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Solar Power in Space

The sad thing is that SimCity 2000 did as much to demonize microwave transmitted power as it did to popularize the idea. Glaser's original design poses very little risk to life around the unit because the beam would be very diffused. Learn more about the idea here.

you can find the full announcement here. Alan Clegg -- Formerly abc@bsdi.com

Who's the newbie here? I've been using Vi since 1979. Even the original man page refers to modes. Hey, "vi" originally meant "visual mode".

Who's the newbie here? I've been using Vi since 1979. Even Bill Joy's original man page refers to modes. Hey, "vi" originally meant "visual mode".

Some links to compilers and virtual machines can be found here. The BSDi JDK is supposed to work with FreeBSD in the future, according to this news item.

And a number of companies, including BSDi and those listed here, here, here, here, here, here would probably disagree.

Jim said:
I'm pretty sure BSD does not.

You would be wrong.

FreeBSD

NetBSD

BSD/OS

OpenBSD does not. But don't perpetuate the falsehood that all BSD does not.

Where is the industry interest in the BSD license?

BSDi
Intel InBusiness Storage Station
Whistle They even mention contributing back code on the job listing link.
Yahoo

I believe BSDi, Whistle and Yahoo have all contributed code and fixes back to FreeBSD. I have no idea if Intel does or not.

> There aren't any public companies selling BSD

What about this one? I seem to remember this little company used to sell a BSD before they went to SysV.

Granted, this wouldn't be astoundingly great, and it wouldn't offer solutions for font specification, spacing, etc., but why doesn't someone make a client that interprets *text* as text and _text_ as text?

You mean like setext? (Which appears mostly defunct, alas.)

-j

It looks like Patrick Volkerding of Slackware is wearing a BSDi company card. I guess Slackware didn't have their own booth...

Telenet Systems, who was just bought out by BSDi makes fairly nice systems. We use them for firewalls and intrusion detection systems. They even have a quad xeon system now which I'm evaluating for some database work. Check them out at www.tesys.com and hardware.bsdi.com

Uhm they do, try researching a bit before you post. BSDi's LAPand Sun'S lxrun solution. Now go and do some research on your own.

If you read Slashdot or other news sources, you might have noticed that BSDI and Walnut Creek (a major supporter of FreeBSD) are merging. What this means is that BSDI and FreeBSD themselves are going to eventually merge as the BSD/OS (BSDI's product) is gradually Open-Sourced. While this "daemon mating" is another example of commercial/open source merging, I don't see it happening to any large degree.

(Having said this, there will probably be a "HP/UX - OpenBSD merger" story posted next :)

-- Floyd

BSDi offers systems with FreeBSD on them. BSDi or Linux are optional.

This all due to the acquisition of Telenet by BSDi.

BSDi offers systems with FreeBSD on them. BSDi or Linux are optional.

This all due to the acquisition of Telenet by BSDi.

BSDi offers systems with FreeBSD on them. BSDi or Linux are optional.

This all due to the acquisition of Telenet by BSDi.

Posted by 11223:

No - I disagree. While I don't know what a 'teh shell' is, I can assure you that NetBSD stands out as a platform. While FreeBSD is the OS of choice for Proprietary Systems, NetBSD provides honest-to-goodness Open Source software on almost every platform - and we don't need to hide in Canada either.

No, I've never screwed up anything on my own web pages, and even if I had,

sample of Commercial Appliances based on FreeBSD -
Nokia Firewall/VPN Appliances
Internet Devices, Inc. - Products Overview

router/dialup/etc ... - FreeBSD on a Floppy...
PicoBSD

Commercial Embedded BSD from BSDI

sample of Commercial Appliances based on FreeBSD -
Nokia Firewall/VPN Appliances
Internet Devices, Inc. - Products Overview

router/dialup/etc ... - FreeBSD on a Floppy...
PicoBSD

Commercial Embedded BSD from BSDI

Look at the walnut creek web site, dull, boring, stale. Look at the FreeBSD site, the home page hasn't been touched in well over a year. Look at the BSDi site and you would think they were out of business. You can't even find a comprehensive feature list for BSD/OS. I think it is telling that none of the sites listed above have an announcement of the merger!

So is FreeBSD repositioning itself to focus on the server segment of the market, leaving the workstation segment to Linux?

The distributions of software from the University of California at Berkeley were called "Berkeley Software Distribution"(s).

A company named Berkeley Software Design, Inc. sells a commercial OS - called "BSD/OS", not "BSDI" - based on the BSD 4.4-Lite source.

