http://www.greasydaemon.com/directory/intro/

Intro to BSD

Briefly, BSD is a powerful Unix based operating system. It started at U.C.
Berkely where it eventually was made public with the BSD license when 4.3
BSD lite was released. Over time three major flavors evolved from BSD lite:
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD. Most recently a new project grew out of the new
Apple operating sytem. They segmented the BSD base into an independent OS
which they call Darwin. These systems are quite similar and can work
seamlessly together on a heterogenous network, but each has unique qualities
and goals.

The most popular at this moment is FreeBSD. It runs strictly on x86 and
Alpha machines, with plans to expand to other architectures in the future.
Early on it was decided that it would be best to optimize it for limited
platforms so that development would not be stifled by making it work on many
diverse platforms. FreeBSD is regarded as the fastest Unix system you can
run on a PC as it's TCP stack is one of the fastest, although recently much
of the software which makes that work has been borrowed by both Linux and
Microsoft. FreeBSD is used to serve up sites such as Yahoo.com, cdrom.com
and Apache.org.


OpenBSD is regarded as the most secure BSD system. It's original project
goals put security at the top of the priority list. Several years have been
spent looking at the BSD code for security holes or ways to exploit the
system. These flaws were patched or replaced with better methods. It is
developed in Canada where laws on cryptography in the US do not apply. This
allows OpenBSD developers to incorporate advanced cryptography into the core
of the system. They even went so far as to allow you to encrypt your swap
space for the ultimate in security. OpenBSD runs on a wide range or
platforms, including x86, Sun, SGI and PowerPC architectures.

Also running on multiple platforms, there is NetBSD. It's primary goal is to
run on as many platforms as possible. It shares all of the same Unix
capabilities as the other two branches of BSD, including IPv6 support,
Network Address Translation, Network File System, and many others. In order
to make it easy for NetBSD to run on various hardware platforms the code has
been cleaned and kept clean for extremely easy portabiliy. The clean code
makes it very appealing to developers of embedded systems. It is yet another
powerful branch of the Open Source BSD community.

After years of a less than stable operating system, Steve Jobs directed
Apple to base their next generation OS on a Unix system. Apple took
components from the major BSD branches and eventually formed Darwin. This
basic BSD base serves as a stable layer for their advanced graphical
interface Aqua. After the initial development of MacOS X, Apple released the
BSD base as Darwin which soon found support from the XFree86 project and
others and has quickly become a powerful BSD in it's own right. A major
difference with Darwin is the virtual elmination of all text configuration
files in favor of the NetInfo system. This system holds information in a
special database which can either be local or pulled from a server located
anywhere. It is quite powerful and may be adopted by the other BSD branches
in the future. The fact that the new MacOS X puts BSD on the desktop of many
users makes it the most widespread BSD OS in existence. And hopefully driver
support for MacOS X will quickly translate to driver for all BSD systems.

Given your needs, you may choose one BSD system over another. Perhaps you
have many kinds of hardware and would like to support one OS to reduce
maintenance time. NetBSD would be a great choice there. Perhaps you need to
build a private network which has a gateway connecting it to the internet.
OpenBSD would work well as a gateway/firewall server. And finally, if you
simply have x86 hardware and want to be able serve up tons of bandwidth for
a high traffic file server, FreeBSD would take care of you nicely. You could
also run a mixture of FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD systems on the same
network. In addition to working well with each other and other Unix systems,
these BSD branches work nicely with other non-Unix systems, with support for
Samba and AppleShare/IP.