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Walnut Creek CDROM And BSDi To Merge
It's been planned for some time, and on March 4 at a user
group meeting in the Netherlands, Jordan Hubbard let slip the
news that the ink was dry, and Walnut Creek CDROM, a big
player in the development and promotion of FreeBSD, and BSDi are merging. Obviously,
this has big implications for FreeBSD. You can read what's been
written so far at this DaemonNews article. Later today we'll have an interview with Walnut Creek president, Bob Bruce. If you've got questions, then you know the drill. . . Oh, OK. If you don't know the drill, post them here,
let the moderators moderate them up, and I'll make sure they get an
airing later.
How the hell can anyone think that that was informative?
I bet you guys just HATE XFree86, Apache and *BSD.
Look at the walnut creek web site, dull, boring, stale. Look at the FreeBSD site, the home page hasn't been touched in well over a year. Look at the BSDi site and you would think they were out of business. You can't even find a comprehensive feature list for BSD/OS. I think it is telling that none of the sites listed above have an announcement of the merger!
So is FreeBSD repositioning itself to focus on the server segment of the market, leaving the workstation segment to Linux?
What happened to all the good software? Seems like a prelude to the end of both BSDi and FreeBSD. No more Net or FreeBSD no Linux no XFree86 no Mozilla, only some windows stuff. What is going on? Seems like a sellout to WinWorld. Changes are starting and so far it isn't good.
Are there any plans for an IPO?
BSDI's releases have not been 'where you can only re-link the binaries for the kernel'; full source (minus a few NDA-restricted items) has always been available for BSD/OS. However, some people explicitely asked for a cheaper, binary only package, so BSDI made that available in addition to the full source thing. I'm not worried about source code availability, now or in the future.
Hi I would like to know how much of BSDi's code base already contain FreeBSD code? Thank You Malartre
Talk about first posters, at least they don't pretend to have a clue!
When asked about varying flavors of Unix, I've been telling people that "BSD/OS is basically FreeBSD that costs a whole bunch of money and lags 2-3 years behind the actual FreeBSD tree"...
Having recently given BSD/OS the boot at my place of business in favor of other things that don't suck nearly as much, I can safely say that this will not bother me. BSD/OS users stand to gain a lot from this, of course, since this will lose the large gap that was between the two projects time-wise.
Look at it this way. When did Linux get SMP? Then when did FreeBSD get SMP? Then *how much longer* did it take for BSD/OS? Considering how much we were paying for the privilege of being in the dark, it was a no brainer to go to another system.
I should have known something was up when I found out that Rob Kolstad was no longer at the helm.
I saw Jordan Hubbard speak when he came to Japan a couple of years ago, and he swore up and down that there wouldn't be a PowerPC port of FreeBSD because the PowerPC was dying with Apple. Nice to see that he doesn't mind eating his words
Maybe it has been said on other dicussions but then you should say that article is redundant.
Linux runs on more, and a much wider range of, CPUs. NetBSD artificially inflates their numbers by counting every architecture separately, while Linux lumps all ports to Motorola 68k processors as the m68k port, for example, instead of as separate Mac, Atari, etc. ports like NetBSD. Similarly, the S/390 Linux port is one Linux port but would be four NetBSD ports, assuming NetBSD ever gets around to supporting S/390 (the Linux port runs on the bare metal or as a virtual session under any of the three OSes available for S/390).
If you meant Cold Fusion the Web application development tool (or server side script, however you wanna call it), it is owned by Allaire, not Cygnus.
wtf why is this guy moderated as troll? he has some interesting points, moderate up
That reminds me: nik, any idea when I can expect to get my 4.0 CD in the mail?
- Jesus Christ
(#154953, account temporarily disabled for being moderated down, imagine that!)
I am the Lord.
God Hates Moderators.
BSDI has been struggling for quite some time. They have been in a hiring freeze for over a year, which is most unusual in the normally hot tech world. There is speculation that several more BSDI employees could lose their jobs as result of this merger.
Only time will tell if this is a good idea. It may be too little, too late.
Exactly.
However, while commercial backing usually means more resources for a project, you have to question commercial entities on their interest in a project to see if it's goals match your own and if those goals are good for your community. It's a sure bet that BSDI is only interested in FreeBSD because it feels that it can gain financially from the merger.
This isn't any different from Sendmail, RedHat, Corel, SuSE and you name it.
If a good balance is maintained and BSDI makes worthwhile contributions to the FreeBSD codebase then I would say this is a "Good Thing (TM)", however if BSDI comes in and hijacks the FreeBSD codebase without making any contributions back to the community then I would have a different opinion.
