The Joy of BSD

It's fun watching Sun Microsystems -- which has been rubbishing GNU/Linux for years -- trying to put its motormouths into reverse gear and explain how it really really loves Linux (as long as it doesn't replace a Sun Solaris version of Unix running on a Sun server with a Sun Sparc processor). But it seems co-founder Bill Joy has not yet had the required rah rah brain transplant, and has doubts about "the open source business model", always assuming there is one. Still, it is impossible not to feel sorry for Joy: he not only has to watch a technically inferior Unix clone (ie Linux) storm past the much more stable and reliable BSD version to which he contributed so much, his company is now helping it. "Linux is moving faster than BSD at this point," says Joy. The Berkeley version "doesn't have the strength of community that Linux does." This is true, of course, but it was also completely obvious at least five years ago.