“During the past years, the free software community has gained
much popularity. Many people have found themselves engaged in an
ongoing battle between what is normally called the “open source”
faction and the “free software” faction. Several has gone to the
extreme point of thinking that everything in systems like Debian
GNU/Linux and Red Hat Linux developed by the Free Software
Foundation, a well-known free software advocate, should be replaced
by utilities from the various BSD computer systems.”
“There appears to be a number of reasons for this, some of which
can be supported and some which are only silly. The most
interesting reason is to see if it really can be done. It is
understandable that some people would find this interesting to
pursue. As the BSD kernels and the Linux kernel gets closer to
each other it is a natural course of action to see what utilities
that can be mixed in user space. It would also be interesting to
see if one could use a BSD kernel with the GNU system to form a
GNU/BSD system.“
“There’s also a technical aspect in this. Perhaps the GNU make
is inferior to the BSD make. That would give you two options;
either improve the GNU make to meet the same high quality as the
BSD make or replace the GNU make on your system with the BSD make.
The fact is though that most GNU utilities are very well written
and work flawlessly. It is not uncommon for BSD users to run GNU
software on their machines. The GNU software’s ability to compile
on many different UNIX flavours has led to a widespread user base
that has been able to debug the programs under very different
environments.”