Slashdot Mirror

big knife writes: "Check here for the official press release." Wind River is the company that puts out vxWorks, the embedded OS that runs our great Arrowpoint Web Content Switch we have here at OSDN. Evidently, BSDi will become iXsystems, dealing with BSD product solutions, and hardware (essentially a beefed up Telenet Systems). The status of FreeBSD and their commitment to Open Source, and FreeBSD in specific is mentioned, definitely a good thing.

big knife writes: "Check here for the official press release." Wind River is the company that puts out vxWorks, the embedded OS that runs our great Arrowpoint Web Content Switch we have here at OSDN. Evidently, BSDi will become iXsystems, dealing with BSD product solutions, and hardware (essentially a beefed up Telenet Systems). The status of FreeBSD and their commitment to Open Source, and FreeBSD in specific is mentioned, definitely a good thing.

Newsforge, Slashdot, Freshmeat, and all Mediabuilder sites are moving to FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT for its increased SMP capabilities, this move should be completed by Beltaine (May 1st), leaving enough preparation time before the festival to sacrifice a goat to the SCSI gods.

CmdrTaco seems to be excited about the move, knowing there are several BSD experts on the network staff now.

"Linux's disorganization, and the fact it seems like a a bunch of unconnected developers tried to write an OS with no prior planning or agreements has been hard for us at Slashdot who have to work with the Operating System. To the users, there will be no difference, the upgrade will be seamless. Trish and Jim will be happy and they will stop their complaining about Linux," he said.

John Baldwin, a kernel hacker working on SMPng at BSDI's Open Source Division, said that "it should be able to handle Slashdot just fine, Are we done yet? I have things to code."

This also reflects a shift in focus for OSDN, as we are starting to move away from the politically charged Linux in favor of more reasonable, stable OSes.

You're sure to hear more about this transition in the coming weeks, along with some other important announcements.

An unnamed reader writes "Daily DaemonNews is running a story about Chili!Soft doing a port of Chili!Soft ASP to FreeBSD. It seems they're trying to gather enough interest to make a port worth while. A phone number and link is mentioned in the article."

Every BSD article posted, trolls come out and post about BSD dying. Naysayers at every turn, mostly pro-Linux, say that BSD doesn't have the marketing and advocacy to succeed. Greg Lehey, author of The Complete FreeBSD and FreeBSD core team member, takes a look at naysayer's claims, the history of BSD, the root of the "quiet" BSD advocates, and the relationship of Linux to it all, in this month's Daemon's Advocate at Daemon News

Last Friday we solicited questions for Robert Watson, hard-core FreeBSD and TrustedBSD developer. His answers (below) are breathtakingly deep and instructive. Whether you're "just curious" about BSD or a FreeBSD user who wants to see what's going on with the inner circle of developers, you'll want to spend the time it takes to read everything here, and possibly even send Mr. Watson a brief "thank you" email.

OS X based on FreeBSD
by Kevinv

OS X's Darwin is based on FreeBSD. How good a member of the Open Source movement has Apple been? Have they contributed anything back to the FreeBSD project (code/money/t-shirts/etc...)?

Robert:

The easy answer is that Apple is involved in the open source community, and appears to be strongly committed to releasing their own software as open source, and contributing changes back to other projects whose software they use. Clearly, they're fairly embroiled in their upcoming release process at this point, but I'd expect more news on this front in the future.

They've had a strong presence at various technical conferences, including the BSD Conference in Monterey last year, and they're helping to sponsor and are participating in the Open Packages project. I've visited Apple on two occasions to discuss both FreeBSD and TrustedBSD work with them, and had the opportunity to meet with many of the people in their Core OS Group. While I don't know everything they've been up to, I can speak to their shipping me two iMacs so I could explore the operating system and look at porting some of the TrustedBSD work to it, and must say that

I'm very impressed.

One thing I think the FreeBSD project should do is select a liaison to work with Apple to help them understand our development model better, and help integrate back changes made to Darwin. Especially in light of all the changes coming in FreeBSD 5.0, it's important that we work together to prevent substantial divergence between our source trees (where possible) allowing us to continue to exchange features in the future. I have to give Apple a big thumbs up, and hope they keep up the good work!

what do you do for *money*??
by gskouby

While perusing the mailing lists for -hackers, -stable, -current, etc. etc., I often wonder what people like yourself, Mike Smith, Greg Lehey, and the other core members do to pay the bills.

Unless something has changed recently with the BSDi takeover, I can't imagine that the FreeBSD project keeps the food on the table. So how about a little insight into your and the other core members "real" jobs. (As if there is such a thing as a "real" job). But anyways, thanks for all the hard work for little pay!

Robert:

Ahh, the perils of capitalism. Needless to say, all core members enjoy employment in some form or another. Some work with companies that pay them to work on FreeBSD (including BSDi), others do independent consulting on (among other things) FreeBSD; others still work on utterly unrelated areas. Since the question was raised, I'll talk a little about what I do, and how it does relate to FreeBSD.

I work for NAI Labs, a research organization that is now associated with PGP, Inc -- about 100 full time researchers doing advanced research and development for the likes of DARPA, other government agencies, industry, and internal research and development. If you don't recognize the name, we used to be the Advanced Research and Engineering (ARE) division of Trusted Information Systems (TIS). At NAI Labs, I'm a Research Scientist in the Network Security research group, and have worked on a variety of projects including securing DNS (DNSsec), DHCP security, active network security, and denial of service research. While most of my work (right now) is relatively unrelated to FreeBSD, we hope to change this in the relatively near future, identifying funding for work on FreeBSD and TrustedBSD, as well as porting work to OpenBSD, and work on Darwin. Other examples of operating system security work on open source here include Software Wrappers and Low Watermark Mandatory Access Control. One of the great things about working at NAI Labs is the opportunity to participate in cutting edge security research, and the opportunity to set your own direction. All in all it's a really nice place to work, and I recommend it highly--in fact, we're actively hiring at this point, so if you're interested, feel free to fire off a resume to rwatson@tislabs.com.

Of course, companies can greatly benefit from employing a FreeBSD developer, as they have the opportunity to influence development of the operating system (subject to the common sense of the developer and consensus of the project as a whole, needless to say). Many FreeBSD developers, looking at the committer community as a whole, are employed to do what they would like to be doing anyway: working on a section of the system that interests them.

TrustedBSD and NSA secure linux
by Xuther

How does TrustedBSD compare with NSA secured linux (http://www.nsa.gov/selinux) in terms of new and or improved security features? And are there any plans to eventually integrate the rest of the TrustedBSD features back into the shared BSD source tree (the extended attributes already have been committed)? How would using TrustedBSD instead of FreeBSD impact clustering applications?

And just for my information, where did all the packages for clustering BSD go? All I can seem to find anymore is the linux stuff. And personally I don't like redhat and their rpm distribution method, all anyone wants to distribute anymore is rpms which is not near enough to standard and compatable accross the board as tar-gzip for my purposes. (One primary difference being that I can open a tar-gzip on a windows box at work during break to browse through source, and to my knowledge no one has bothered to create a "winrpm")

Robert:

These compound questions are the killers :-).

I am both aware of and familiar with the NSA Secure Linux work -- a fair amount of the work is being done at NAI Labs under contract from NSA. Stephen Smalley, one of the lead developers on the project, actually works just upstairs from me in the Glenwood, Maryland office of NAI Labs. As such, I've had a number of opportunities to talk with him about the work. One of the advantages of working at NAI Labs is the ability to get wide exposure for a variety of security-related research on many platforms, and relating to many topics.

TrustedBSD and SELinux are similar in many ways, and also differ in many ways. The similarities lie in overlapping functionality and architectural goals; the differences only begin with the choice of operating systems. TrustedBSD introduces a number of features into the FreeBSD operating system including Mandatory Access Control (MAC).

In a broad generalization, MAC allows administrators to define security policies about how users interact with one another. These policies are mandatory in the sense that users are not permitted to change the policies, although some flexibility may be permitted by the policy.

MAC is distinguished from Discretionary Access Control (DAC) in this manner; most Linux or FreeBSD users will be familiar with DAC in the form of file permissions. In DAC models, the owners of objects (and possibly other parties) are permitted to modify protections to reflect their needs. A common mandatory policy is Multi-Level Security (MLS), or the "military security model".

In this model, users are assigned "clearances", and objects are assigned "classifications". MLS prevents users from reading files they are not allowed to read, but it also prevents users from sharing files they are not allowed to share (this is the mandatory component). MLS is just one mandatory policy, there are many others that have been defined and explored in various environments. TrustedBSD implements three mandatory policies in its current prototype form: MLS, a Biba integrity policy that is similar to MLS but protects integrity instead of confidentiality, and a light-weight partitioning scheme that is an extension of the popular jail() mechanism introduced in FreeBSD 4.0-RELEASE.

SELinux provides an implementation of a flexible mandatory access control architecture called Flask for Linux. The architecture is a generalization of Type Enforcement (TE) and can support a wide variety of mandatory security policies. In the Flask architecture, the security policy is encapsulated in a pluggable "security server" component that can be replaced. The example security server provided with SELinux includes support for TE, MLS and a simple form of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). An important focus of this architecture is separating policy representation and processing from policy enforcement.

SELinux differs from TrustedBSD in that it is a more mature system, having been worked on for several years, that it addresses only mandatory access controls, and that it uses the Flask architecture rather than explicit hard-coded policies. It is certainly the case that we plan to leverage the SELinux implementation now that the source code is available; the abstractions of the Flask architecture are similar to ones that were being considered for TrustedBSD. Having the opportunity to look at the SELinux source will allow us to benefit from their implementation experiences.

