BSD vs Linux

History and definitions

Unix has a number of traditions - tendencies grown out of certain groups of people and vendors developing the system locally and spreading those ideas, through commercial adoption, source, or (often) a mix to other people. Because in early times, ownership of the system was very loose, and in later times attempts by ATT to exert ownership caused the community to split (initially with attempts to rewrite the system into a non-legally-encumbered variant, and latter with rewrites driven by ideaology or desires for radically thinking some system design), these differences flourished, giving Unix a rich cultural heritage. There were a number of major traditions of system design that saw expression, some short-lived, some much longer-lived. These traditions are now obscured because the traditional Unix market has grown much smaller. Some of this is due to economies of scale - the success of both the 3 main BSDs derived from BSDLite and Linux (derived from fusion of the GNU Project with an externally developed kernel) have reduced the incentive for vendors to develop/maintain their own Unix, particularly because these projects are relatively portable and hardware is a lot less diverse than it once was. While there were many Unix traditions, the most dominant divide in style throughout most of Unix history was that between the BSD tradition (which predates the BSDLite-development) and the SysIII/SysV tradition (most other traditions mostly fit into one of these two camps, although there are some exceptions, like the Bell Labs Research Unix tradition which remained relatively independent from either camp). The differences between the systems ranged from the small (core commands take different sets of arguments) to the large (competing subsystems that did the same thing). Many of these decisions leave a legacy in modern times, particularly with the older parts of unix - core utilities like ps have either a BSD or a SysV commandset (or sometimes attempt to do both, guessing which style the user wants), while others, like the print system and the init system, have generally been replaced with something new.