). With a BSD system you must carefully research the Internet for supported products/chipsets before purchasing any hardware.
• BSD kernels can be set to several security levels. This is also possible with Linux, but BSD's have taken a very good care of this kernel-tuning feature, which makes it even impossible to change something in files in higher security levels - you cannot delete them.
• Generally, BSD systems boot and reboot faster than Linux. Linux can do this, too, but it must be tuned. It is very surprising that Linux is shipped, on the one hand, on huge DVD's and, on the other hand, it has a compressed kernel. BSD systems do not use (but they can) a default kernel that is compressed, thus the system boots always faster.
• If you compile programs from ports, you will not stumble into compilation errors. BSD packagers prepare their packages carefully, so that users will always compile them successfully. This does not always happen with Linux.

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