Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
ATT developed Unix as a closed source operating system. Eventually, the American courts ruled that the code need to be offered as an open source product. At this time, ATT was a monopoly on the verge of being broken up into smaller companies. There was virtually no telecommunications competition in the later half of the 20th century.
Unix was available to the general public. Eventually, different universities took hold and “developed” Unix into different versions. The most notable version is the Berkley Software Development created by the University of California, Berkeley. The operating system was given freely to other companies under a permissive license. Eventually, this software was called BSD for short. The most well known BSD is macOS developed by Apple.
There are numerous BSD derivatives today. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD, and NetBSD are the most popular bases. Yet each one has a different direction or purpose. NetBSD can run on any computing hardware. DragonflyBSD specializes in multi-threading and, to a certain extent, microkernels to develop a seamless operating system, yet it runs only on certain platforms. OpenBSD is extremely security focused. FreeBSD’s main goal is an operating system for any use. The most popular BSD today is FreeBSD. There are other numerous forks from these four upstream operating systems.
There has been a mix of Linux OS with the BSD kernel. The most notable of these operations are GentooBSD, UbuntuBSD, DebianBSD, and ArchBSD. These projects attempted to offer the best of Linux and BSD. However due to the extreme niche, these projects are dormant and unmaintained according to various sources.
In general, there are strong differences in BSD and Linux. The BSD userland consider Linux to be the kernel, while BSD is the entire operating system. The security is tighter on BSD due to its lower number of daily desktop users. Linux has a penguin, while BSD has a demon called Beastie. The releases tend to be a bit slower, and it can be difficult to install BSD using USB methods. Doing a burnt imaged ISO DVD is the easiest, consistent, and safest way to install BSD. The packaging manager is called ports. ZFS is the file manager. Software jails are used within the operating system.
The most popular versions of BSD according to distrowatch are: FreeBSD, GhostBSD, DragonflyBSD, TrueOS, Project Trident, HardenedBSD and OpenBSD. TrueOS has been forked into Project Trident. TrueOS is going down a different path of modular and cutting edge software, while Project Trident will be the desktop version of TrueOS. GhostBSD is the easiest to install BSD out there onto a machine. While FreeBSD is the most documented with the largest community.
It was once said BSD is the last level of open source learning. Let's find out in the coming months. I will be using GhostBSD and the FreeBSD documentation to develop the new column that you are currently reading.