As you observe, some TrustedBSD features have already been integrated into the base tree, including extended attributes on files, as well as infrastructure support for capabilities, ACLs, and some of the improved abstractions I spoke about above. The plan is to integrate most of the TrustedBSD features into the base operating system distribution over time; some features are more intrusive, as well as more computationally expensive, than others, meaning that some features may be distributed as modules rather than enabled by default. However, it is a definite goal to make all of the work easily available for FreeBSD installations, and under a two clause BSD-style license. Many of these features will appear in FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE, although they will presumably mature over time.

The remainder of your questions address clustering; I have to begin by pointing out that I don't have much experience with clustered environments. I can probably safely comment that the TrustedBSD features won't present any substantial additional impediment towards implementing clustering, either in terms of functionality or performance. Most of the of the TrustedBSD features either supplement base UNIX features without substantially changing them in ways that impact applications, or are disabled unless specifically configured.

My understanding is that many of the normal computational clustering tools, such as PVM, are available via the FreeBSD ports/packages collection, and that FreeBSD is used in clustering, but as a non-expert can't speak much to this issue. As clustering means something different to every observer, this may not have answered your question, and I'd welcome follow-up e-mail to discuss this further.

Openpackages?
by Enahs

What's your opinion on the Open Packages project? Even though I'm not currently a *BSD user, it sounds great on the surface--there's even been interest expressed in patches for Linux!--but I've got to wonder what sort of complexities need to be worked out to maintain a set of packages for FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin...

Robert:

I think OpenPackages is a great idea: the ports/packages on FreeBSD and other BSD platforms have been an incredible boon for the users of these systems. One of the disadvantages of BSD is that it hasn't presented a single porting target, and that there has been redundant porting work going on. OpenPackages offers a way to reduce redundant work, and improve application portability. I was excited to see Apple on the list of sponsors for the project, it shows continued commitment by Apple to open source.

A few important questions:
by Bob Abooey

1) Do you ever plan on moving away from the slow and resource intensive method of VMS style paging for memory address resolution

Robert:

I'm not sure how to interpret this question; FreeBSD provides the standard UNIX-like API for memory management (brk(), sbrk(), memory mapping, protection modification, SysV shared memory). This is supported by a Mach-based virtual memory system that has undergone substantial feature evolution and performance optimization. All performance benchmarks I've seen suggest that the FreeBSD virtual memory system is both robust and high-performance under both light and heavy loads. This is one of the features of FreeBSD that has made it so popular for web farms and file servers.

My understanding is that the new VM system under development for Linux takes into account the FreeBSD VM design, and shares many of its design choices and, as a result, performance and stability properties. However, I have not followed that work closely enough to comment in great detail on the topic.

2) Are there plans to rewrite the TCP/IP stack to be multi threaded

One of the major development projects currently underway is "SMPng", or the Next Generation SMP project for FreeBSD. The SMPng project goals include:

• A fully preemptive and reentrant kernel
• Fine-grained data based locking
• An evolutionary development process
• Rapid development cycle leveraging technology donated by BSDi from their next generation SMP support under development for BSD/OS, including debugging tools and operation models
• Thread-based interrupts allowing blocking at will

This should substantially improve performance on SMP machines, as well as modernize the structure of the kernel. It will include work to push down locks (eliminating the giant kernel lock present in other versions of FreeBSD), including in the network subsystem, allowing components of the network stack to execute in parallel on different processors.

3) Will BSD ever migrate away from UFS to a more modern file system?

It depends what you mean by a "modern file system". Right now, FreeBSD actually uses FFS, the Berkeley Fast File System, with the addition of "soft updates" for performance and consistency, and under 5.0-CURRENT (the development branch), the ability to atomically snapshot file systems, as well as the ability to store extended attributes on files, in turn supporting other features such as Access Control Lists (ACLs). Fsck-less booting is currently a work in progress, and will be in 5.0-RELEASE also. In fact, several sites including Yahoo! have already deployed fsckless booting internally. paper presented at the USENIX 2000 Technical Conference discusses the performance and consistency differences between journalled and soft updates consistency mechanisms. The paper in question also discusses two different journalling implementations based on FFS and developed on FreeBSD, which will be made available at some point to the FreeBSD project for possible integration. I think it's safe to say that, by most definitions, FFS on modern BSD operating systems is very much a modern file system.

4) With serious POSIX compatablity issues are there plans to use code from POSIX compliant OS's to become more commercially attractive to major corporations

One of the FreeBSD Project goals is to comply with appropriate API and user interface standards. Generally speaking, a failure to comply with a relevant standard is considered to be a bug, and should be reported using the standard bug reporting tools (we use GNATS to track bugs). If you are aware of non-compliant features or interfaces, please let us know and we will endeavor to fix them.

Why would you... ?
by SonOfSam

FreeBSD development is obviously a big part of your life. I have noticed that peoples reasons for using a free OS are often not simply because its better, but because of some view or stance on freedom that they have.

I am a Windows guy, only because my job says so.

What I want to know is, how would you go about convincing me, a Win2k user, to consider using a *BSD. I am interested in learning a new OS... always. But, what makes it stand out from Linux/Win2k/MacOS?

Robert:

There are a number of aspects to your question, and there are a lot of ways I could explore it. It seems that the first part of the question relates to why I as a user and developer make use of FreeBSD (and open source in general). Another aspect seems to be a question about political motivations.

Open source gives me as a developer the ability to do things that closed source could never allow--I get to determine what features are important and dedicate resources to making them available. As "extensible" as closed source operating systems may be, it is hard to understand how a system works without access to the source, and hard to modify it to do things the designers didn't anticipate. This argument is also a reason why NAI Labs does a great deal of its research and development on open source systems: it's simply impossible to get that level of responsiveness from a closed source system vendor.

As to political motivations? My motivation for pushing FreeBSD is the philosophy of the project, rather than general intuitions about personal freedom. The project (as with many open source projects) has a dedication to technical excellence and openness (of process, as well as source) that is outstanding. I wouldn't force anyone to open source their software as that's a personal (or often corporate) choice, but I recommend open source software widely.

One of the political aspects to open source is the selection of license: I don't see this as a big thing. The BSD license probably does better reflect both my beliefs and needs, but I use and modify software under a variety of licenses, and recognize that the license you release your software under has to reflect your own beliefs and needs. Any other understanding of license selection as a moral argument fails to recognize a contemporary understanding of relativism that is vital to cooperation :-).

As to why FreeBSD as opposed to any other operating system? Well, as I mentioned above, the FreeBSD project has a dedication to technical excellence and openness. What does this mean? It means that I have a high level of confidence in the software (both by reputation, experimentation, and source code inspection). The operating system is stable and performs extremely well, is extensible, and is being actively developed in a variety of ways. There's an attention to detail, as well as the big picture, that reflects a high level of dedication among developers.

Advantages over the traditional Windows platforms have long been stability and performance, as well as openness. I haven't run the performance numbers recently, but understand that Microsoft has made large investments in stability and performance for Windows 2000; it would be a mistake to underestimate their ability to improve in this area. As long as Microsoft remains closed source, however, they will be unable to match the openness that is vital to the work that I do.

The primary difference that I see as important for me when comparing FreeBSD and Linux lies in the development model: there is a central forum and structure for the FreeBSD developer community that provides a forum for communication, group decisions and consensus building. My feeling is that this leads to better design decisions, and a focus that reflects a whole-system view. An important question for the FreeBSD Project as we move forward is whether or not this model can scale easily as we expand. The number of "committers" on the FreeBSD team has dramatically expanded over the last couple of years; many of these developers are working on the ports/packages and documentation, but many of them also work on the base system. Moving towards an elected core team, as well as ongoing debates on the development model and source code management reflect the increasing size and more diverse needs of the developers. The SMPng project's managed development model is another sign of this growth, and an example of a successful attempt to address the need for more structured development practices in the face of a larger audience and more people working on the same code.

Mac OS X appears to have a bright future: Apple has managed to tread in NeXT's footsteps when it comes to combining a mix of strong technical components from the open source and research communities, as well as excellent internally developed work. OS X represents a number of dramatic changes for the Mac user community; Apple has in the past shown a great deal of responsiveness to that community, and OS X looks like it will be an interesting fusion of advanced operating system concepts and a highly usable interface. Part of what will be important in the widespread adoption of Mac OS X is consistency with prior versions, allowing users to migrate in a relatively seamless manner. In Steve Jobs' recent demo and presentation, inclusion of the traditional Apple Menu appears to demonstrate sensitivity to this issue, and responsiveness to the comment submission process. I see a place for a Mac OS X box on my desk in the near future.

Because it leverages FreeBSD work, and because FreeBSD leverages Apple's work, I don't see them as mutually incompatible. It is my firm hope that Apple and the FreeBSD Project find ways to work together more in the future, because I think everyone will benefit from this.

These are just my opinions, and I would expect others to disagree with me. I should point out that in the past, I've recommended the use of a variety of operating systems to both individuals and companies; this includes Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Solaris, and FreeBSD. I'd be a fool to assert that any operating system is appropriate for all uses and environments.

decent literature
by boog3r

instead of asking you a few questions directly, i would like to solve them on my own with the best set of tools. what publications or literature would you recommend for:

the *bsd newbie or learner
the *bsd uber-know-it-all-i-dont-need-any-docs

i am trying to cut the signal/noise ratio out of understanding bsd. specifically, what security documentation have you found useful day-in/out?

