Slashdot Mirror

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
W hat's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

GanttProject seems nice. I haven't tested it thoroughly, but it seems promising. It was mentioned on a NewsForge article.

... some actual facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Loki Games had a large following among the Linux community. Many people bought games and wanted that company to succeed. There was broad recognition throughout the community that illegally trading Loki games would result in the death of Loki, and as a result there was strong opposition to Loki warez. I really don't think you should place the blame on Linux users when the blame can so readily be placed on Scott Draeker (former founder and CEO of Loki) himself. While it's true that the customer base may not have been large enough to support a Loki games at the time, or even today, the fact remains that Draeker royally screwed his employees and offered terrible customer service to boot. While the programming and engineering staff killed themselves to produce a great product, management stuck it to them and the customers. Then Draeker closed shop, leaving one (far too loyal) employee with a huge credit card bill, the charges of which he took on to help with staff payroll.

Bad management is what killed Loki. And possibly not enough sales to warrant a Linux gaming business. But we'll never know because Loki's books are locked away. It's just as possible that, like with the Macintosh, there's enough of a Linux community to support a small, but well run, games porting business. Hopefully, in the near future, we'll find out.

What? The loud mouth pro-linux kiddies whose windows expereince is limited to videogames have no idea whats going on in the enterprise? On top of their FUD they knock down informative windows posts in defense of their pet OS? Say it aint so!

sigh, if there is a reason why "slashdot is losing its readership" (is it?) its because of evangelical mods and bullshit anti-MS posts.

If they want Open Source news they can visit NewsForge and stop whining about windows and other commercial apps.

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Searching for this very info, I found a note that claims 496 Linux virus-like things as of "November of last year". I still haven't found a reputable number that shows how many there actually are today, but 530(Lnx) and 28(Mac) will work fine for now.

If desktop market share (ms) is around 5% as suggested in one of the GPs, there are about 10x as many infections per virus on a Windows system as there are on Linux. If it's closer to 10% ms (as suggested in several articles w/ Win @ 85% ms), then the ratio goes up to just over 22x.

That shows that my thoughts were a bit off (well, 22x versus "just a little slanted"), but that doesn't match the 187x (99442* Win / 530 Lnx) ratio implied above.

You'd still do better with a Mac, they're at almost 209x the number of users per vulnerability as a Win box, about 10x a Linux box.

* 99442 Win = 100,000 total - 530(Lnx) - 28(Mac), ignores all others for cellphones/etc.

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has a secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has a secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

if you'd like to see what RMS was thinking on this subject four years ago, see these two articles:

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=00/11/01/1 636202

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=00/12/14/1 910252

if you'd like to see what RMS was thinking on this subject four years ago, see these two articles:

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=00/11/01/1 636202

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=00/12/14/1 910252

I stumbled on this when I was looking for solutions to settle the "he did this to me"/"no I didn't" arguments between my kids. http://software.newsforge.com/software/04/10/11/17 58211.shtml?tid=152&tid=78&tid=137&tid=126

> "scalability problems" is still unrefuted

I'm not sure how high PostgreSQL scales, although I've heard of folks running terabyte-sized databases on it. At any rate, Fujitsu is helping to fund improvements in that area, so it's only getting better.

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has a secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

.. is here.

FreeBSD is a complete Unix-like operating system entirely developed by a single large team of programmers. This is in stark contrast to GNU/Linux which, as a complete operating system, has no central, cohesive developer base and is packaged in myriad different ways by myriad different distribution projects and companies; and proprietary Unixes, which are closed-source, restrictively licensed, and work on a comparatively small number of usually proprietary hardware architectures. FreeBSD has historically been clean, fast, reliable, and scalable. It's easy to use, learn, set up, and navigate from the command line, has more than 10,000 software programs in the Ports system, runs on a wide variety of hardware, and can easily be used for either a desktop or a server.

The transition to 5.x

Until the release of 5.3, the most recent "production release" was the FreeBSD-4 series, which is presently at version 4.10 and has been deemed the "Legacy" release in the wake of the 5.x branch going to STABLE. FreeBSD-5 was supposed to be a grand introduction of new technology -- a revolutionary improvement to the tried and true 4.x branch -- but soon after it left the gate, it got caught up in developer politics and failed implementations of too-ambitious theories among other questionable design decisions, causing some developers to fork the FreeBSD-4 project into a separate and more focused operating system.

