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System administrator and former ski instructor, Albert Valbuena, has posted a table with accompanying analysis comparing several of the BSDs against Illumos and Linux. Among the topics in the analysis are licensing, how licensing is abused by companies, benchmarking, and of course a comparison of how various features are or aren't implemented across the spectrum.
The writing of this piece comes from the annoyance I get from reading about the prominence of Linux (the kernel) in almost all the computing spaces. And since electronic devices are gaining relevance in our daily lives and society in general this question of prominence of not just Linux but 'X' gains importance too.
More specifically this writing comes after reading someone who has participated in relevant software which is in a gazillion people's pocket. In a very unfortunate reply to the question: 'What are the advantages Linux has over BSD now?' the individual in question (which I'd like to preserve his identity) replied something close to (I do paraphrase): Linux receives much more investment from companies and therefore more paid developers are in it, plus BSD's feature parity with that of Linux doesn't hold.
This is mainstream opinion. Linux is better than anything else and money is poured in constantly, more than in other platforms. And aside this is not true, this is not based in facts but on feelings. Most GNU/Linux distributions are very average on many aspects. The fact they run on many servers on this planet and many developers work on them, doesn't make them better than 'X'. They are popular but that's it.
The individual in question did not, because he could not, point to relevant feature differences bettween the two operating systems.
Now go back to the top of this article and start checking features in a specific OS and start comparing, from that fastly written, from the top of my head, chart. Have fun doing that.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Wednesday November 06 2019, @02:31PM
As well as reciprocal versus non-reciprocal there is also the scope of licence applicability - essentially what is referred to as the "viral" bit in the GPL, but I don't like that description really. Although GPL is the archetypal reciprocal licence, reciprocity is actually orthogonal / independent of scope claim. MPL for example is reciprocal but the boundary is the changed source file, for LGPL the boundary is the library / compilation unit.
The GPL on the other hand uses "work based on the program", something which has generated thousands of posts of arguments on Usenet for as long as Usenet has existed and probably continues to do so on other more current forums. It's fairly easy to understand if you're working with user-space C executable in a standard(ish) Unix environment, but outside that in embedded work or a program which is using Java or dynamic-linking or interpreted or distributed, or... pretty much anything else, it rapidly gets very very vague and ill-defined and that means unknown liability which is a big no-no for business use.
GPLv3 changed scope again to cover hardware if shipped with software (but only if its a "user product") and patents, and also did little to clarify where scope ends (at least I don't find it any clearer, quite the opposite actually). GPLv2 - v3 scope clarity / changes are apparently behind various organisations' (e.g. FreeBSD, Apple) decisions to avoid any GPLv3 code on their systems - it's not fear of reciprocity, GPLv2 was ok and e.g. Apple contributes plenty upstream to FreeBSD.