Robert:

I'll speak to the FreeBSD section of BSD, since that's what I'm most familiar with. There are several books available describing FreeBSD.

The most commonly used is The Complete FreeBSD by Greg Lehey, which can also come bundled with a CDROM set, making it easy for new or experienced users to go to a single source. The book is currently in its third edition, and apparently there is a fourth edition currently under preparation. I saw this book in the local Barnes and Noble's recently, so it should be fairly easy to locate. A recent addition to the collection of books on FreeBSD is Ted Mittelstaedt's The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide, which also includes a CD-ROM.

The online documentation for FreeBSD is also strong, both in the form of the FreeBSD Handbook, which includes both reference and tutorial materials accessible via a web browser, and the normal UNIX-like man pages. The FreeBSD Handbook is also available in printed form. Both are actively maintained and regularly extended to cover new features.

FreeBSD and BSD books are generally available from BSDi via their FreeBSD Mall Books page, and from the Daemon News Books and Posters page, not to mention your normal online book vendors (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, et al), and quite possibly your local bookstore.

In addition, the BSD Daemon News magazine is now available in print as well as electronic form, and includes articles appropriate for both users and developers.

I suspect the "uber-know-it-all-i-dont-need-any-docs" guy is unlikely to listen to any recommendations from me, but would probably find the man pages most useful as they're more reference than tutorial :-).

To be honest, I don't use security documentation other than the man pages, as I'm familiar with most of the base system features, as they're an area where I've done a lot of work. Out of the box, FreeBSD is a fairly safe beast, as long as you've reviewed recent security advisories for the release you're using. The usual advice applies: don't install or run things you don't need to, and emain up-to-date on security advisories. There's a FreeBSD security how-to on the web site.

For the die-hard "uber-know-it-all", there's always the source, which in the end is authoritative as to how the implementation works, regardless of documentation :-).

----------------

I noticed in the comments, although it didn't make it into the questions in the interview, that there was a lot of curiosity about the relationship between the OpenBSD Project and the TrustedBSD Project, also regarding TrustedBSD and FreeBSD. As it's important to understanding the work I do, and the goals of the project, I figured I should throw in a bonus answer:

TrustedBSD provides a set of extensions to FreeBSD to add support for {ACLs, Capabilities, Mandatory Access Control, Auditing} as well as supporting features to implement them. As I described above, these features are being integrated into the base operating system distribution, with the intent that they be "part of FreeBSD". This is facilitated by having some of the TrustedBSD developers also be FreeBSD Project developers.

The OpenBSD and TrustedBSD projects have largely different thrusts: while the OpenBSD project seeks to provide a correct and bug-free POSIX implementation (where correctness includes a focus on failing to suffer from security holes). It also includes cryptography-related features as a primary development goal, hence early development and integration of IPsec in the base system (and a continuing high level of maturity of their implementation), as well as their work on OpenSSH. The TrustedBSD project seeks to introduce a variety of features, some described in the defunct POSIX.1e draft.

While TrustedBSD targets FreeBSD as the starting operating system, it should be observed that all of the BSD systems stem from the same source base, and remain very similar. This means that porting a feature from FreeBSD to OpenBSD should prove relatively straight-forward. The same goes for Darwin, the kernel from Mac OS X. I list both of these explicitly because we in fact have plans to start porting features to both of these platforms, as resources permit. The starting point in both cases will be to make Extended Attributes available in their file systems; these are used to store the supporting data for ACLs, capabilities on files, and MAC labels. I'd welcome interest in porting these features to other BSD platforms, including NetBSD and BSD/OS as well.

---------------

Robert Watson is a core developer for FreeBSD, and a member of the TrustedBSD project. He is one of the best people in the world to ask about FreeBSD security, and about FreeBSD development in general. Please post your questions below. We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated ones to Watson by email, and post his responses verbatim as soon as we get them back.

Claus Färber asks: "Is there an easy way to add nested groups (i.e. groups that contain or import user lists from other groups) to Unix account management? While you can manually add all users of one group to the other, it is very hard not to forget to remove or add users to all groups. I already thought of patching NIS modules, providing a PAM module (but will this work with Samba and NFS?) or switching to LDAP (but RFC 2307 does not allow nested groups either...). Has anyone already done this, or are there better ideas?" I've always wondered about this issue as well. Wouldn't extending the /etc/group file to handle nested groups, and the ability to exclude users from groups, be a way of implementing a more finely grained permissions system for Unix?

To understand the advantages of nested groups, I'll use the following example:

Typically, unix groups look like the following:

a: user1, user2, user3
b: user3, user4, user5
c: user6, user7, user8

Now if I want to create a group "d" that is comprised of groups "b" and "c" under most Unices, then you'd add the following line to /etc/groups:

d: user3, user4, user5, user6, user7, user8

Now if I were allowed to nest groups, I could just do:

d: @b, @c

Where the "@" means 'import names from group "b"'.

The advantage of the latter system is that you can add users to group "b" and "c" and not have to maintain the group "d" line as well. Another useful extension would be the exclusion operator, so that if I wanted to remove a specific user from a group (to insure said user isn't included, even if he's a member of an included group) I could do the following:

e: !user1, @a, @b

Instead of manually creating a new list of individual user names:

e: user2, user3, user4, user5, user6

Now you can do something similar to this using NIS and netgroups for large networks, but this feature seems to be particularly useful for the single-machine-large-userbase without the hassle of configuring another service. Would you admins out there find this to be a useful feature? If so, how difficult would it be to modify existing Unix systems to handle these extensions? If not, what reasons can you give as to why future Unix systems should not implement this feature?

Quite a number of people have e-mailed in the last bit about the release of FreeBSD 4.2. This is the release - you should try it out today, because CowboyNeal sez so, and he's currently updating it on his Vaio.

Jordan Hubbard, co-founder of the FreeBSD Project speaks out about OS X, its significance to the geek, and whether it may be the David that brings about Goliath Microsoft's downfall, in this Salon.com article.

Again, from Daily Daemon News, it looks like the Japanese ISP, Livin' On The Edge has infused BSDi with a 5 million dollar strategic investment to keep developing the iExtreme line of servers and provide backing to the FreeBSD project. The actual press release is here.

OSDNs favorite BSD zealot BSD-Pat Lynch was on the scene at the latest BSDCon, and took the time to send us in a report. Lots of links to stuff for you BSD folks to share and enjoy.

Well I just got back from BSDCon, and spent some time catching up with old friends, new core team members, and cool new products. The highlight of the event was the reception and dinner at the Monterey Bay State Aquarium, which in my opinion is a must-see. All five BSDs were represented this year: MacOS X, BSD/OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.

There were some really neat talks at BSDCon, three tracks in all: general, security, and development. The highlights of the security talks were Bill Fumerola's talk on DoS attacks and the new ipfw which uses compiled rulesets for better performance, Robert Watson's TrustedBSD presentation, and Mark Murray's explanation of the /dev/urandom work he has done with FreeBSD using Yarrow. In the development track, Greg Lehey and Jason Evans presented a paper on FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT's new SMP model.

The exhibit hall itself was small, lending to a larger focus on technical issues, but there were several exhibitors that caught my eye. One was RelexUS, a company with its roots in Russia. They make a relational database called Linter which I found extremely easy to use (though commercial, it was very robust) It also bills Linux and FreeBSD among its native support list, as well as almost every other OS under the sun. It supports ODBC, stored procedures, transactions, asynchronous replication, and a host of other features. Also, the EFF were there, and I finally got around to joining.

Thursday night we piled into a bus to head on over to the Monterey Bay State Aquarium for dinner, drinks, and dessert. We had to wear Daemon horns to get in and fun was had by all. The new core team wrapped up the conference on Friday afternoon, and everyone left and went into town, tired, hungry, but satisfied with this year's turnout.

More pictures can be found at Greg Sutter and Jim Mock's pages. More coverage can be found on BSD Today.

OSDNs favorite BSD zealot BSD-Pat Lynch was on the scene at the latest BSDCon, and took the time to send us in a report. Lots of links to stuff for you BSD folks to share and enjoy.

Well I just got back from BSDCon, and spent some time catching up with old friends, new core team members, and cool new products. The highlight of the event was the reception and dinner at the Monterey Bay State Aquarium, which in my opinion is a must-see. All five BSDs were represented this year: MacOS X, BSD/OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.

There were some really neat talks at BSDCon, three tracks in all: general, security, and development. The highlights of the security talks were Bill Fumerola's talk on DoS attacks and the new ipfw which uses compiled rulesets for better performance, Robert Watson's TrustedBSD presentation, and Mark Murray's explanation of the /dev/urandom work he has done with FreeBSD using Yarrow. In the development track, Greg Lehey and Jason Evans presented a paper on FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT's new SMP model.

The exhibit hall itself was small, lending to a larger focus on technical issues, but there were several exhibitors that caught my eye. One was RelexUS, a company with its roots in Russia. They make a relational database called Linter which I found extremely easy to use (though commercial, it was very robust) It also bills Linux and FreeBSD among its native support list, as well as almost every other OS under the sun. It supports ODBC, stored procedures, transactions, asynchronous replication, and a host of other features. Also, the EFF were there, and I finally got around to joining.

Thursday night we piled into a bus to head on over to the Monterey Bay State Aquarium for dinner, drinks, and dessert. We had to wear Daemon horns to get in and fun was had by all. The new core team wrapped up the conference on Friday afternoon, and everyone left and went into town, tired, hungry, but satisfied with this year's turnout.

