The BSD Vision

[Cath O'Deray]

To produce the best UNIX® like operating system package possible, with due respect to the original software tools ideology as well as usability, performance and stability.

– <https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/developers-handbook/introduction/#introduction-bsdvision>

Is this BSD vision officially expressed by other BSDs?

Thanks to Trihexagonal for the screenshot, without which I would not have discovered the vision statement.

 

[mrbeastie0x19]

OpenBSD: Project Goals

About NetBSD

(project goals)

Notice the emphasis on standards compliance, source tree independence, and being free from encumbering licenses, all shared in common.

I like Linux, I think it (largely distributors themselves) has many design decisions in recent years that are bad (systemd being a big one) but it is open source and any open source software is better than nothing.

However I personally feel a huge advantage of the BSD systems is the conservatism. Don't get me wrong the devs here seem really interested in growing tech like RISC-V, but the approach here is fundamentally conservative. Linux moves too fast. New software replaces old software and ends up being worse than what it replaced. The approach here seems to be on reliability, performance, security, and most of all durability. Too often on other systems I see some software being replaced because it is 'old' rather than that it actually has problems, and the technology that replaces it always has problems too.