Should There Be A Unified BSD Operating System?

I haven't read Michael's article, but this will never happen. The BSDs are never, ever, never getting back together. A BSD project, existing or new, could get critical mass in terms of development resources and really "take on" Linux, but unification is not happening.

I agree, Steven. Anyone who has followed these projects and the personalities behind them knows this is just about as likely as the sun rising in the west while a squadron of kosher pigs flies over the Middle East with banners proclaiming world peace.

Actually, I'd bet on the kosher flying pigs first.

>Actually, I'd bet on the kosher flying pigs first.

Kosher? Oh yeah -- non-kosher flying pigs has already been done.

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/15869

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porco_Rosso

http://www.fpqrp.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Pigs

This is old news..I've had police helicopters flying over my house for years now..JK!!!

I have no malice towards police I swear. Just a good one liner that came to me when I read this thread.

:-)

I can't believe this even qualifies as a story on Phoronix.

Quoting:There's a call for unification of the four largest *BSD operating systems in a move to create a "unified BSD" with the best features in order to better compete with GNU/Linux.

Honestly that could be rewritten as "Some user trolled the mailing lists of the major BSD projects..."

There is no call from any significant developers from any of the BSD projects so I would hardly classify one person sending a rather lazy and intentionally provocative email as "a call for unification".

I love this quote from OpenBSD Nick Holland

Quoting:Personally, I think there are bigger issues that the computer world needs to address, very high on my list is the level of craptastic design and implementation people tolerate and even encourage in the computer world. Why are your credit cards splattered all over the 'net? Well, I can say with confidence, compromise was involved -- between good design and an arbitrary deadline, between good design and pretty pictures, between good design by a skilled (and expensive) programmer and the $5/day that a programmer in Elbonia charged.

Elbonia? LOL. So... does Nick Holland give to Shave the Children?

Quoting:I'm a young and naive junior sys admin...

That's the problem right there. Why would anyone write an article based on this person? Slow news day or too lazy to write something of importance?

I don't see the problem: He (Robin Bjorklin) was self-aware enough to admit up-front that he was "under-qualified" to comment, before expressing his opinion/making his suggestion. (Actually, he didn't even do that -- he just asked the question, why doesn't/wouldn't it make sense to...) It's not like he declared that in his brilliance he had identified and was proposing a "simple" solution for some problem that somehow nobody else had recognized.

And it wasn't even a blog post or and article, but an actual question, posed on an appropriate mail-list.

If I was going to criticize anything about this story, I would criticize how Phoronix handled presenting this simple and trivial mail-list question as if there was some actual "story" about some supposed "call for unification of the four largest *BSD operating systems".