More pictures can be found at Greg Sutter and Jim Mock's pages. More coverage can be found on BSD Today.

OSDNs favorite BSD zealot BSD-Pat Lynch was on the scene at the latest BSDCon, and took the time to send us in a report. Lots of links to stuff for you BSD folks to share and enjoy.

Well I just got back from BSDCon, and spent some time catching up with old friends, new core team members, and cool new products. The highlight of the event was the reception and dinner at the Monterey Bay State Aquarium, which in my opinion is a must-see. All five BSDs were represented this year: MacOS X, BSD/OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.

There were some really neat talks at BSDCon, three tracks in all: general, security, and development. The highlights of the security talks were Bill Fumerola's talk on DoS attacks and the new ipfw which uses compiled rulesets for better performance, Robert Watson's TrustedBSD presentation, and Mark Murray's explanation of the /dev/urandom work he has done with FreeBSD using Yarrow. In the development track, Greg Lehey and Jason Evans presented a paper on FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT's new SMP model.

The exhibit hall itself was small, lending to a larger focus on technical issues, but there were several exhibitors that caught my eye. One was RelexUS, a company with its roots in Russia. They make a relational database called Linter which I found extremely easy to use (though commercial, it was very robust) It also bills Linux and FreeBSD among its native support list, as well as almost every other OS under the sun. It supports ODBC, stored procedures, transactions, asynchronous replication, and a host of other features. Also, the EFF were there, and I finally got around to joining.

Thursday night we piled into a bus to head on over to the Monterey Bay State Aquarium for dinner, drinks, and dessert. We had to wear Daemon horns to get in and fun was had by all. The new core team wrapped up the conference on Friday afternoon, and everyone left and went into town, tired, hungry, but satisfied with this year's turnout.

More pictures can be found at Greg Sutter and Jim Mock's pages. More coverage can be found on BSD Today.

OSDNs favorite BSD zealot BSD-Pat Lynch was on the scene at the latest BSDCon, and took the time to send us in a report. Lots of links to stuff for you BSD folks to share and enjoy.

Well I just got back from BSDCon, and spent some time catching up with old friends, new core team members, and cool new products. The highlight of the event was the reception and dinner at the Monterey Bay State Aquarium, which in my opinion is a must-see. All five BSDs were represented this year: MacOS X, BSD/OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.

There were some really neat talks at BSDCon, three tracks in all: general, security, and development. The highlights of the security talks were Bill Fumerola's talk on DoS attacks and the new ipfw which uses compiled rulesets for better performance, Robert Watson's TrustedBSD presentation, and Mark Murray's explanation of the /dev/urandom work he has done with FreeBSD using Yarrow. In the development track, Greg Lehey and Jason Evans presented a paper on FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT's new SMP model.

The exhibit hall itself was small, lending to a larger focus on technical issues, but there were several exhibitors that caught my eye. One was RelexUS, a company with its roots in Russia. They make a relational database called Linter which I found extremely easy to use (though commercial, it was very robust) It also bills Linux and FreeBSD among its native support list, as well as almost every other OS under the sun. It supports ODBC, stored procedures, transactions, asynchronous replication, and a host of other features. Also, the EFF were there, and I finally got around to joining.

Thursday night we piled into a bus to head on over to the Monterey Bay State Aquarium for dinner, drinks, and dessert. We had to wear Daemon horns to get in and fun was had by all. The new core team wrapped up the conference on Friday afternoon, and everyone left and went into town, tired, hungry, but satisfied with this year's turnout.

More pictures can be found at Greg Sutter and Jim Mock's pages. More coverage can be found on BSD Today.

OSDNs favorite BSD zealot BSD-Pat Lynch was on the scene at the latest BSDCon, and took the time to send us in a report. Lots of links to stuff for you BSD folks to share and enjoy.

Well I just got back from BSDCon, and spent some time catching up with old friends, new core team members, and cool new products. The highlight of the event was the reception and dinner at the Monterey Bay State Aquarium, which in my opinion is a must-see. All five BSDs were represented this year: MacOS X, BSD/OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.

There were some really neat talks at BSDCon, three tracks in all: general, security, and development. The highlights of the security talks were Bill Fumerola's talk on DoS attacks and the new ipfw which uses compiled rulesets for better performance, Robert Watson's TrustedBSD presentation, and Mark Murray's explanation of the /dev/urandom work he has done with FreeBSD using Yarrow. In the development track, Greg Lehey and Jason Evans presented a paper on FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT's new SMP model.

The exhibit hall itself was small, lending to a larger focus on technical issues, but there were several exhibitors that caught my eye. One was RelexUS, a company with its roots in Russia. They make a relational database called Linter which I found extremely easy to use (though commercial, it was very robust) It also bills Linux and FreeBSD among its native support list, as well as almost every other OS under the sun. It supports ODBC, stored procedures, transactions, asynchronous replication, and a host of other features. Also, the EFF were there, and I finally got around to joining.

Thursday night we piled into a bus to head on over to the Monterey Bay State Aquarium for dinner, drinks, and dessert. We had to wear Daemon horns to get in and fun was had by all. The new core team wrapped up the conference on Friday afternoon, and everyone left and went into town, tired, hungry, but satisfied with this year's turnout.

More pictures can be found at Greg Sutter and Jim Mock's pages. More coverage can be found on BSD Today.

OSDNs favorite BSD zealot BSD-Pat Lynch was on the scene at the latest BSDCon, and took the time to send us in a report. Lots of links to stuff for you BSD folks to share and enjoy.

Well I just got back from BSDCon, and spent some time catching up with old friends, new core team members, and cool new products. The highlight of the event was the reception and dinner at the Monterey Bay State Aquarium, which in my opinion is a must-see. All five BSDs were represented this year: MacOS X, BSD/OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.

There were some really neat talks at BSDCon, three tracks in all: general, security, and development. The highlights of the security talks were Bill Fumerola's talk on DoS attacks and the new ipfw which uses compiled rulesets for better performance, Robert Watson's TrustedBSD presentation, and Mark Murray's explanation of the /dev/urandom work he has done with FreeBSD using Yarrow. In the development track, Greg Lehey and Jason Evans presented a paper on FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT's new SMP model.

The exhibit hall itself was small, lending to a larger focus on technical issues, but there were several exhibitors that caught my eye. One was RelexUS, a company with its roots in Russia. They make a relational database called Linter which I found extremely easy to use (though commercial, it was very robust) It also bills Linux and FreeBSD among its native support list, as well as almost every other OS under the sun. It supports ODBC, stored procedures, transactions, asynchronous replication, and a host of other features. Also, the EFF were there, and I finally got around to joining.

Thursday night we piled into a bus to head on over to the Monterey Bay State Aquarium for dinner, drinks, and dessert. We had to wear Daemon horns to get in and fun was had by all. The new core team wrapped up the conference on Friday afternoon, and everyone left and went into town, tired, hungry, but satisfied with this year's turnout.

More pictures can be found at Greg Sutter and Jim Mock's pages. More coverage can be found on BSD Today.

Eladio McCormick writes: "Yeah, I know point releases are not by themselves huge news, but FreeBSD 4.1.1-RELEASE represents a major event, in that the base distribution now includes RSA. Info on the release is online." We've had a number of submissions about this one -- good to see the patent come off, and encryption working its way into more things.

chenwah writes: "Jordan K. Hubbard, the big head honcho fella over at FreeBSD, recently posted a 5000 word document to the freebsd hackers mailing list. He discusses the FreeBSD installation program 'sysinstall' and the current package format (tarballs) and the need for something better. Hopefully this could get the ball rolling on something bigger..."

qbasicprogrammer writes: "FreeBSD Basics on The O'Reilly Network covers some of the more useful FreeBSD commands that make computer life easier, including commands for things like scrolling through virtual terminals and checking date, time, and current working directory. Good read for the BSD neophyte."

WasterDave wrote in with this link to information about zero copy sockets on FreeBSD. Some hunting turned up more detailed information about NetBSD and Gigabit networking. Pointers to similar information for OpenBSD are appreciated...

Cabal writes: "FreeBSD 3.5.1-RELEASE is now available for the x86 and alpha architectures. There have been a few important changes in both the kernel and userland, plus several security fixes were included. Most important is the inclusion of the new kerberos security updates. 3.5.1 is the continuation and most likely final release of the 3.x branch. New development continues on 5.x. The release notes have the full details on what's changed, you can download 3.5.1 from here or the i386 ISO image from here." But why no CVS tag? Read on for the explanation. . .

In this message to the -announce mailing list, Jordan wrote: CVS TAGS: Because of the relatively minor nature of this point release, it was done quietly and without much in the way of fanfare or even a tag. Tags are very expensive in CVS (they shouldn't be, but they are) and one was deemed unworth the overhead in this case. Anyone trying to reproduce 3.5.1 should simply build with the RELENG_3 tag given that changes to that branch have been extremely light since the re-roll and will produce results identical enough as not to matter. If you really must put your rifle sights over that exact part of the source tree, use -D "July 21, 2000" for your check-out.

Cabal writes: "FreeBSD 3.5.1-RELEASE is now available for the x86 and alpha architectures. There have been a few important changes in both the kernel and userland, plus several security fixes were included. Most important is the inclusion of the new kerberos security updates. 3.5.1 is the continuation and most likely final release of the 3.x branch. New development continues on 5.x. The release notes have the full details on what's changed, you can download 3.5.1 from here or the i386 ISO image from here." But why no CVS tag? Read on for the explanation. . .

