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Comment by datashovel | Hacker News Reader

This project has intrigued me for a long time. I seriously believe it could eventually become the premiere BSD-flavor OS. Although given all the low-level changes they've made it may not be easy to "label" it BSD in the future.

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FreeBSD itself has diverged significantly from its own 4.x release, which is where DFBSD forked. I would still call DragonFlyBSD a "BSD" now and in the future since it still leverages a lot of work from FreeBSD (and other BSDs) to this day. It would be stupid to not continue to leverage the upstream work.

Agreed. I think it's a fantastic ecosystem, and they should all continue to feed off one another. A great example was discussed in the interview. The decision to integrate FreeBSD ports will almost certainly make it easier for folks who are considering adopting / experimenting with it. (not a recent decision, but an important one)

I would say the primary identifier of BSD systems are their interface with the kernel, the userland, and the license. DragonflyBSD is a true BSD to the kernel; the implementation details may differ, but you can compile most freebsd code for dragonfly with no changes and have it run perfectly (or as well as dragonfly can swing it).

Not disagreeing, but I found the following quote from the site interesting and helpful to understand where they're coming from:

http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/howtos/howtonewkerneldevelo...

"While DragonFly was forked off FreeBSD and has generally quite a few similarities to other *BSD, you definitely cannot rely on understanding FreeBSD to understand what's going on here."

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