I suggest you actually read the article!
The codes will merge, it will be under BSDL(BSD License, not Boundary-Scan Description Language).
And it's most surtanly a good thing for FreeBSD, and in the end I hope it's a bad thing for Corel, RedHat and the other Linux IPOs.
BSDi is taking over FreeBSD and releasing it under non-BSD license. BSDi was upset for a very long time with FreeBSD because people could not justify purchasing expensive OS when the equivalent is available at no cost. Great move BSDi!
What happened is someone with a pro-linux-over-all-else ajenda saw the line showing that Linux was #2 server os and decided it was worth moderating up.
/. is all about fitting the politics of the moderator of the day. Given there are more Pro-linux-only voices here, thoese posts get higher moderation.
Moderation on
I'm shocked that Walnut Creek and BSDi announce that they are going to unilaterally make major changes to the FreeBSD code base as though they owned it.. They don't own it! FreeBSD was supposed to belong to the community and not be controlled by any one corporate interest.
While this merger may be ok for WC and BSDi, it relegates the rest of the community as observers who have less and less control over the direction of the project.
It doesn't mention them because it's just what it says, ***FreeBSD*** history.
The others fall under UN*X history, not that I would mind them getting some credit for their work.
They could have called it FreeBSDi :-)
FreeBSD/OS
Btw, a hot issue in upcoming FreeBSD releases is CLUSTERING. Jordan also spoke about the design of a competely new packaging system (object orientated). There was also some commotion from BSDi/Walnut Creek after Jordan bringing the news of the merge out. The pressured the NLFUG/NLUUG (NL Unix User Group) not to bring out the news.
:)
You can take a look at the NLFUG page at:
http://www.nlfug.nl (sorry only in Dutch)
- Snowdude
http://futurism.system-x.org (try it, I dare ya
that we finaly will see proper soundcard support in FreeBSD?
Will we see some general work at getting FreeBSD, and BSD in general, to get the reconition it deserves?
Ummm, code fusion is cygnus's IDE and has *nothing* to do with cold fusion.
If Win2000's biggest threats are from NT and 98, where exactly is Linux in that equation? Serious question here.
NO! He wasn't moderated by Anti-GPL people, he was moderated down for beeing Anti-BSDL, there is HUGE difference you zealot.
Linux 2.2 does smp only slightly better then freebsd 4.0 if any at all. NetBSD owns multi platform if anyone does (go check them out at http://www.netbsd.org) This merger in time will give FreeBSD better smp support (and linux will get better smp support in 2.4) so on that area it will just help to stay on even ground. Also, FreeBSD may lack in some areas where linux is better, but the same is true the other way around.
imho both have their own place, and both can benefit from eachother since both are open source, which will at least help in that people can see how something is done (even when they can't take the code because of the license issues)
Bart
If the code is licensed under a standard 4-clause Berkeley license, the GPL would prevent its inclusion in Linux.
First off, you should know that besides "down, not across" the other motto is "all software sucks - some just sucks less"...
The focus is not on quality. I never ran BSD/OS SMP, since I bailed for Linux long before 4.0 came out. The issue was on timing. Linux would get something, then FreeBSD, and then BSDI would trot it out many months or years later.
Paying for that privilege irked me, and it wasn't even MY money - rather, it was the department's budget. So the fact that Linux or FreeBSD wouldn't cost me anything didn't make me change - it was merely a nice bonus.
Here's a story for you:
There once was a system connected through corp.bsdi.com via modem. It was getting bombarded by a script kiddie sending spoofed pings "from" 1.2.3.4 to an address in that network. Despite the fact that the packets had to come from the Alternet T1 through a BSD/OS box ("external" IIRC), through another BSD/OS box ("bsdigate"?), then through #3 (corp) and actually #4 (the one on the other end of the modem), nobody could do anything to stop it!
When the company itself couldn't do anything to stop the flood despite a very easy "rule" (drop all ip packets of protocol 1 from 1.2.3.4), that told me that fixing such things myself in the future would be futile.
There may have been a solution ala ipfw, but I certainly didn't know it. The real kicker was that the people involved on that end didn't know either. That's just one part of the larger puzzle.
What can I say - we outgrew it.
One thing I can't stand is people like you that you have that answears to everything.
Hwo cares if someone can make a closed src version, it still benefits humanity, more choices.
