What are the distinguishing features of NetBSD in comparison to OpenBSD and FreeBSD?
From the respective home pages, FreeBSD targets high performance, OpenBSD security, but it is not so clear to me what is the focus of NetBSD.
From the respective home pages, FreeBSD targets high performance, OpenBSD security, but it is not so clear to me what is the focus of NetBSD.
They differ in their development models, families of related operating systems (consider TrueOS, DragonFly, MirOS, et al.), ports and packages mechanisms, extent of kernel APIs, filesystems, and toolsets.
Just three out of many examples:
* NetBSD's and OpenBSD's "wscons" subsystem for kernel virtual terminals is significantly different to FreeBSD's "syscons"/"vt" subsystem.
* OpenBSD's packing list files for pkg are different to FreeBSD's manifest files for pkgng.
* On OpenBSD, /bin/sh is the Korn shell, which is also the superuser's standard interactive shell, and the base toolset contains things such as doas and rcctl. On FreeBSD, /bin/sh is the Almquist shell, the superuser's standard interactive shell is the C shell (and the "toor" user exists), things like sudo come from ports, and the command for manipulating rcconf files is sysrc. /bin/sh is the Almquist shell on NetBSD, and the PD Korn shell on MirOS.
> Why the name?
> The “BSD” in our name is an obvious recognition of our heritage as a derivative of 4.4BSD and 386BSD.
> Our contributors communicate primarily via email and Internet-based chat systems; many of us have never met each other in person. We also use a remote source code management system called CVS which enables a large number of developers to do independent work on the same source tree easily. We believe that the Internet was an enabling technology that made NetBSD possible. The “Net” in our name was thus chosen as a tribute to the Internet.
Also, just as an aside, NetBSD was released in 1993, long before network security had anywhere near the attention it has today.
describing remote software development as if it was novelty