In this message to the -announce mailing list, Jordan wrote: CVS TAGS: Because of the relatively minor nature of this point release, it was done quietly and without much in the way of fanfare or even a tag. Tags are very expensive in CVS (they shouldn't be, but they are) and one was deemed unworth the overhead in this case. Anyone trying to reproduce 3.5.1 should simply build with the RELENG_3 tag given that changes to that branch have been extremely light since the re-roll and will produce results identical enough as not to matter. If you really must put your rifle sights over that exact part of the source tree, use -D "July 21, 2000" for your check-out.

Cabal writes: "FreeBSD 3.5.1-RELEASE is now available for the x86 and alpha architectures. There have been a few important changes in both the kernel and userland, plus several security fixes were included. Most important is the inclusion of the new kerberos security updates. 3.5.1 is the continuation and most likely final release of the 3.x branch. New development continues on 5.x. The release notes have the full details on what's changed, you can download 3.5.1 from here or the i386 ISO image from here." But why no CVS tag? Read on for the explanation. . .

In this message to the -announce mailing list, Jordan wrote: CVS TAGS: Because of the relatively minor nature of this point release, it was done quietly and without much in the way of fanfare or even a tag. Tags are very expensive in CVS (they shouldn't be, but they are) and one was deemed unworth the overhead in this case. Anyone trying to reproduce 3.5.1 should simply build with the RELENG_3 tag given that changes to that branch have been extremely light since the re-roll and will produce results identical enough as not to matter. If you really must put your rifle sights over that exact part of the source tree, use -D "July 21, 2000" for your check-out.

Dr. Banana writes "Jordan Hubbard announced that FreeBSD 4.1 is now available on ftp.freebsd.org. You can read the release notes here. The ISO will be available on August 1."

Dr. Banana writes "Jordan Hubbard announced that FreeBSD 4.1 is now available on ftp.freebsd.org. You can read the release notes here. The ISO will be available on August 1."

mblase asks: "According to a recent MacCentral article, one of the benefits of Mac OS X's NeXT-based roots is that "since Mac OS X is BSD based, the ports shouldn't be too difficult. The hardest part, according to Robert Palmer, will be writing the GUI (graphical user interface) front end to make administration easy." My question is, is this likely to happen? Will UNIX developers want to port their applications to an operating system that costs more in hardware and OS software both? Or is the demand likely to come from the other direction -- OS X server admins who want the stability and popularity of established UNIX applications, even if the graphical front-end Mac users have come to expect may be less than ideal? This will doubtless be a big issue for Apple as they tout Mac OS X as a server platform for the future."

nik says: How about "larger installed userbase"? Assume Linux has ~ 7 million users, and the BSD's have about 3 million (both those numbers are on the conservative side). Apple's probably going to ship 10 million or more OS X boxes in the next year or so, and porting most software is going to be no-brainer (particularly if it's already in the Free, Net, and Open BSD ports and packages collections).

AnonymousCow writes "At LinuxTag, an unbiased comparison of performance of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, and Solaris." I'll let Tim's comment on this story stand: "Unbiased is hard to claim - all tests can be seen as biased in their formulation - but this is thorough, with 45 slides and well-explained methodology -- BSD does very well ..."

dougc writes: "FreeBSD 3.5-RELEASE is now available for the x86 architecture. Many changes in both the kernel and userland, plus several very small security fixes were included. A bunch of neat things were also merged from -current." 3.5 is the continuation of the 3.x branch, with mostly important bug and security fixes. New development continues on 5.x. This release is almost certainly the last on the 3.x line, with 4.x becoming the new ``stable'' release. The release notes have the full details on what's changed, you can download 3.5 from here.

dougc writes: "FreeBSD 3.5-RELEASE is now available for the x86 architecture. Many changes in both the kernel and userland, plus several very small security fixes were included. A bunch of neat things were also merged from -current." 3.5 is the continuation of the 3.x branch, with mostly important bug and security fixes. New development continues on 5.x. This release is almost certainly the last on the 3.x line, with 4.x becoming the new ``stable'' release. The release notes have the full details on what's changed, you can download 3.5 from here.

grimmy asks: "I've been looking around freshmeat at the floppy-Based Linux distro's, and would like some input on what fellow /. Readers think is the best one for older systems. I'm in need of a way to get a small NAT/firewall box running for my home lan with the dilemma of having very little HD space. Any recommendations would be great." [If it doesn't have to be Linux, you might find PicoBSD attractive. Does all you want, and is a doddle to reconfigure for other tasks too - nik]

dragonfly_blue writes: "Just wanted to let you know, OpenBSD 2.7 is out, with significant advances; including OpenSSH2, better Linux binary emulation, DSA encryption, and (my personal favorite) support for encrypting your swap space. Theo and the gang have also expanded the ports and packages collections considerably, so get 'em while they're hot!" (More.)

ocipio contributed some more tidbits, writing: " ... OpenBSD 2.7 improves support for high end system boards, SCSI controllers, ethernet interfaces, and adds gigabit ethernet drivers and IPv6 networking. OpenBSD's cryptography has been further enhanced by encrypting virtual memory swap space, and by more flexible ISAKMPD key exchange and operating modes for IP Security networking." To keep things interesting in BSD Land, he adds "According to Jordan Hubbard, FreeBSD's release engineer, FreeBSD 3.5 will be released June 20th."

Cool on all counts. Way to go, BSD crew! (And Thanks! to everyone who pointed out this release.)

ocipio writes "The article on sfgate.com discusses the use of FreeBSD on the largest Internet companies in the world. FreeBSD is used by Yahoo!, Hotmail, MindSpring, UUNet, and Verio. BSD will also get an indirect boost next year as Apple releases Mac OS X. Comparing the BSD family to Linux, BSDi's Rose said, "We think we have a product that's more reliable, scalable and robust for high-performance, infrastructure-grade computing." Yahoo!'s Chief David Filo agrees, noting he couldn't imagine moving to a proprietary system. "

Anonymous Coward writes "Jim O'Gorman has an article at bsdtoday.com about choosing an OS for a firewall project. While OpenBSD has a lot of followers, find out why Jim chose FreeBSD instead."

Jim Mock writes in to "announce the hardcopy release of the FreeBSD Handbook. Written by the FreeBSD Documentation Project, the FreeBSD Handbook is a comprehensive guide to installing and running FreeBSD, and covers the installation and day-to-day use of FreeBSD, the ports collection, kernel configuration, the X Window System, printing, FreeBSD's Linux binary compatibility support, upgrading your system from source by using the ``make world'' command, and much more." Read on for more details.

Integrity demands that I point out that in another window I'm the FreeBSD Documentation project manager -- that doesn't mean I get to see any of the money this raises though, so the black-helicopter gang needn't worry. Jim continues: "If you are interested in purchasing a copy of the handbook, you can do so online from the FreeBSDMall or Walnut Creek CDROM."

If you're involved in other open source documentation efforts you might be interested to know that the Handbook is marked up in (a slightly extended version of) the DocBook DTD (and more details about the extensions are available at the Doc. Project Primer). The "source" for the Handbook is (naturally) available in CVS, as are the tools and infrastructure used to build it.

Jim Mock writes in to "announce the hardcopy release of the FreeBSD Handbook. Written by the FreeBSD Documentation Project, the FreeBSD Handbook is a comprehensive guide to installing and running FreeBSD, and covers the installation and day-to-day use of FreeBSD, the ports collection, kernel configuration, the X Window System, printing, FreeBSD's Linux binary compatibility support, upgrading your system from source by using the ``make world'' command, and much more." Read on for more details.

Integrity demands that I point out that in another window I'm the FreeBSD Documentation project manager -- that doesn't mean I get to see any of the money this raises though, so the black-helicopter gang needn't worry. Jim continues: "If you are interested in purchasing a copy of the handbook, you can do so online from the FreeBSDMall or Walnut Creek CDROM."

If you're involved in other open source documentation efforts you might be interested to know that the Handbook is marked up in (a slightly extended version of) the DocBook DTD (and more details about the extensions are available at the Doc. Project Primer). The "source" for the Handbook is (naturally) available in CVS, as are the tools and infrastructure used to build it.

Jim Mock writes in to "announce the hardcopy release of the FreeBSD Handbook. Written by the FreeBSD Documentation Project, the FreeBSD Handbook is a comprehensive guide to installing and running FreeBSD, and covers the installation and day-to-day use of FreeBSD, the ports collection, kernel configuration, the X Window System, printing, FreeBSD's Linux binary compatibility support, upgrading your system from source by using the ``make world'' command, and much more." Read on for more details.

Integrity demands that I point out that in another window I'm the FreeBSD Documentation project manager -- that doesn't mean I get to see any of the money this raises though, so the black-helicopter gang needn't worry. Jim continues: "If you are interested in purchasing a copy of the handbook, you can do so online from the FreeBSDMall or Walnut Creek CDROM."

If you're involved in other open source documentation efforts you might be interested to know that the Handbook is marked up in (a slightly extended version of) the DocBook DTD (and more details about the extensions are available at the Doc. Project Primer). The "source" for the Handbook is (naturally) available in CVS, as are the tools and infrastructure used to build it.