The ULE (which is not an acronym; its full name is SCHED_ULE as opposed to the older SCHED_4BSD) scheduler continues to have stability and performance problems and was totally disabled instead of being made the default process scheduler in 5.3 as planned. The mix of threading subsystems still yields problems with efficiency and stability. Also, the networking subsystem may now be multithreaded and therefore faster on SMP systems, but users with some implementations of the 3Com (SysKonnect/Yukon) gigabit LAN chip are now unable to access their network at all because of new bugs that have popped up in the driver; other SysKonnect/Yukon users have problems under heavy network traffic, along with those using Intel Pro/1000 chips. Unfortunately all of our test systems use these network chips for onboard LAN; coincidentally they are two of the most popular gigabit LAN chipsets used on modern motherboards from major manufacturers. We also experienced lockups during boot if a custom-compiled kernel did not have SMP enabled on a Hyper-Threaded computer. A list of these and other errata can be found here.

Considering the long list of significant problems in FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE, it would seem irrational to recommend that anyone switch a production server from 4.x or any previous known-working 5.x release to 5.3. Just the same, the FreeBSD project maintains a migration guide for this purpose.

A lost lead

FreeBSD 5.x enjoyed an excellent head start in the fully 64-bit AMD64 operating system arena, but now trails

While it is true that both Red Hat and SuSE have free versions of their distributions, Fedora and SuSE Linux Personal/Professional respectively, and they provide free patches for these products, neither provides enterprise products for free.

So, why not use the free version? Quite simply, it is because the upgrade and obsolescence cycle of the free products is too rapid for enterprise environments. The Linux version upgrade process is definitely not without its problems, some of which are cited here. Using the free products would require these upgrades every year. This is an enormous problem for production environments where large numbers of systems with things like third party accounting applications or databases are used. This is also part of the reason that the major vendors, such as Oracle and SAP, will not support their product on the free distributions.

Novell/SuSE and Red Hat address this issue by offering Enterprise versions of their products. These Enterprise distributions have a much longer life/support cycle requiring far fewer upgrades. The third party vendors also support their applications on these Enterprise distributions which makes the Enterprise distributions a necessity for an enterprise that wishes to utilize Linux.

It is these Enterprise distributions, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8&9 and Red Hat Enterprise Server 2&3, that I was referring to in my previous post. Neither of these distributions are free. They both require a subscription fee for "support". This support is primarily password restricted access to the updates for these products. To the best of my knowledge, there is no free source for these updates. Red Hat does provide free access to the source code for their product but, Novell does not make even the source code available to the downloading public. If you want bug fixes and security updates for these products you must pay for it.

Microsoft is not blind to this. They are watching it very closely. If they determine that their customers in the enterprise space are suitably "softened up" by this business model it is entirely possible, if not likely, that Microsoft will try to cash in on it as well. If that happens, customers will be required to pay a subscription fee to access service packs for Windows instead of the free ones they get today.

Now, as far as I am concerned, it is fine to charge for your product. It is also OK to charge for version upgrades. I suppose that the software industry has trained me to be accustomed to this and accept it. However, I have a major issue with paying for bug and security fixes to software that I have already paid good money for. In my opinion, the software that I paid for is defective and I should not have to pay additional fees for the repair or removal of those defects. I suppose we will have to wait and see what the future holds.

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has a secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has a secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has a secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Clusters are proven to be cost effective, but they do require more labor to optimize code to get it to work in that environment. Its easier to have the system and the complier do the work for you in a single image system. This article address those issues and concerns. single image shared vs distributed memory in large Linux systems

Solaris will never be released with a GPL license (I'll bet they write their own "open source" license, finding the thousands of other FOSS licenses available as too free). And because Sun will never release Solaris under the GPL, Solaris is doomed to failure. GNU/Linux is unstoppable. GNU/Linux is the juggernaut, and Scott and Jonathan are the pavement that the GNU/Linux jalopy will blast across.

It sucks, but restrictive laws are necessary to avoid corruption.

