Unified BSD?

[Magnus Eriksson]

On Tue, Nov 13, 2012, at 14:18, Martin wrote:
> My point is about the possibility of creating a new BSD project (with
> separate developers) that aims for 100% compatibility with at least
> FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and maybe DragonflyBSD.

On Tue, Nov 13, 2012, at 22:43, matthew sporleder wrote:
> If you are interested in generating linux-like "buzz" advocate
> hardware manufacturers and industry types to fund (with money)
> development of drivers.

Not a developer, but here's something I've been thinking about: Are
there perhaps some *parts* of the major BSDs (kernel interfaces, file
formats) that could benefit from being unified / standardized?  Maybe at
least a subset of syscalls and libraries that could be agreed on and
declared stable forever so that simple binaries can run?  That is
something that's already being done for Linux compatibility - except for
the bit about stability.  But why should I have to keep Linux binaries
around for handling weird archive formats?

I think matthew is basically right; but if there was only one single
target to develop for, with a big fat sign on it saying simply "BSD",
I'd bet that arguing for getting things written - graphics drivers or
userland tools for managing ones RAID setup, or whatever would end up
being feasible - would be easier.

In my daydreams (slightly less unrealistic than the mail that started
the discussion) I'm sending an email to a developer that says "Hey, you
can get four done in one shot, and it's also a standard.  And did I
mention that Apple and the Minix project have been using lots of code
from the BSD projects?  Want to bet they'll adopt this too?".

Yeah, I need to get out more, but you get the point.


Magnus