Sorry, I now have to hit you with the clue-stick... ***WHACK!!!***
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Right next to FreeBSD are a whole whackload of Linuxes, and 4.4BSD. I believe Walnut Creek is also the official distribution site of Slackware (I might be wrong here), yet also distributes Red Hat. I can't verify that right now, since it appears all the linuxes on ftp.cdrom.com have disappeared. :)
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
People keep saying this, and I keep asking for the URL of this magic tool that causes the existing, BSD-licensed source code to disappear from every single server in the whole wide world.
Will you be the first to tell me where I can get this magic tool, so that I can stop FreeBSD, Sendmail, BIND, or Apache from being free just because some closed-source project uses code from it?
Linux may support more cpus then netbsd, but supporting the cpu in a machine is not the same as supporting a machine. Nice example can be found in the mips support for linux.. a dec station and an SGI indy share a lot, but the indy requires me to get stuff from SGI's open source cvs/ftp servers to make it run. So out of the box Linux may have the potential to support all of the boxes with a certain cpu, but that doesn't mean it actually runs on them.
Also, something like a console driver on an indy is really very different from something like a console driver for a dec station. The bus architectures are completely different, just the cpu happens to be from the same brand (and sometimes even indentical) and more or less compatible. (a nice problem in this is that the handling of big/little enndian code on SGI or DEC boxes is entirely different. A mips cpu in theory can operate in both modes, but not so on a dec station)
Anyway, different machines that happen to employ the same or very simular cpus can be 2 different ports for very good reasons like efficiency of the code and hardware specific requirements that are not cpu bound. By merging it into one big tree, and relying on 3rd party support to make it work isn't the same as supporting many platforms out of the box, and it is bound to be less efficient in both speed and memory usage because of the overhead of supporting entirely different pieces of hardware that happen to use the same instruction set.
It does however allow Linux to run on a huge amount of different devices.. that is of course true, but i personally don't care for that, I rather have a distribution that is actually built and maintained for the specific type of machine that I want to run (which in the case of my indy still happens to be Irix and not an open source unix... but that may change when XFree gets to supporting the Indies graphics hardware with some decent performance)
For my Vax linux is not a serious option given its still experimental state. NetBSD has a very decent release for Vax which so far proved to work very well. It doesn't support the graphics console of my vax, but heh, whats the use for a relatively slow 19' monochrome graphics console when I have 2 21' high speed true color graphics displays already). Linux so far gets as far as actually booting and initializing its kernel... after that it dies when actually trying to talk to the network. Since it netboots that is a rather big problem, and since it loads its kernel perfectly well from the bootserver (and it works perfectly well with NetBSD) I can assume that my ethernet hardware is not broken.
Anyway, its nice to support a zilion cpus, but its more usefull to have actual working implementations for different hardware platforms, and the requirements for a port are much more dictated by IO subsystems then by the actual instruction set used by a cpu.
I'd say that at this point they're destined to forever play catch-up to Linux. Linux owns multi-platform and SMP, and I see no reason why merging BSD/OS and FreeBSD would change that.
It's sad, really--if it weren't for that @#$% lawsuit, BSD would be where Linux is today. As it stands, Linux has a three-year head start.
Well, it depends. As looking at web statistics where I work, Mac IS the second most used OS outside of the Windblows world, but Linux comes in a close third. However, for general use, and possibly for servers, Linux may slip upwards in the rankings. At the FreeBSDCon last year, Jordan did mention that some big stuff was coming down the pike, I didn't realize this could of be what he intended. There were a couple big pow-wow's late at night, and after one, folks seemed really giddy. This is a GOOD thing for the FreeBSD and the xBSD community in general. With so many divergent Linux distributions, and having had my experience with just about every OS out there, I'd say that a BSD based platform is more of a sure bet to look to migrate to. The reason, as other posters (read: poseurs) mentioned about some features, notably SMP, coming out later on the BSD side of things, is that the BSD community does a rigorous amount of testing a performance tuning before releasing upgrades and features. Short of clustering, I'd challenge a "bake-off" of simple OS performance between any Linux distro and FreeBSD. BSD will wipe the floor becuase it more stable, more secure, and just written well by folks who know what they hell they're doing. Plus, for Mac folks.. while talking to Fred Sanchez at the FreeBSDCon, he mentioned that the ONLY reason Mach was at the core of OS X was that the director of development was a comrade of mine back at my alma-mater and was the chief developer of Mach. Most of the core OS team wanted a straight BSD core, but the dir. wanted Mach... oh well. At least they haven't totally lost their minds at Apple.
This merger announcement has me shaken.
The FreeBSD trademark has long been held by Walnut Creek CDROM, with some rather arbitrary restrictions on its use to describe derivative works that improve things such as the install process, or the overall "new user" experience.
