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- Why FreeBSD is great
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FreeBSD is an OpenSource implementation of a complete UNIX-compatible
operating system. It contains everything you need for a running
system, including kernel, C libraries, commandline tools,
installation program and a superb system to integrate and update
third-party applications.
This page gives an overview on some of the outstanding features.
- Why the GNU General public license (GPL) is
not
- The GNU General Public License (GPL), used by many popular free
software packages, contains some requirements that makes it hard to
use in the real world.
Most importantly, its clause that program modules under the GPL
must not be linked with modules under licenses that add any term the
GPL does not have, prevent many good software packages from being
combined.
There is an alternative license - the LGPL - that has all the power
to protect people's own work, but without the extended requirements
that serve no other purpose than to force your will on someone else
and his work.
- Abortion of shell scripts and proper
handling of signals.
- In UNIX terminal sessions, you usually have a key like
C-c (Control-C) to immediately end whatever program you
have running in the foreground. This should work even when the program
you called has called other programs in turn. Everything should be
aborted, giving you your command prompt back, no matter how deep the
call stack is.
Basically, it's trivial. But the existence of interactive
applications that use SIGINT and/or SIGQUIT for other purposes than a
complete immediate abort make matters complicated, and - as was to
expect - left us with several ways to solve the problems. Of course,
existing shells and applications follow different ways.
This Web pages outlines different ways to solve the problem and
argues that only one of them can do everything right, although it
means that we have to fix some existing software.
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