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Why pay for expensive, licence impeded, virus prone
binary-only software ?
Why not use free software with sources instead ?
Fools & addicts will continue to throw money away
forever. Consider MS- DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP, Vista, &
the other non MS licences too: You could continue buying
licences till you die.; Or maybe till your employer dies
first ? (Your competitors using free software have a
financial advantage).
If you think buying software makes you safe, because you
have a vendor legally liable to you, excuse us while we laugh
! This author's experience as a systems
engineer, & computer
consultant suggests that's more wishful thinking than
reality.
- Remember the Russian saying, in German: "Vertrauen ist
Gut, Kontrol ist Besser ! = Trust is good, Inspection is
better ! Maybe you personally can't understand the source,
but you can find someone who can if needs be, & others
probably already have read it & checked it, or will. (Big
projects like FreeBSD.Org have
even organised methodical read throughs of their entire code
base before now !)
- Free binaries with no source can be scarey: The question
of provenance & trust. Corporate IT staff can't trust
what they can't inspect (so why they trust Micro$oft after
the Word previous edits leakage is anyone's guess ;-)
- Binaries without sources encourage a paradigm of lots of
small suppliers, not co-operating, not checking, higher risk
of problems if humans fall ill, stop, or little companies
fail.
- Free Source corrects that, bigger projects can adopt
code, cross check, provide spare experienced staff if
maintainer drops out, & there's competition &
improvement & cross fertilisation.
- Imagine an engine block made out of tough crystal - where
you can See your problem, & assess just how bad it is,
& & how to work round it or fix it, what it might
take to fix it.
- You & others can look for potential trouble ahead of
time & be confident there's no faults deliberately hidden
by the manufacturer !
- You can check security, & ensure there's no hidden
data leaks to a Redmond or other manufacturer.
- No dark places for viruses to hard.
- You can fix urgent bugs Now, not wait for a new release
of the software from a monopoly software vendor in months or
a year, & hope a fix Might be included then.
- Companies can employ from a free market of competitive
consultants to fix or customise what you need Now, (Remember
you've saved lots of money not purchasing bulk licences)
- You can get help from free self help groups
- Your own tech support staff can patch things if
urgent.
To Index
We in the Free World, generally think anything's nicer than
Micro$oft. Some Unix people with long experience think: Yes
Linux is nice, but BSD Unix is even nicer ! But both are good
 . Linux
& BSD are just two types of Unix. (There's many
other types too, eg eg Mach, HP-UX, Solaris, Ultrix, Sinix,
Xenix, SCO etc though they're mostly not free).
Linux & BSD both come in various sub types beyond.
(which makes job advertisements that say "Must have
Linux Experience" show how uniformed the Advertiser is! Yes,
this author is a Unix Consultant
with much experience of many Unix systems, not merely Linux
- BSD
Unix, Ports
collection has tens of
thousands of packages
- FreeBSD.Org
official Site. & Julian's Extra page(s)
-
Variants of Variant: There's several variants based on
FreeBSD (personally I stick to the main FreeBSD, but here
are some CDROM size variants generally aiming at ease of
installation for new users :
-
PCBSD
- Attractive to Newbies.
- Also comes in a German version.
- Web had intrusive adverts in middle of front
page @ 18.01.2007
-
Desktopbsd.org
& http://desktopbsd.net
A wrap of FreeBSD
that EW reckoned newer / better than PCBSD, but he
now notes in perpetual Beta, ever chasing newer
FreeBSD releases.
- http://www.truebsd.org
With a DVD tracking 7 before 7 was released, so maybe
they'll stay current. Web is raw though. Lack of links,
& Russian back to English switching fails @
2008.01
-
There's various stripped small kernels for eg
firewalls & real time, eg
- http://www.freesbie.org
- NetBSD BSD Unix,
more CPU types & board architectures than Any other
operating system.
- OpenBSD BSD Unix,
emphasising security.
- DragonFlyBSD
branched from FreeBSD in 2003
to develop a different approach to concurrency, SMP,
etc.
- Berkeley In
Munich (A geographicly focused group of BSD users
)
- http://www.daemonnews.org
& http://daily.daemonnews.org
- Berkeley In
Munich's BSD Leaflet BSD overview + Comparison of FreeBSD, NetBSD OpenBSD
- O'Reilly
Network's new BSD DevCenter
- Darwin
(Apple's Free-Sourced BSD
OS)
- http://www.apple.com/macosx/
http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/darwin/
- List
of BSDs on the Distrowatch.com Linux site
-
SUPPORT: Free Help & Commercial Consultancy
Available:
To Index
- Linux Debian
supported 10 processor types @ 2006.10 (as releases, + 5 in
progress) (second only to NetBSD (& OpenBSD)).
- knoppix
Linux CDROM bootable without hard disc to try.
(BSD has similar, I even mastered one myself, long before most
people had heard of the idea
- There's loads of other Linuxes, but many are commercial
distributions, copying hundreds of cdroms etc for a company
not legal, unlike BSD.
- If you want to browse Linux you could try here: www.li.org & www.linux.com
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