*BSD News Article 32753


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From: nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu (Nate Williams)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: New OS's a good thing?
Date: 12 Jul 1994 14:32:23 GMT
Organization: Montana State University, Bozeman  Montana
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Message-ID: <2vu9hn$ki3@pdq.coe.montana.edu>
References: <2vsnmt$1co@mojo.eng.umd.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: 153.90.192.29

In article <2vsnmt$1co@mojo.eng.umd.edu>,
Charles B. Robey <chuckr@glue.umd.edu> wrote:
>I was wondering, amid all the new free OSes that are Unix spin offs, like
>Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, et. al., if all this recent embarrassment of
>riches is necessarily a good thing.
...
>But isn't it true that the splintering of Unix into x divisions was the
>start of massive incompatiblity, and at least *some* of the reason for
>Unix's lack of general public acceptance (outside of us techies).
....
>at some point, some fusion of ideas betweeen the major Free camps would
>be good, especially if that could be done without making the various camps
>lose their unique virtues, lose too much independence (and the freedom
>to experiment that implies).  Is this unreasonable?

This already happens.  The sound driver in FreeBSD are ports of the Linux
versions, and much of the library code in Linux is based on BSD code.

I suspect the cross-pollination will be even greater with the release of
4.4lite, since all groups are using it's code to some extent or the other.


Nate
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