Wasabi Systems - The NetBSD Company

Why NetBSD?

Better Licensing and Code Quality than Linux

Licensing

Linux, the most popular open source OS available today, is distributed subject to the GNU General Public License (GPL). This license, developed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) promotes the ideals of open source software by requiring anyone who uses the code in a product and makes modifications to it, to make their modified code available upon request. Consequently, if, for example, an embedded systems developer creates a new modification of Linux that contains enhancements over the core functionality of Linux, that developer is required by the terms of the GPL to divulge any innovations they may have developed. While the GPL does arguably promote the ideals of open source software, its commercial liability is apparent; a company may spend thousands of dollars attempting to gain a strategic advantage over a competitor, only to be required by the terms of the GPL to divulge the fruits of their efforts.

NetBSD is not distributed subject to the GPL. The Foundation believes that while open source methodology is superior for some applications (including the design of an operating system), it may not be appropriate for every software project. Consequently, users of NetBSD are subject only to the terms of the BSD License, which permits, but in no way requires, the sharing of source code.

Wasabi believes this difference constitutes a considerable added value for NetBSD over Linux for commercial users of the system. Particularly in the context of embedded systems, the developer-hours spent customizing an operating system for a given use may constitute a tremendous investment -- and potential strategic asset that a manufacturer may be loathe to relinquish because of the GPL. Suppose a VCR manufacturer, perhaps making use of Wasabi consulting services, customizes NetBSD in a way that enables a pared-down version of the OS to coordinate functions in an innovative, newly-efficient manner; if the end product works better as a result, the manufacturer would obviously prefer to maintain its edge by not sharing the fruits of its investment. Under the GPL, exercising this preference would be unlawful. With NetBSD, the manufacturer may choose to keep its code private and retain its commercial advantage. If you were the manufacturer about to devote hundreds of thousands of dollars to an OS customization project, which system would you choose?

Full System Integration

Unlike Linux, NetBSD has a fully integrated set of user layer software. Linux itself, after all, is only the "kernel" of the operating system; most of the software needed to use a real system, such as all the user layer commands, are actually maintained by different groups. As a result, an entire industry has arisen to supply Linux users with fully integrated sets of software. These are the so-called "Linux distributions," which are the basis behind companies such as Red Hat and S.u.S.E., each of which sell their own "distribution" of Linux.

Because Linux is not maintained and integrated by a single team, enormous headaches face the Linux distribution producer. Minor changes to the kernel or to system compilers often break different portions of the system that rely on particular behavior in other portions of the system. Because of the fact that there is not a single group maintaining and integrating all the components, quality and uniform behavior across Linux systems suffer.

By contrast, the entire NetBSD operating system is developed and integrated by a single group. This means that all the system software that commonly ships on a traditional Unix system is integrated into NetBSD and maintained by the NetBSD project team, so there are never conflicts between particular compilers, user utilities and kernel versions. A given full NetBSD source tree is guaranteed to be a fully integrated whole that functions flawlessly out of the box. NetBSD even maintains an integrated and supported version of the X Window System, the graphical user interface used by most users of the system. This assures that, on all NetBSD architectures that support graphics hardware, the X implementation is fully optimized and supported for the needs of NetBSD users.

Interoperability / Software

NetBSD provides one of the most highly standards-compliant, Unix-like APIs in existence. A team of programmers who are standards experts constantly comb NetBSD's libraries, include files, and system calls, assuring maximal compliance with X/OPEN, POSIX, and all other relevant industry standards. As a result, NetBSD's standards compliance is unequivocally better than that of any other available Unix-like system, including commercial systems like Solaris. This is a matter of critical importance for a system such as NetBSD, because it assures that software from other Unix-like operating systems ports to NetBSD with minimum difficulty. It also makes NetBSD one of the best and most comfortable development environments for authors of new software. Extensive work has also been done to assure that source code compatibility between NetBSD and other Unix-like systems is high. Porting software to NetBSD from other Unix-like systems typically takes very little time and effort.

In addition, because the entire user-level suite of software is maintained by the NetBSD project, the user software has also been rendered highly standards compliant. Scripts and other software reliant on the behavior of system supplied programs being standards-compliant will run smoothly and without problems.

NetBSD's developers have long understood that NetBSD is not the most widely used Unix-like operating system. So, in order to assure that NetBSD users need never want for application software, extensive work has been done to assure that binaries of software created for other systems, such as FreeBSD and Linux (on i386 systems), Solaris (on i386 and SPARC based systems), Digital Unix (on ALPHA based systems) and many others will run under NetBSD as though they were running under their native operating system. A user can run a copy of the Linux version of Netscape Communicator or WordPerfect on a NetBSD system just as well as they could under Linux itself.

In order to further assure NetBSD users of a wide variety of available software, several thousand open source packages have been ported to NetBSD using the so-called "pkgsrc" system which permits the automated building of open source software from the original source code distributions. "pkgsrc" automatically downloads, patches, configures, builds and installs software from source, permitting easy maintenance of everything from Apache to GNU Emacs to Zope. Literally thousands of pkgsrc packages are actively maintained, providing a rich variety of open source software for the NetBSD user.

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