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By the time you read this, FreeBSD 3.4 will have been released. Being a 3.x release, this primarily contains fixes and enhancements to existing parts of the system, rather than complete new functionality and subsystems. Those will come with the 4.0 release, later next year. That said, there are a few new developments that have been shaken out in the -current branch, and have been backported. Read on for more.

On the networking front, the 'netgraph' code has been integrated, giving a much more modular networking framework, allowing arbitrary protocols and transports to be connected together. Amongst other things, this means that PPP over ISDN and PPP over ethernet now work. Many ISPs want to support PPP over ethernet now, and FreeBSD is ideal for this environment. The netgraph code was written and donated to the FreeBSD project by Whistle, and interested hackers can read more information about netgraph.

ISDN support has been improved, with an updated i4b(4) driver. Amongst other things, this adds support for more ISDN cards, including Asuscom ISDNlink 128K, AVM Fritz!Card PCI and PNP, and the Siemens I-Surf 2.0.

There have been security improvements across the board, including a new FreeBSD auditing project, to inspect the source code for potential problems, and fix them as necessary. ICMP redirects, outgoing RSTs, and incoming SYN|FIN frames can all be blocked, to negate certain DoS attacks, and the packet forwarding system can be configured to do so without decreasing the TTL, making gateways and firewalls much less visible, to list a few of the security related enhancements.

The Linux ABI has been improved, thanks to the efforts of Marcel Moolenaar. Linux versions of Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament work flawlessly (and often faster) on FreeBSD, as do many other apps for which only Linux binaries are available.

As well as these, there have been the general plethora of fixes, updates, improvements to the documentation, and additions to the ports tree. There are currently more than 2,800 software ports available, from Apache, to Zope, which makes software installation that bit simpler for everyone.

FreeBSD 3.4 is available now.

Bob Frankenberg was CEO of Novell in the early nineties, when Novell were marketing DR-DOS as a replacement for MS-DOS (DR-DOS is now the subject of a law suit between Caldera and Microsoft). In part of this CBS interview he explains why his new company, Encanto, is not using Microsoft software, and why they chose FreeBSD. Read on for a few notes.

There are a number of interesting things to take from this article. It's unsurprising that an ex-Novell CEO does not want to use MS software after the way Novell were treated by them, it is mildly surprising that he hasn't chosen a Novell, or other 'industry standard' solution.

Encanto's choice of FreeBSD over Linux is also interesting. Naturally, we all know that FreeBSD is the best choice (heh heh heh :-)), but Linux (or Solaris) would be the anti-MS knee jerk choice. Using FreeBSD suggests that they've actually investigated the different OS choices open to them, and chosen one on merit -- or that the first SA they hired preferred FreeBSD over Linux.

As ever, the media have got the licensing issues wrong. One of the key things about the BSD license is that you don't have to contribute enhancements back to the original codebase if you don't want to -- of course, that doesn't stop many companies from doing so anyway, because it's better business sense in the long run.

Having looked at the Encanto web site, and the products they're selling, the license may very well be the key issue. They sell network appliances -- plug and play web servers, that sort of thing, and the ability to make proprietry changes to the code base to support their product (and enhance their product's value) without having to disclose those changes is probably key to their business plan.

This is quite similar to the approach taken by Whistle and their Interjet devices. Whistle have been the classic example of a company which has contributed code back, even though the license doesn't force them to -- typically 6 to 12 months after they've deployed it in their product, and reaped the commercial benefit. This lets them recoup their development costs plus profit, and lets the rest of the community benefit from (and extend and support) the code later on.

Finally, CBS's phrase, "so-called open-source software" should get them a stiff letter from ESR...