We meet the players

Here I will give a brief overview of the systems that will be discussed. Note that the stories presented do not claim to be a comprehensive and authoritative opinion, and no attempt has been made to make them so.
I beg!

Unix

Unix is actually not an operating system. Well, yes and no. In a specific application, Unix is ​​an operating system developed at Bell Labs in the late sixties by Bell Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs. All subsequent time, it was developed and distributed as a commercial operating system and research operating system by companies such as Bell Labs, USG, USDL, ATTIS, USL, Novell, SCO and everyone who could come up with an acronym. Probably, Unix has had the greatest impact on the modern computer industry. Any common use device and many specific devices use ideas and concepts and often the code of systems from the Unix pedigree. When we say the word "Unix", we most often mean "common form" rather than a specific OS called Unix. The general form means "any operating system that is significantly similar to the Unix system in design, performance, and taste." That is, all BSD, Linux, SunOS, Tru64, SCO, Irix, AIX, HP / UX, and hundreds more and thousands of others. I’m not interested in entering into philosophical discussions on the topic “how many angels can dance on split ends of hair”. Let this be enough to understand that when I say “Unix-systems”, I mean exactly what you think about when I say this phrase.
City of Pedants → in that side.

Linux

There are also a few things under the word Linux . This is the core, originally written by Linus Torvalds during his student years in Finland. Since then, he was shaken up, knocked out, hacked, twisted, dispersed, hacked, brushed, trampled and performed other manipulations (order is not important, of course) as many people as it is difficult to imagine. Linux is also a family of operating systems. While this second around the world, brilliant metaphysical discussions are underway (I guarantee it) regarding the fact that "Linux is not an operating system, but simply a kernel" or "It is correct to say GNU / Linux" and so on, I want dissociate from this semantic garbage. When I say “Linux”, I mean Red Hat . I mean Slackware . I mean Mandrake . I mean Debian . I mean suse . I mean Gentoo . I mean each of the 2 Cadillian distributions, which are based on the Linux kernel with a similar user environment, mostly built on GNU tools that migrate over the Web.

BSD

BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution. Initially, it was a collection of patches and utilities for the official Bell Unix, which were developed by the CSRG group at the University of California at Berkeley. Over time, it developed, replacing and / or changing more and more parts of the system until, at some indefinite stage, it turned into its own OS, simply by sharing pieces of code with Bell Unix. Of course, this still required Bell licenses to use the system, if only because most of the code was written in Bell. All code written in Berkeley, nevertheless, was released under a license, which later became known as a BSD license, the free translation of which sounds like this: “Do whatever you think of your code, just let us know” . So, the path of almost the entire BSD code eventually led back to the “official” Unix systems: System III and System V. And both these branches paved their way to various commercial Unix forks. After the CSRG (for the most part) broke up and BSD development ceased, several groups picked up the banner. One of these was the 386BSD project, which ported the BSD code to the Intel i386 platform. When the 386BSD project came to nothing, two other groups were formed, which supported and developed the code 386BSD; one was the FreeBSD project, the other was NetBSD. Over time, some internal disagreements within the NetBSD project led to the formation of the OpenBSD project. When I say BSD, I mean a few things. I mean the general BSD spirit and approach to systems. In a general sense, the aforesaid is understood to be the 3 BSD systems currently in the public domain ( for 2005. - approx. Transl. ):

• FreeBSD was initially aimed at achieving the best possible performance on the 386th platform. Later, a number of other platforms joined i386, including Alpha and SPARC, along with the i386 heirs: Intel Itanium and AMD Opteron. The main goal of the project is to maximize the reliability and efficiency of work on these platforms, both as a server and as a desktop.
• NetBSD aims to work on as many platforms as possible. Its goal is to become the most portable OS on the planet, and it seems to be honestly trying for it.
• OpenBSD focuses primarily (someone will say "solely") on security and the like. Tight integration of security, auditing, cryptography and related issues are primary concerns.

All these goals are, of course, interchangeable. Every BSD cares about and works on security. Each BSD takes care of performance and works on it. Each BSD takes care of portability and working on it. Inside the group are divided into large pieces of code. Many developers are working on more than one system. An insightful reader will notice that I did not mention Mac OS X or the underlying Darwin . Although they are built more on BSD, the upper layers of OS X are still clean Apple. Working as OS user in OS X, you use it as MacOS, not BSD. Therefore, despite the fact that purely academically, some things can be attributed to OS X, there is no particular practical value in their understanding. Darwin is closer to the standard BSD concept, but since most of its users come from BSD, it can be said that this is outside the context of my essay. However, most of the general information is likely to be easy to understand. When discussing the specifics in my essay, I will mostly refer to FreeBSD, because I work with it and know it best. In some specific aspects there will be significant differences. Common parties are likely to be the same for the whole group. From a philosophical point of view, all BSD are very similar, in contrast to the Linux methodology. Anyway, this essay is primarily philosophical.

1. BSD vs Linux. Introduction