Jim Mock writes in to "announce the hardcopy release of the FreeBSD Handbook. Written by the FreeBSD Documentation Project, the FreeBSD Handbook is a comprehensive guide to installing and running FreeBSD, and covers the installation and day-to-day use of FreeBSD, the ports collection, kernel configuration, the X Window System, printing, FreeBSD's Linux binary compatibility support, upgrading your system from source by using the ``make world'' command, and much more." Read on for more details.

Integrity demands that I point out that in another window I'm the FreeBSD Documentation project manager -- that doesn't mean I get to see any of the money this raises though, so the black-helicopter gang needn't worry. Jim continues: "If you are interested in purchasing a copy of the handbook, you can do so online from the FreeBSDMall or Walnut Creek CDROM."

If you're involved in other open source documentation efforts you might be interested to know that the Handbook is marked up in (a slightly extended version of) the DocBook DTD (and more details about the extensions are available at the Doc. Project Primer). The "source" for the Handbook is (naturally) available in CVS, as are the tools and infrastructure used to build it.

Dan Langille, creator and maintainer of the FreeBSD Diary, has just unleashed FreshPorts on the world. In a nutshell, this is a changing list of new and updated ports in the FreeBSD ports tree, making it easy to keep bang up to date with new software as it's ported. It's a natural companion to Wolfram Schneider's fortnightly port update messages.

As this release explains, BSDI are about to start providing support contracts for FreeBSD. Support options will include options from per-incident to 24x7 support. Linux already has a number of high profile companies providing support contracts, such as Red Hat, and IBM. It'll be interesting to see how much of an issue the availability of BSD support turns out to be.

From a hundred feet up, the action on the floor at FOSE would look like that of any technical tradeshow. Eager vendors try to get their names into the heads of buyers, and the aisles are jammed with swag-toting prospects. The show floor has plenty of the power suits and eager vendors that any other shows do, but also more than a scattering of military insignia, camouflage and Marine crew cuts. And for the first time, just a quick stroll from the 50,000 square foot Microsoft display, this year's FOSE floor also featured Linux vendors and a dedicated Linux pavilion. (Read more.)

Why FOSE matters

Linux at computer trade shows is nothing new -- but this show in particular targets no one outside the largest buyer of computers and software in the entire world, bar none: the Feds. The Federal government spends upward of 35 billion dollars each year on computer systems and software; how much more depends on who you ask.

"If you ask Federal sources, they pin it around 38 billion dollars, and that's become an accepted number -- that includes telecommunications buying. One of the reasons that the estimates are so diverse is that the government doesn't count things the way businesses do," says FOSE consultant Peg Hosky. Remember, that estimate too is conservative: trying to calculate the depths of the black budgets which drive some of the largest and most secretive IT purchases, not to mention contingency spending hidden in euphemized line items, is a black art.

The Departments of Defense, Energy, the Interior, Transportation, the Federal Aviation agency (and all the other agenices associated with the every Federal department) --- the list stretches from the White House to the most distant exploratory spacecraft.

The goods on offer at FOSE, though, are for the most part more mundane. Though the show is now simply called by its acronym, the initials stood for Federal Office Systems Exposition: you won't find radar systems or flight control computers on offer at the show. But for anything related to desktop computing, "FOSE's always been the introduction point of new technologies to the Federal government, because the government leaders and the national press focuses on this show," said Hosky.

Getting penguins in the door

The main-floor pavillion was the brainchild of Northern Virginia LUG (NoVaLUG) member Tim Bogart, by day a network server administrator for a major telecommunications company, and furthered by Lois Rude, industry manager with FOSE. After a Washington-area Linux exposition was cancelled nearly a year ago, Bogart asked himself and fellow LUG members "Why don't we get in on the real action?"

He began angling at a more ambitious target than the Linux enthusiasts who populate LUGs and Linux-only conventions. A previous job had put Bogart into the realm of Federal purchasing as the manager of a 20-million dollar IT project, and he knew how complicated government purchasing was. "My background isn't as a coder -- I'm an electrical engineer by training. I thought this was a way I could contribute to the community," he said. "You have no idea how complicated it gets."

Going from interested user to organizer put Bogart into contact with a receptive FOSE executive, and that made all the difference. "[Bogart] called on the sales people, and the salesperson didn't understand what he was asking for, so they gave him to me," says Rude. "I was new with FOSE at the time. We talked, we had lunch together and the more we talked, the more we realized it would be mutually beneficial to have all of them do something within FOSE."

Billy Ball, Linux book author and fellow NoVaLUG member, helped spearhead the effort too. "Bill and Tim came in and gave our sales team an amazing demonstration with Linux, and really educated us about it," says Rude.

Abstract goals like education are fine -- and to that end, volunteers from several local LUGs donated time in the pavillion answering questions of every level -- but the organizers also have a more pragmatic reason to make Linux more visible to Federal buyers: "I would like nothing more than to reach my hand down into Bill Gates' pocket and pull out $11-18 billion in accounts receivable," says Bogart.

To that end, he and the other volunteers solicited donations of software and information from Linux vendors, and cajoled others to actually show up at the show. Applix and Caldera occupied booths flanking the pavilion, but as you'll read they were far from the only vendors present.

The problem with "free" The biggest obstacles to getting Linux onto Federal desktops currently running Microsoft operating system is not just perception -- hardware vendors industry wide are touting their Linux compatibility, and mainstream magazines have featured Linux on their covers -- but the inertia which characterizes federal sales even more than it does the private sector.

High-performance computing centers like Sandia National Laboratory and Los Alamos aside, the problem is the desktop. Open-source software, Linux or not, tends to advance more rapidly and with less oversight than government purchasers are comfortable with.

Col. Stephen Quick, who specializes in training and retention for the U.S. Air Force, put it this way: "We've got a force of about 75,000 Air Force personnel who we've got to train to sustain that [desktop software investment]. Of course, our user community is all of the Air Force, about 550,000 people. So you've got to make sure you've got standardization, configuration control in whatever you do." The other armed forces face similar constraints -- workforces that shift at the drop of an order, and a work force made up of people enlisted for just a few years.

"We use a lot of UNIX in the command and control centers, but we use NT for the desktop," says Quick. With open-source software, "you could well have somebody developing a little application that they become dependent on. The person who develops it leaves, somebody else moves in who's never seen it before. If that's your expert, and they're now over in Saudi, you're kind of out of luck."

Citing manpower restraints for support as well as development, many vendors said their products would remain Microsoft-centric for the foreseeable future. "In my 20-person shop," said one biometric device manufacturer's rep who asked not to be identified, "we're doing everything we can to get even one client version out the door. We don't rule out porting to other platforms, but frankly we have to go where the market is. After NT, we're working on Novell, because that has the second largest installed base among our customers. Other clients have to wait."

Hits and misses

This may be the first year for a Linux pavilion, but Linux also showed up at the fair in unexpected corners: Apple, for instance.

While work on the BSD-based OS X is moving along, no machines at FOSE were demonstrating the new OS. However, under a sign proclaiming High Performance Computing, developer Kai Staat of Terra Soft Solutions happily demonstrated Yellow Dog Linux 1.2 on a Macintosh G4. With a few keystrokes, he switched from a KDE desktop to the usual Mac desktop -- or rather, to Mac On Linux, in a KDE window. "To the Mac OS, it's as if you just pushed the power key on the keyboard," he explained to some onlookers from the Air Force, showing them that both systems were happily coexisting on the machine.

After one of these demonstrations, NIST robotics researcher David Gilsinn told me "My scientific work, it's on UNIX, so I have to either run X, or go sit at a UNIX box to do it, so that [Linux on G4] looked like a really good option." Gilsinn said that his workplace is currently Sun based, but that "we're trying to cut down the cost of our systems, especially Unix systems, and Linux is getting to be a viable option."

Corel's large exhibit showed off, in addition to their Windows products, both Corel Linux and the company's office suite. And API, who manufacture the Alpha processor, were also out in force. I spoke with Michael Foley, API technical marketing engineer, about what Linux meant to their product. And despite the availability of BSD Unix, Foley said, "With NT no longer on the Alpha platform, I think [Linux] offers the best possibilities. The BSD Unix is a great Unix, but it doesn't have the push behind it that Linux does today. And the Digital Unix, True64 -- that's owned by Compaq, and it doesn't have the popularity [of Linux]."

Linux also shows up in many products which don't tout the OS unless prompted: it serves as the embedded OS driving Watchguard's firewall and VPN devices, and Linux on x86 serves as the platform for Trend Micro's AntiVirus software, which patrols for virii stalking more vulnerable desktop OSes. And a small company with the inscrutable name of Applied Business Services is quietly reselling and customizing open-source accounting software which runs on both Linux and Windows to both government and private buyers.

From the impressed looks on visitors to the Corel Office 2000 Linux kiosk, not to mention those on everyone who stopped to examine the tiny embedded-Linux Web server on display at the Linux pavillion, the interest in Linux products seemed palpable.

A Wednesday-afternoon panel hosted by Ball and featuring some of the biggest names in commercializing open source software, though, drew only sparse attendance and seemed aimed at a less Linux-saavy audience which didn't materialize -- perhaps because it intersected the 4 p.m. end of the Expo day.

Chris DiBona of VA Linux and Red Hat's Bob Young joined SGI VP of marketing for servers and high-end graphics Jan Silverman and Rene Schmidt of Corel's Linux division.

Unsurprisingly, and despite a few friendly jabs at each other and at mutual rival Sun Microystems, the four mostly agreed with each other: Linux is stable, extensible and high-quality. No brass from the big agencies showed up for their presentation, though, which reflects the tenor of many of the buyers at the show.