Even if Red Hat goes bankrupt tomorrow, all their code will be around for anyone to use. And just as importantly, their code will not be used in a way that is harmful to the Open Source communitiy, such as in a closed source distro by Microsoft or another giant corporation. Why? Because of the GPL.

The commercial BSD vendor, Berkeley Software Design, Inc., and Eric Allman's companym, Sendmail, Inc., share several characterics. (Note: I may be wrong about some of the following. Corrections welcome) They both started with free software. They both added proprietary enhancements. The both sell their value-added product as a revenue source. Both give you source code to the product you bought. And both forbid you from redistributing that source or changes to it to those who don't hold a licence.

Two critical questions are:

1. What's the current technology transfer? To what extend do corporate BSDI enhancements return to the free BSD distributions?
2. If these companies go down, what happens to their code? Licence holders still have the source, but so what? Is it dead?

To add one more pair of companies to the stack, consider John Ousterhout's TCL-based Scriptics company, or the Canadian Perl-related firm, ActiveState. My understanding is that there's more technology transfer between these two companies and their core free software roots than might be immediately obvious with the previous pair. I cannot really speak of the TCL world, but in the case of the Perl one, that firm funds not only the salary of the Perl release manager, they also fund development for porting to non-free systems. For example, they've made Perl's fork() call work "right" on Microsoft systems (actually, Microsoft paid for that work!) and have immediately returned those corporately funded enhancements back to the world of free software.

Yes, that means that the current developer release of Perl, version 5.005_63, supports fork(2) with Unix semantics even on Microsoft. Hurray!

If you want other mixed-mode business models, think about Alladin Ghostscript. The interesting issue of licensing is covered in the FAQ. There's also Sleepycat Software, whose database product, Berkeley DB, was used in Netscape with neither credit nor compensation, thus triggering a good bit of bad blood on the authors' parts because of lack of public recognition and appreciate for their work. The resulting `poison pill' licence seeks to avoid a repeat of this unpleasantry.

Now, we have in contrast to those situations, look at companies that are making a business, or trying to make a business, out of GPL'd software. The two most obvious examples, RHAT and LNUX, are hardly typical cases due to their current market valuations, which are obviously astronomically overvalued. But even in their cases, you'll find things that aren't what you would call "free software". In fact, they aren't even open source; look at the way Redhat ships "demo versions" of things without source. Now, I would be willing to argue that this is in fact a good thing because it shows people that Redhat's operating system is a viable platform for traditional licensed software. Others, however, dispute this, pointing out that that software would be orphaned if the company who produces it were to die.

My point is that I believe we now have a sufficiently long list of corporate endeavours which are based, at least with respect to some definitions of the term, free software. That means we have actual cases to look at, not hypothetical cases. I'm sure I've only named a couple of them here. What about other companies? I'm not talking about simple packagers and distributors. I mean firms that do serious development work based on free software. (I would mention Cygnus, but they've recently become an acquisition by Redhat.)

Do we have examples of companies that have died or otherwise abandoned their work in these areas? The university Ingress experience and Britten-Lee? Can we come up with other examples to look at? What has happened to the product of their work? Has it truly gone the way of all things, or did humanity derive some benefit from it?

The developers it would attract are already engaged in various Gnu projects and Linux development itself.

It doesn't matter much to me what people claim about their code if they can't prove it. If they can, more power to them. If they're nice people, they'll say what they did, if not, it can probably be figured out.

(Anyway, everyone with a brain knows NetBSD is better than FreeBSD and BSDOS put together. ;^>)

(... please observe the smiley, kiddies.)

Then again, they also claimed Java support would be in 4.0. (A don't reply with 'Try Kaffe'; Kaffe is a nice excercise but doesn't hold up well for production purposes).

Oh, and I thought "Berkeley Software Distribution"....

You thought entirely correctly. It was originally a distribution of software from Berkeley (until Berkeley stopped doing BSD); a company called Berkeley Software Design, Inc. made a commercial OS out of the Net-2 and later 4.4-Lite BSD releases (with source available; I think the original releases may have come standard with source, for about USD 1000, although a quick look at their site suggests that you pay extra for it now).

(BTW, BSDI's release was originally called BSD/386; it was renamed to BSD/OS when, I think, a SPARC port was made available. They never sold an OS called BSDI....)

Take a look at this article... BSDI is doing the exact same thing with their operating system. But OS emulation on the UNIX side isn't anything new. BSDI also has SCO binary compatability, for example.

Hmmm....