CORPORATE AMERICA'S trepidation about the safety of using open-source software for business seems to have passed. The slow economy and sinking prices for PC server components have made Linux a media darling and, increasingly, an enterprise success story. Garnering considerably less fanfare is another capable open-source OS: BSD Unix, which lacks the powerful personalities and PR machinery backing Linux.

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The fabled acrimony between Linux and BSD adherents has repercussions beyond Slashdot and other gearhead watering holes. Businesses often choose one OS or the other based on a political rather than technical rationale.

For example, Microsoft joins BSD followers in decrying Linux's GNU "copyleft" license, which restricts commercial reuse of Linux source code, as being anti-capitalistic. BSD's license imposes no such restrictions. Linux loyalists like to point out that the license hasn't held back heavyweights such as IBM and Oracle from developing commercial applications that run on Linux with full support from the vendor.

Above the discord, Linux and BSD developers work together quite often. There may be a dearth of commercial software for BSD, but smart open-source developers make their projects portable to BSD and to Linux. Most of the thousands of applications running on Linux run just as well on BSD, and that's not counting the thousands more that run using BSD's Linux emulation layer.

Just as developers have done, the smart approach is to embrace both operating systems. BSD and Linux play well together and their combined strength far outshines what either OS can do alone.