Let me quote from an exchange from a hearing on Texas' SB 1579 (the Open-Source bill):

Sen. Carona: ~ Again, I don't understand why you all are so threatened by [the bill], but from a careful look at the lobbyists in this room that are representing Microsoft, and all of you here representing proprietary software companies which -- let's face it, that's where the big money is, it's not in Open Source it's in proprietary -- it's rather transparent as to why [the senators who are against the bill] all feel so threatened by this language [of the bill].

All elected officials care about is getting reelected. To do that takes cash and guess where that comes from?

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has a secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Oh, and the link ol' AC was pointing to (www.sco.com/redhat) has been de-defaced, but the mirror is here

here you go
http://www.newsforge.com/blob.pl?id=5c8a047f9da401 e00ad9b6f569742119

http://www.newsforge.com/blob.pl?id=5c8a047f9da401 e00ad9b6f569742119

Article on NewsForge and screenshot.

Article on NewsForge and screenshot.

1. can think of any ways to really improve on it
2. wants to hastily change it lest they somehow damage its legal watertightness ("if it ain't broke don't fix it").

However, there is now talk of releasing a new version (GNU GPL 3.0) and maybe a first draft of the new version sometime "soon" (in terms of it's slow development cycle--some people are bandying around 2006 as a possible date). There is no draft ATM but possible changes that have been talked about in the past include:

1. an anti-DMCA clause;
2. clarification of the section on granting patent licenses (and better protection against algorithmic patents in general);
3. possibly something about trusted/trecherous computing to stop free software being effectively shackled by that technology;
4. possibly allowing the offer of source code for binaries without source to refer to a URI where it can be downloaded (as opposed to the out-dated snail-mail method);
5. clarification (and possible tightening) of "as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed...with the major components...of the operating system on which the executable runs..." to close the loophole that people could argue quite a wide defintion of "major components of OS";
6. most significantly, a new clause saying that source code must be available to users who use the software remotely over a network (e.g.: the Internet). [See the relevant official GNU-GPL FAQ and section 2(d) of the Affero GPL (which is very similar to what the FSF are considering for the new GNU-GPL clause).]

See this FSF presentation and NewsFourge's two-part article interviewing RMS for more background--neither recent. Those are the main official sources I could find.

I'm sure a public draft will be released for discussion some time before anything gets finalised.

1. can think of any ways to really improve on it
2. wants to hastily change it lest they somehow damage its legal watertightness ("if it ain't broke don't fix it").

However, there is now talk of releasing a new version (GNU GPL 3.0) and maybe a first draft of the new version sometime "soon" (in terms of it's slow development cycle--some people are bandying around 2006 as a possible date). There is no draft ATM but possible changes that have been talked about in the past include:

1. an anti-DMCA clause;
2. clarification of the section on granting patent licenses (and better protection against algorithmic patents in general);
3. possibly something about trusted/trecherous computing to stop free software being effectively shackled by that technology;
4. possibly allowing the offer of source code for binaries without source to refer to a URI where it can be downloaded (as opposed to the out-dated snail-mail method);
5. clarification (and possible tightening) of "as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed...with the major components...of the operating system on which the executable runs..." to close the loophole that people could argue quite a wide defintion of "major components of OS";
6. most significantly, a new clause saying that source code must be available to users who use the software remotely over a network (e.g.: the Internet). [See the relevant official GNU-GPL FAQ and section 2(d) of the Affero GPL (which is very similar to what the FSF are considering for the new GNU-GPL clause).]

See this FSF presentation and NewsFourge's two-part article interviewing RMS for more background--neither recent. Those are the main official sources I could find.

I'm sure a public draft will be released for discussion some time before anything gets finalised.

If you want to protect yourself from software patents, there's only one way to do it. Get rid of them entirely. You may not agree with RMS on his free software philosophy, but you should be able to agree with him on his software patent philosophy.

But once running, I argue it takes less time than other distros. Setup vs. Long run, I'll take long run anytime. Setup is guaranteed to take a certain amount of time, however if I can accurately forsee how long it will take to keep a system up to date over time, I win.

I'm not a Gentoo "fanboy" by any stretch of the means, however I do prefer it over something like Fedora. Why? Because it gives me incentive to keep my system up-to-date. Updating individual packages is easy, simple, and relatively safe in Gentoo.. something I can't say about Up2Date for sure. I've used Gentoo in some low-priority production roles, and it's perfomed fine for years. Our RedHat boxes have as well, but the Gentoo ones are at least running the newest, secure software.

