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Re: [LUG] [OT] FreeBSD and OpenSolaris

 

On Sun, May 13, 2007 at 03:25:56PM +0100, Anton Channing wrote:
> I was curious to know what those in the Linux
> community thought about other open source OS
> that are available, such as FreeBSD and
> OpenSolaris?  These all seem to run x86
> architecture...

The BSDs will run on pretty much anything GNU/Linux will (certainly x86/amd64,
sparc, powerpc, alpha, etc). OpenSolaris only seems to support x86/amd64 and
sparc, but from what I saw when I looked, most of the distributions of it were
aimed at x86.

> What are their advantages and disadvantages
> over using Linux distros?  Are their open
> source licenses 'less open' than Linux?

I don't know much about OpenSolaris, but I've used FreeBSD a fair bit. The
licence for most of the system is the three-clause BSD one, which doesn't have
the same requirements for the distribution of source code as the GPL -  you get
all the source code, but you're not required to supply it in a derivative work.

It's still a free licence as far as the FSF is concerned, but it's not copyleft.

The major disadvantage is that they're generally less newbie-friendly than
GNU/Linux, and hardware support isn't so good.

        bma

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