"We're an NT shop and we're going to stay that way for the foreseeable future. I don't see us moving from that to Linux or any non-Microsoft OS," said one Social Security official.

Whether those words get eaten remains to be seen, but both Bogart and Rude are upbeat about next year. "Next year, mark my words, they'll have to cross names off the list [of Linux exhibitors]," says Bogart.

Bob Bruce writes: "There will be a BSD BOF (Birds Of a Feather meeting) at Spring Comdex, on Wednesday April 19 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. The BOF is at the Essex Inn at Grant Park, Chicago. You do not need to be a Comdex attendee to come along, everyone is welcome." Read on for more details.

Bob continues: "There will be speakers from BSD/OS, Darwin, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. This is a great opportunity to meet some of the leaders in the BSD community. There will be plenty of technical information available. Whether you are a BSD expert, a newbie, or just thinking of switching over, you can get your questions answered."

"Several BSD celebrities will be attending, including Chris Coleman, an editor of Daemonnews, and cartoonist Susannah Coleman, creator of Darby Daemon, who will be signing prints."

"We will have installation CDROMs, BSD paraphernalia, and free food and beer. We will even have free Daemon horns!"

"This BOF is being co-sponsored by BSDi and Daemon News."

Joey the Lemur writes "I saw this article over at Yahoo! about the BSDI/Walnut Creek merger that has some good points concerning FreeBSD and Apple. The author talks about Apple's proposal to stay synced with FreeBSD (Darwin), and why they should actually follow through with it. It also has some good commentary on why BSD isn't as prominent as Linux. "

RobertPearse noted that the winners are on CNN. No surprise that American Beauty cleaned up (I watched it again on saturday: Wow). But The Matrix took Editing, Sound and FX (Edging out Phantom Menace). Sleepy Hollow took Art Direction. Update by nik: "Not a lot of people know that" many of the effects for The Matrix were generated on FreeBSD systems.

spr writes, "Actually it is uploading as of this posting. Looks like about 200+ MB is already up. You can get it at: ftp.freebsd.org. To quote the README: "This should be enough to install the full operating system, though if you're looking for the full experience or wish to support the project through your CD purchase, please see the FreeBSD Mail."

Claes Leufven was one of the first to write in with the news that FreeBSD 4.0 is now available for download. Features added to 4.0 since it diverged from 3.x include: IPv6 and IPSec support built in (courtesy of the KAME project), OpenSSL and OpenSSH are integrated in to the base system, jail(2) ("chroot(2) on steroids") to help build secure environments, many, many NFS bug fixes and performance improvements, bug fixes and performance improvements to the VM subsystem, netware file and client connection support, gcc upgraded to 2.95.2 as the base compiler, better support for laptops, a much more complete threads library. . . see the Alpha or i386 release notes for more details. And before you all rush off to upgrade your production servers, read on for a brief message from Jordan Hubbard, FreeBSD's Release Engineer, and to find out where to download the release from.

"As with all FreeBSD releases ending in .0, the project recommends that production environments wait at least one or two releases after it before moving mission-critical services over. These dot-zero releases are primarily aimed at the developers and early adopters who are willing to work on refining the technology until it's production-ready. The 4-stable branch will also not be created until just before 4.1 is released, the period following a .0 release being the best time to collect serious feedback before branching the tree."

For a static list of mirrors, see this section in the FreeBSD Handbook. Alternatively, try Gavin Cameron's automatically updating list of mirror sites.

Claes Leufven was one of the first to write in with the news that FreeBSD 4.0 is now available for download. Features added to 4.0 since it diverged from 3.x include: IPv6 and IPSec support built in (courtesy of the KAME project), OpenSSL and OpenSSH are integrated in to the base system, jail(2) ("chroot(2) on steroids") to help build secure environments, many, many NFS bug fixes and performance improvements, bug fixes and performance improvements to the VM subsystem, netware file and client connection support, gcc upgraded to 2.95.2 as the base compiler, better support for laptops, a much more complete threads library. . . see the Alpha or i386 release notes for more details. And before you all rush off to upgrade your production servers, read on for a brief message from Jordan Hubbard, FreeBSD's Release Engineer, and to find out where to download the release from.

"As with all FreeBSD releases ending in .0, the project recommends that production environments wait at least one or two releases after it before moving mission-critical services over. These dot-zero releases are primarily aimed at the developers and early adopters who are willing to work on refining the technology until it's production-ready. The 4-stable branch will also not be created until just before 4.1 is released, the period following a .0 release being the best time to collect serious feedback before branching the tree."

For a static list of mirrors, see this section in the FreeBSD Handbook. Alternatively, try Gavin Cameron's automatically updating list of mirror sites.

Claes Leufven was one of the first to write in with the news that FreeBSD 4.0 is now available for download. Features added to 4.0 since it diverged from 3.x include: IPv6 and IPSec support built in (courtesy of the KAME project), OpenSSL and OpenSSH are integrated in to the base system, jail(2) ("chroot(2) on steroids") to help build secure environments, many, many NFS bug fixes and performance improvements, bug fixes and performance improvements to the VM subsystem, netware file and client connection support, gcc upgraded to 2.95.2 as the base compiler, better support for laptops, a much more complete threads library. . . see the Alpha or i386 release notes for more details. And before you all rush off to upgrade your production servers, read on for a brief message from Jordan Hubbard, FreeBSD's Release Engineer, and to find out where to download the release from.

"As with all FreeBSD releases ending in .0, the project recommends that production environments wait at least one or two releases after it before moving mission-critical services over. These dot-zero releases are primarily aimed at the developers and early adopters who are willing to work on refining the technology until it's production-ready. The 4-stable branch will also not be created until just before 4.1 is released, the period following a .0 release being the best time to collect serious feedback before branching the tree."

For a static list of mirrors, see this section in the FreeBSD Handbook. Alternatively, try Gavin Cameron's automatically updating list of mirror sites.

Claes Leufven was one of the first to write in with the news that FreeBSD 4.0 is now available for download. Features added to 4.0 since it diverged from 3.x include: IPv6 and IPSec support built in (courtesy of the KAME project), OpenSSL and OpenSSH are integrated in to the base system, jail(2) ("chroot(2) on steroids") to help build secure environments, many, many NFS bug fixes and performance improvements, bug fixes and performance improvements to the VM subsystem, netware file and client connection support, gcc upgraded to 2.95.2 as the base compiler, better support for laptops, a much more complete threads library. . . see the Alpha or i386 release notes for more details. And before you all rush off to upgrade your production servers, read on for a brief message from Jordan Hubbard, FreeBSD's Release Engineer, and to find out where to download the release from.

"As with all FreeBSD releases ending in .0, the project recommends that production environments wait at least one or two releases after it before moving mission-critical services over. These dot-zero releases are primarily aimed at the developers and early adopters who are willing to work on refining the technology until it's production-ready. The 4-stable branch will also not be created until just before 4.1 is released, the period following a .0 release being the best time to collect serious feedback before branching the tree."

For a static list of mirrors, see this section in the FreeBSD Handbook. Alternatively, try Gavin Cameron's automatically updating list of mirror sites.

Earlier we announced that Walnut Creek CDROM and BSDI are merging. Obviously, this will shake up the BSD playing field considerably, and will doubtless have knock on effects with the Linux and other open source communities too, to say nothing of the various commercial organisations that already rely on FreeBSD or BSDI on their servers. Here, to answer questions about the merger, is Bob Bruce, president of Walnut Creek. Jordan Hubbard, FreeBSD core team member and release co-ordinator, and Gary Johnson, CEO of the new company, also contribute.

But first, a little bit of background.

Walnut Creek sells CDs full of freely available software, and run the world's busiest FTP server (ftp.freesoftware.com, formerly known as ftp.cdrom.com). Walnut Creek has been involved with FreeBSD since the early days, producing the first FreeBSD CD distribution, and providing gainful employment for some members of the FreeBSD development community. This article from FreeBSDzine explains some of the Walnut Creek/FreeBSD relationship.

BSDI was formed by members of the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at UC Berkeley (i.e., the same group responsible for the Unix BSD in the first place). BSDI produce, market, and provide support and training for a commercial BSD Unix (or Unix-like) OS for the Intel platform, and as such, are competing in the same space that FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux (not to mention Microsoft) all play in.

While there have been several IPOs, mergers, and acquisitions by various Linux-driven companies in the relatively recent past, this is the first in BSD space. Here Bob Bruce answers questions about the merger, some of which came from yourselves, via the earlier story.

[Disclaimer: in another xterm I'm nik@freebsd.org, which obviously gives me a greater vested interest in this event than most. Unless otherwise indicated, the answers are from Bob.]

What, exactly, is happening? The reports from DaemonNews are that the two companies are merging, the Wall Street Journal says that BSDI is "acquiring" Walnut Creek. Is this a merger of equals, or will one company be the dominant partner?

Walnut Creek CDROM and BSDI have merged into a single company. I don't think either partner will be dominant. Walnut Creek CDROM and BSDI had very similar company cultures, and both companies had a long history of involvement in the BSD community. Several BSDI people were members of UC Berkeley's Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG), and were key early contributors to the free software movement. Several of the top people in the FreeBSD project worked for Walnut Creek CDROM. So together we have an extemely talented group of people.

The two companies mesh well at the sales and marketing level, too. Walnut Creek CDROM brings online sales and retail channel expertise. Our shrink-wrap products are sold in nearly all major chains, including CompUSA, MicroCenter, Fry's, Border's, etc. BSDI brings expertise in VAR/OEM sales, embedded systems, corporate sales and infrastructure markets. For instance, UUNet runs on BSD/OS.

