FreeBSD talks

[Paul Robinson]

On Wednesday 28 November 2001  7:04 pm, Tom Hukins wrote:

> I think it's fine to mention how the BSD license works, and mention
> that some people might prefer it, but I agree that it would be a bad
> idea to make one-sided statements like "The BSD license is better than
> GPL" or anything like that.

The problem is, when you bring up the subject of licenensing with advocates 
of either GPL or BSD, you can end up in an argument quite quickly. RMS is 
very good at avoiding these nowadays by making his statements then ducking 
out of the way in the crossfire. He's got it sussed... :-)

> Whilst benchmarks have their place, I think it's best to emphasise
> that lots of people are using FreeBSD for this, and that the
> Ports/Packages systems combined with FreeBSD's relative security make
> it easy to get powerful, secure, reliable servers up and
> running with comparatively little effort.

Fair enough. It's also marginally better as an OS for a network server than 
Linux is in terms of performance, and considerably better than Windows. 
Providing you're not using some MS-tie-in like DCOM, etc.

> products.  I vaguely recall claims that the Windows 2000 TCP/IP stack
> behaves _very_ similarly to that of FreeBSD 3.4, which suggests
> Microsoft have incorporated parts of FreeBSD into Windows.

Since NT4, the stack in Windows has been based on the BSD stack. In fact, I'm 
reasonably sure that NT3.51 used it as well (now I'm showing my years).

> Okay, so I couldn't hack the pace on Saturday, but I'm sure you
> weren't around when I left the hotel on Friday night (or Saturday
> morning). :-)

Tsk, tsk! Not at all. Friday night was spent in the bar ensuring that 
everybody could charge drinks to my room if they needed to (cos of the 
no-cash-after-midnight rule) and so was Saturday - OK, I was drinking too, 
because as some people may have noticed, I like my drink :-) . Both nights 
finished at around 4-5am for me, and resulted in a bar bill of around £200 
when I checked out. I would like to take this oppurtunity to thank Visa for 
their generosity with regard to this matter... :-)

-- 
Paul Robinson