*BSD News Article 37679


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From: kstailey@leidecker.gsfc.nasa.gov (Kenneth Stailey)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: The Real reasons the *BSDs should cooperate, if not merge.
Date: 05 Nov 1994 21:45:28 GMT
Organization: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center -- Greenbelt, Maryland USA
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In-reply-to: wes@indirect.com's message of Sat, 29 Oct 1994 06:03:19 GMT

In article <CyF7HK.5BF@indirect.com> wes@indirect.com (Barnacle Wes) writes:

   Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc
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   Jon Cargille <jcargill@grilled.cs.wisc.edu> wrote:
   > Up until now, the fact that there is more than one free version of BSD
   > for the i386 has been at most an inconvenience: [...]

   > Inconvenience aside, however, the split hasn't been a REAL problem for
   > many people.  In the future, though, I see it becoming a true Achilles
   > heel for the user community.

   Mark Tamola (buckwild@u.washington.edu) wrote:
   : I have to agree with this.

   While I don't disagree, I think you've missed the fact that BSDI
   is most likely to garner commercial support, simply because it is
   a supported product.  This doesn't bother me much, I haven't seen
   all that much commercial software I'd want to pay money for;
   certainly not the Wordperfect or Excel mentioned in the above
   articles...

   Using a "free" system is pretty much a high-wire act, just like
   the good old days of UNIX.  Being a curmudgeon-in-training, I like
   the good old days, when there were a few UNIX people around and we
   knew how good we had it, much better than today when everyone and
   his dog is talking about how good UNIX is, if it only had feature
   "X" from DOS/VMS/VM/etc.

What is iBCS2?  NetBSD has a kernel option COMPAT_IBCS2 as well as a
suboption COMPAT_SVR4.  The FAQ has nothing in its table of contents
and only a blurb about "working on COFF and ELF compatiblity" in some
*BSD vs LINUX section.

Ken