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From: tzs@u.washington.edu (Tim Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: I hope this won't ignite a major flame war, but I've got to know!
Date: 18 Jul 1994 12:13:49 GMT
Organization: University of Washington School of Law, Class of '95
Lines: 24
Message-ID: <30drlt$7tc@news.u.washington.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: stein2.u.washington.edu
I realize I'm treading on dangerous ground here, since I'm going to
mention {Free,Net)BSD and Linux in the same post, but something
puzzles me. From what I've read (I've not had a chance to try any
of these systems yet--I'm still shopping for hardware to try them
out), {Free,Net}BSD are Berkeley-like (duh!) and Linux is closer to
System V.
From what I've seen on the net, it appears that most of the users of
these systems are academic types or are professional programmers who
want to hack around with operating systems.
Historically, these classes of people have preferred Berkeley Unix
to System V. System V appealed to the corporate world, where what
was important was a supported Unix.
Hence, I would expect {Free,Net}BSD to be overwhelmingly more popular
than Linux. Yet, based on the volume of posting on the net, the number
of FTP sites that carry each system, and the number of CD-ROM places that
I've seen selling each, it seems the Linux is by far the winner in the
popularity contest.
What is going on here?
--Tim Smith