Why merge at all? FreeBSD and BSDI have coexisted for some years now. BSDI uses code from FreeBSD (I believe) and they have also contributed code back to FreeBSD. What benefits will merging bring?

The obvious advantage is that our development efforts will be sharing codebases. So we can make improvements faster and at lower cost. Our goal will be a single ABI for third party vendors to port to, which will mean more applications available on BSD.

People who are trying to decide whether to rely on Linux or BSD should note that the two commercial BSD-based companies are unifying at the same time that the Linux market is being divided up into smaller and smaller fragments. It seems like every few weeks another company announces a Linux distro. I just read that Motorola is producing their own. Now don't get me wrong, I really wish that Linux wasn't so fragmented. In fact, I would like to go back to the good old days when Slackware had a 90% market share ;-)

Gary adds: A merger makes a lot of sense from a promotion and funding perspective. You'll be seeing much more promotion about BSD in the future. It's often been said that we've got the superior technology, but the marketing has been nearly non-existent. That's going to change.

More money means more development funds as well. For example, an Itanium project is definitely in the pipeline. No firm details yet, but it will happen.

What's the new company going to be called?

Currently BSDI is the name of the company, but we are looking at alternatives.

Where is BSD's focus going to be? The traditional role has been servers, with some developers expressing a disdain for the desktop.

Gary says: We're committed to growing our position in the marketplace. Traditionally, the Internet Infrastructure market has been where we're strongest, and that's where we're going to focus. But not to the exclusion of promoting BSD for the desktop. FreeBSD and BSDI both have major customers in the embedded market, and among infrastructure suppliers.

What will happen to the FreeBSD codebase? Is it going to merge with the BSDI code, or vice-versa? Will there be two code trees?

There are plans for the two codebases to merge, but not immediately. FreeBSD 4.0 is scheduled for release very soon [4.0 should go gold on March 13th -- Nik] and will not contain any code from BSD/OS. Once 4.0 becomes the "stable" branch, the merging work will begin on the "current" branch. There will also be continuing improvements and enhancements to the proprietry BSD/OS.

Jordan adds: I also see us best doing this by gradual convergence, not by simply attempting to ram one group or code-base into another. It will take time for the FreeBSD developers to come up to speed on the various features in BSD/OS they may be merging and the converse is true for the BSDI developers; they've been working on BSD/OS for the last decade and will need time to familiarize themselves with the FreeBSD code base, its development methodologies and its culture.

There are a number of FreeBSD features which existing BSD/OS customers have requested just as there are a number of BSD/OS features which the FreeBSD project will be looking into merging. By doing this work in parallel, we can deal with the familiarization issues on both sides while making the eventual code merger progressively easier.

David Greenman and Mike Karels will be working together as co-architects for the new system. As features are merged in, they will be available for download at www.freebsd.org, and on "snapshot" CDROMs. The completely merged system will be released as FreeBSD 5.0.

Who 'owns' FreeBSD now? Jordan's been talking about a FreeBSD Foundation, is that going to see the light of day?

FreeBSD is "owned" by the FreeBSD Project, which is made up of the core team, the committers, and all the other people who write the code. No company can ever own FreeBSD, anymore than a company can own Linux. The FreeBSD Foundation will be an independent non-profit organization. It will be controlled by a board of directors, which will contain some members of the core team. The Foundation and the core team are still separate entities going forward.

What about the name "FreeBSD", and related tems, like the "PicoBSD" distribution? If someone wants to build the own CD-ROM release, can they call it "FreeBSD"?

The trademark "FreeBSD" was owned by Walnut Creek CDROM, so it is now a registered trademark of the merged company. But, by written agreement, the use of the trademark is controlled by the FreeBSD core team.

Roughly speaking, how many new, full time, developers is this going to bring to FreeBSD?

About twenty. But that will grow. We are hiring, so if anyone out there in Slashdot land needs a job and knows how to code, send your resume to jobs@cdrom.com.

Are there any BSDI only features that are slated for rapid integration into FreeBSD?

No. FreeBSD and BSD/OS have well deserved reputations for robustness and stability. We don't want to jeopardize that by rushing the integration process.

Are any features of the BSDI codebase going to stay proprietary?

At first much of the BSDI codebase will remain proprietary. It will only be freed as it is integrated with FreeBSD. There are some parts of the codebase that cannot be freed because the code was written under a contract that does not permit disclosure.

Jordan adds: This pertains only to the BSD/OS kernel. There is intention to merge the "userland" code as soon as is practical, since there are no issues with any of that code, according to Mike Karels.

Prompted by a question from "dcs" earlier; most of the FreeBSD developers meet through the mailing lists, and no one is "parachuted" in to a committer position without first submitting PRs, having them accepted, being proposed for committership, having a mentor, and so on. Everyone's got where they are by working with one another, and going through the peer review process.

Will the BSDI developers (those of them who will be working on the FreeBSD code) have to go through the same (or possibly accelerated) process? Or will they be dropped in as committers almost immediately?

Jordan: I think it's too early to say how each and every case will be handled, but that it'd also be reasonable to assume that a hybrid approach will be used. In each case we'll be first estabishing just what each potential new committer will be doing and what the priority for that work is, then we'll look at their track record and take prior experience into account just as we've done with many other committers.

Some committers have approached us as complete unknowns and have had to enter the project "the slow way", by submitting PRs and essentially proving themselves to us over time. In other cases, a committer has approached us (or vice-versa) and the core decision to add him has gone in a matter of hours from concept to edits to the access file ("Kirk wants a commit bit? stamp Done! Somebody go grab him before he changes his mind!"). It all really depends on just how much of a known-quantity the person is and I expect that to work in everyone's favor in a good deal of the cases for BSDI developers.

It's been suggested that some of the BSDI people would be coming in as FreeBSD core team members. Is that right?

Jordan: This really isn't clear yet and all we've talked about is the fact that we'd be willing to take some on if they expressed a direct interest. This has yet to happen as I'm sure most of the folks over at BSDI are still too busy staggering around and trying to cope with this Brave New World to think about things like joining FreeBSD-core. I would also expect to be able to spend a little time explaining just what this means in reality to any prospective candidate in advance, such being only fair.

Are there any changes planned for the BSD license?

That is up to the University of California. We have no control over the BSD license. UC removed the advertising clause last year, which was the right thing to do. I can't think of anything else that should be changed. The BSD license is about as free as you can get short of public domain, and its "business friendly" nature is one of the reasons that BSD is so widely used in commercial applications which require customized kernels, such as the IBM Interjet, the Intel StorageServer, and Inktomi's network products.

Will the code still be released under the BSD license? If so, which one? There are three BSD licenses available; the original BSD license with four clauses, the new BSD license, without the advertising clause, and the FreeBSD license, which also omits the fourth clause as well.

It will be released under the newest license, without the advertising clause. Contrary to other reports, once the BSDI code is released under the three clause license it will be usable by anyone, not just other open source projects.

How will this impact on other organisations use of the codebase? For example, Apple use FreeBSD extensively in MacOS X.

It will have a positive impact. We have been unable to work more closely with partners like Apple because of limited resources, especially not enough people. That will change. We will be strengthening existing partnerships and building new ones.

Jordan adds: It should also be noted that people who are doing their own FreeBSD-based solutions can continue to do so, we're not changing the terms under which FreeBSD is being released or can be used in other products. Nothing changes for FreeBSD here and it's in the areas where a customer wants more than FreeBSD can currently deliver for, say, an embedded systems product that I see the commercial possibilities. Anyong buying a commercial RTOS today gets a lot more than a CDROM containing some bits, for example, they also get about four feet of printed manuals, a support contract, tools for doing cross-compilation on other platforms (like NT), etc. Providing those kind of value-adds for FreeBSD on a commercial basis would be a win-win scenario for everyone, I think, and that's just one possible avenue of exploration.

Living and working in the UK, BSD's presence here is limited. I can get various Linux flavours from the bigger PC stores, but BSD seems to be relegated to a few, more specialist, suppliers. Red Hat has announced plans to expand in to Europe, and Suse is based in Germany. Is this a market you're going for, or are you contentrating on the U.S. at the moment?

Gary: In the UK, you may find FreeBSD on the shelves of Dixon's soon [Big consumer electronics chain, computers, cameras, hi-fi systems, that sort of thing -- Nik]. You can expect to see big changes in our market presence in Europe, particularly over the next six to 12 months. I can't say more than that at the moment.

Walnut Creek sell 'competing' products, including Slackware and Redhat Linux. Is this going to change?

Our Slackware division will be spun off as an independent company: Slackware Linux, Inc. But our Linux and BSD developers will continue to work closely together. Patrick Volkerding has moved out here from Minnesota and is now managing Slackware development on a day-to-day basis. We will be releasing Slackware 7.1 by summer.

What about other distributions (or, indeed, other OSs). Would the new company release OpenBSD or NetBSD CDs, for example?

We have no plans to do that.

But we are trying to get the entire BSD community to work together more. For instance, our annual conference, FreeBSD'Con, is being renamed BSD'Con, and will now include all BSD software, not just FreeBSD.

There is frequent cross-fertilization of ideas and code between the Linux and BSD communities. Probably a lot more than most people realize. This is what "Open Source" is all about: both communities benefit from fresh ideas as well as healthy competition. We are at the focal point where these two communities come together, and this is a very exciting place to be.