Re: [MLUG] BSD and GNU

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

I'm thinking of the GNU "Coreutils" that used to be distributed separately 
with shellutils, fileutils, etc.  This would include programs like ls, cp, 
mv, rm, cat, head, tail, grep, sed, awk, cut, paste and many more.

My understanding is that BSD has it's own versions of all of those 
utilities.  I know that it is always possible to replace such utilities on 
any UNIX system with the GNU versions (personally, I think it is usually a 
good idea to do so -- you can always keep these files in different places 
and use the path to decide which is usually used).

Anyway, I guess you (Bryan) are saying that the user is now allowed to 
choose at the time of installation whether to use the GNU utilities or the 
BSD utilities.  Is that correct?  I had not heard that, but I like the 
idea.

Mike


On Sat, 22 Dec 2007, Bryan Venable wrote:

> It depends on how you look at it.  GPL code can't be considered a "core" 
> or "required" part of a pure BSD distribution, by definition, because 
> then you would have to place the GPL conditions on redistribution of 
> that code.  So e.g. if someone uses just the OpenBSD system itself 
> without GCC or any other GPL'ed components, then it's just a BSD 
> licensed system and they're free to use and redistribute it under those 
> terms.  But if you add the standard compiler package that the OpenBSD 
> project distributes, that includes GCC and related GPL'ed components. 
> The same goes for the other well-known BSD systems, AFAIK:  they 
> distribute GPL'ed software to go along with the core OS, and a lot of 
> people install it, but it's officially "optional" so the core system 
> remains pure BSD.
>
> On 12/21/07, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> > On Fri, 21 Dec 2007, Jack Smith wrote:
> >
> > > I don't know how different it would be to use a BSD live CD as a 
> > > recovery CD as the BSDs do have some differences with Linux but they 
> > > still largely use the same GNU program set.
> >
> > I'm pretty sure that BSD doesn't use GNU programs.  Maybe you meant 
> > that the programs are like the GNU programs even though they are not 
> > compiled from the same code.  Is that it?  All UNIX/Linux systems are 
> > similar that way, and I think POSIX supplies another standard that 
> > makes them alike (if they try to adhere to POSIX).
> >
> > Mike

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