Additionally, I'm not a believer in the "old==stable" crap. If you're using old software, it's probably full of security holes. If it's new it "might" be unstable. I'll take the latter. this article at newsforge only helped me solidify my unpopular (but usually true) opinion.

Then again, opinions are like assholes, everyone's got one.

The are lots of articles on the web about recording with open source software. Also check out Dave Phillips's site and his articles in Linux Journal.

Maybe you should check: http://business.newsforge.com/business/04/05/04/10 58254.shtml for a guide of how to hire people.
I agree with it that the best way might be watching who is doing what in free software project and hiring the people that is best doing what you want him/her to do.
Maybe that person is from a place far away from you... the fact that a developer should work in your office is a myth that I hate to find everywhere.

Regarding Novell's friendliness to Linux and things Open Source, I just want to know what happened to Chris Stone and why his sudden departure occurred coincidental to the Microsoft settlement. This Newsforge article raises good questions.

Check this article out:
The end days of Ximian?
Tuesday May 25, 2004 (11:00 AM GMT)
Newsforge Topics: Desktop
By: Joe Barr
http://software.newsforge.com/software/04/05/24/18 56207.shtml?tid=130&tid=2&tid=82&tid=9 4

I watch novell.support.ximian.desktop

Matt Dillon seems a decent fellow. It's the others that border on psychotic. I wrote this review of DragonFly a few months ago and at least two people associated with the project more or less stalked me because they didn't like the article. I don't care what people post in the comment section, but, um, sending me threats via email? Putting up anti-Jem websites that obviously took a significant amount of time to create? Posting garbage to the forums on my site (which did not even carry the review)? Isn't that taking it a bit too far?

DragonFlyBSD: the OS of lunatics.

-Jem

I will start by admitting that I am just a dumb university student talking out my ass. I have never set up an enterprise scale cluster.

However, last january we set up a small (six node) cluster with the help of CLIC. Once we realized the link between a Mandrake and consective dead CD drives, we installed the cluster in little time.

CLIC might focus a little too much on userfriendlyness and a little too little on flexibility, but for our purposes it was great. It sports ganglia, gexec, distcc and MPI (and probably more), and administration and deployment of nodes is a breeze.

I heartily recommend CLIC for student/test/proof-of-concept projects.

But, if you need a hit-me-over-the-head obvious comparison, enumerating how OOo is better, then look at PC Pro's review of OOo1.1.2. Or you can read Replacing FrameMaker with OOo Writer, which makes several direct and indirect comparisons.

Or you can try editing a long document with OOo and see for yourself. Menus are flexible. File sizes are between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude smaller. Support for styles is better, as is the ability to export to PDF including PDF forms.

Acquisition and installation has no cost except labor, which is perhaps less since OOo is easier to install than MSO. There are no annual fees or overhead such as the tracking of licenses. There are no hidden gotchas such as the need to purchase additional servers, and user licenses for those servers, to manage Digital Restrictions, etc.

The JVM spec is open:

"Open" means that you can implement the spec as you like, and the JVM spec is not open (and neither are the language or the libraries): read the license linked to at the bottom of the spec that you yourself point to. Also read Stallman's take on this if you don't believe me.

Yes, I agree, they don't have a big "ECMA" or "ISO" badge, but well... since when were those worth a penny.

They guarantee that Microsoft can't play the kinds of legal games that Sun has been playing with the Java specification.

C++ has been ISO certified for years or decades,

Yes, and that has achieved exactly what it should: creating a choice of a large variety of compilers from many different vendors.

OK... let's say this: I like Javas design, you like C# design; it's futile to discuss taste issues, so I won't.

That's like saying that the difference betwee a dump truck and a school bus is a question of "taste". In fact, it's a difference in functionality, and a well-understood one at that. See here for a more extensive technical discussion of what Java is lacking if you don't believe me (the people there seem to have pretty much given up on Sun and Java, too).

I agree. It's fucking disgusting. This is not about quality, its entirely about getting the job done as cheap as possible, and if betraying their own country is a side-effect, then so be it.

Here's another example:

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/10/15/1 322259