Question

What is the difference between the *BSDs and GNU/Linux, apart from licensing?

Answer 1

Here's a decent article: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/comparing_linux_and_freebsd

Answer 2

their different districts

Answer 3

Years ago there was a schism in the *nix community. I don't know the details, but the basic is that we ended up with an AT&T and a BSD (Berkley Software Division [I think]) versions of *nix. They've developed separately, but similarly for years.

Some of the differences are in the run levels, the init and rc scripts, and disk partitions.