curious, I don't know ...

Is this a question or is this about the most pointless thread I've seen yet on this site in over 2 years..

http://www.google.com/

In search box, type freebsd, hit enter.

www.freebsd.org

wooo tricky your kinda of an ass chill out he's just curious you could have recommended a site for more info in the same time it took for you to be an ass.

With 347 posts and not being able to do a simple google or forum search he really does deserve a flame IMHO. (The BSD mantra is help those who help themselves, in other words you are expected to be smarter than a windows user )

I'm not a big believer in the BSD mantra. The BSDs are all rock solid unices with incredible package management systems that only now has Linux gotten near equaling (with Gentoo), but the snotheaded elitism that comes with them is more then a bit of a headache. I've been roundly cursed on an OpenBSD usenet newsgroup in the past for giving a "nice" answer.

Regardless, this isn't a BSD forum, this is still LinuxQuestions, but as a silly question gets a silly answer, here's my editorial:

FreeBSD is the first of three offshoots of the BSD project from the University of Berkeley in California, a University in a town where I've bummed out way too many cigarettes. The huge indi music store, Rasputins is nice though... and they even had a couple copies of Midgets with Guns, an album by a very regional, now defunct punk band called Pain.

Sometime in the 80's, the uber-dorks at Berkeley were noticing the fragmentation of the Unix market and in the true sense of people with a California tofu and sushi inferiority complex over MIT's ITS OS, they decided to clone the UNIX operating system. The end result of this was BSD4.4, books were written, king geeks loved to hack it, the License was entirely Academic in that anyone on the planet could snag the code, close it, bury it in peet moss, you name it, and all they had to do was thank the Regents of UC Berkeley. A few of the people that snagged the BSD tcp/ip stack, a good chunk of which was done by none other then the man of that is cool, Bill Joy: hmmm... let's see: Sun, SGI, IBM, HP, Microsoft, Apple... need I go further? Everyone runs the BSD netstack, except... you guessed it, Linux! Why?

In 1990-ish, might have been '91, UC Berkeley got sued by AT&T for incorporating chunks of the proprietary UNIX sysV code into BSD. Sound familiar? *cough* *hack* Sco *cough*

Well, even though BSD386, the x86 port of the BSDs at the time was as free as the government cheese, geeks shyed away from it and started trying out this entirely different mess thrown together by some pasta munching Finnish goofball using already free and clear GNU tools. They dorks of the world sat back and used Linux, just for the time being of course, either BSD would get out of their lawsuit or Stallman would get his own kernel finished, the Hurd. Well, eventually it was ruled that the BSD was more or less free and clear of infringing code, they fixed what was deemed borrowed, UC Berkeley had already finished the project anyway and the code ended up under the auspice of... tada, a freefloating group of geeks that badged it: FreeBSD. Much like Debian and the Linux kernel itself, FreeBSD isn't a company, or at least not like RedHat and SuSe are companies.

The Hurd came out in '99 btw...

Well, during FreeBSD development some people wanted it to run on other architectures, but the FreeBSD group leaders didn't really care about that... so, pop, off comes NetBSD, that now runs on everything short of toasters. Then, in the NetBSD group there was one guy who was just such an evil little bastard that no one could stand him, so he formed yet another fork, OpenBSD, that is more secure then 400 heavily armed cokeheads guarding a 2-ton eight ball in the basement of Fort Knox.

Unlike the distros of Linux that are all standardized around the same kernel, the BSDs are all rather different now...

My apologies for just typing things as I remembered them... most of the above is semi-acurate or inaccurate, or at least, mishspeld.

Cheers,

Finegan

lol, great essay. looks like we had the full range of responses here in one thread. <heh>

Hum, it's a very funny question... how did he know about freebsd and he dont know what it is... its almost impossible!

he may know its an operating system, he may even know it has roots to BSD, but he still may not know the mission or what seperates it from linux or netbsd, or openbsd.

finegan - LMFAO nice history lesson. Wanna pass that on to my co-workers who ponder the desktop I run......FreeBSD

Tis quite funny.

Actually, this is a BSD forum.............

I do agree that it's a silly question, though.

Whew, I really want to apologize for the above, when I go off like that I usually have three or four criteria I try to meet before blathering on a bit:

A) Its actually funny. My goal one day is to make someone pee.

B) I have at least three cups of coffee in me.

C) Finishing sentences: I meant to write that this was just a subforum, a kinda false dichotomy, but nonetheless, this forum is an afterthought.

D) Offend someone greatly. I just gotta remember to throw in a SuSe bashing (my least favorite distro this month), or mention that Compaqs suck, or for that matter anything x86! Down with Intel. Arrrr!

E) Edit... "the man of that is cool, Bill Joy" What in heck was I not thinking? The Man of All that is cool... I'm such a drooling wrech sometimes.

Cheers,

Finegan

Nice essay finegan, with tha one I will pass my Operating System class...