I notice that Jordan Hubbard's FreeBSD History at FreeBSD History is a bit revisionist.
It casually mentions Bill Jolitz, but fails to mention John Sokol, who posted the original 386BSD code to the net, Jesus Monroy, who had a lot to do with the move from 386BSD 0.0 to 386BSD 0.1, or Terry Lambert, who wrote the original FAQ, patch kit, and patch kit production software, and then handed it off (as far as I can tell from the archives, the phrase "the patch kits last 3 coordinators: Nate Williams, Rod Grimes and myself" means "everyone ever involved in administering or creating the patch kit, except Terry").
It also fails to mention that Bill Jolitz had originally lent official support a "386BSD 0.5" interim release, based on the patch kit work, or that "the patchkit swelled unconfortably every day" is a paraphrase of Lynne Jolitz's complaints, which resulted in Bill Jolitz's "rude" withdrawl of support.
This seems antithetical to the BSD credo of "credit when due", and bodes ill for a future where it appears the source tree will have to be closed down for a while, while proprietary bits are sorted out of BSD/OS for integration.
I am unsure of what will occur as a result of this merger, and the idea of the merger itself makes me rather anxious about the historically centralized control of the project by a few people who initially checked in a large amount of code, but later became a barrier to progress, and the centralized control of the "BSD" related trademarks.
People who argue over such issues have long suggested that it would be possible for a commercial entity to "hijack" a BSD project; I have always publically dismissed this, but it seems that perhaps I was wrong. If so, I have a lot of crow to eat, which would be made ever more bitter for it being the result of failed idealism on my part.
I hope that statements are issued soon, clarifying what this merger is going to mean, the process by which it is going to be accomplished, the status of the use of BSD/OS binary-only drivers in a future FreeBSD, the permissable public use of the FreeBSD trademark going forward (preferrably, a trust will be established), and so on.
I feel like Tim O'Reilly, decrying the Amazon patents. 8-(
Actually this is not true. FreeBSD has always went where its developers wanted it to go.. Luckily a user can also become a developer and as such get some influence in which direction it moves. Like with any open source project, the direction it moves is the one for which the code happens to be there. There is planning involved of course, but the availability of code is always the thing that determines what will actually be there.
Is this direction going to be consistent with the new FreeBSD? Some people would like to see FreeBSD hit the desktop, or move into embedded systems; Where does FreeBSD want to go today?
As you can read on FreeBSD's site, FreeBSD aims to be a commercial quality unix like operating system.
So far it has been employed for both desktop and server usage, but its key strength seems to be in the area of (internet connected) servers. I think BSDi would have been killed over time by FreeBSD because the quality and continuity of development in FreeBSD has been causing many companies to support either generic or in more cases very specific implementations of it. Over time that would prolly have killed BSDi which till now had the advantages of slightly better technology in specific areas (smp to name one) and its much better support. Those 2 are welcome additions for FreeBSD, and this will save BSDos from simply going under without anyone profiting from it.
To me its a really good thing to see 2 major BSD distributions team up and merge, instead of the splitoffs that we got so used to in BSD land. Now lets indeed hope this spirit is allowed to stay so way can keep potential pissing contests to a minimum.
Bart.
I didn't moderate this up or down, even though I was able to. As a member of your so-called Anti-GPL faction, I felt it best to moderate elsewhere where my biases would not intrude.
But I fully understand why it was moderated down. He made some statements that were patently false with no basis in fact or logic, whose only purpose was to cast FUD upon non-copyleft licenses. How would you moderate a post that had Anti-GPL FUD on the order of "you can't compile a non-GPL application with gcc".
In Boardwatch magazine afew months ago, JKH was said to have made mention of an unnamed big player entering the FreeBSD world.
This looks like it...
This is extremely good news. We've been a BSDI BSD/OS shop ever since we opened in 1996, and just recently we made the decision to start trying out FreeBSD on one of our production servers. I've been using FreeBSD for about 2 years (since 2.2.6) and have had nothing but good experiences with it. This move by BSDI and WC definitely means good things for the BSD community, and it'll make my task of getting FreeBSD on all of our servers much easier.
It sounds like at least all of FreeBSD will initially remain free. How will the freedom of future feature additions be determined? Will the two development teams haggle over every one, or is a well-defined policy in the works?
Go to slackware.com and read the news at the top.
--
All Glory To The Hypnotoad!
Too bad that Network Associates has now stopped development of Gauntlet for BSD/OS. I believe there is supposed to be one more release. They seem to be concentrating on Solaris and NT. We are on Gaunlet 4.2 at work and we're looking for something else. Maybe a home grown OpenBSD firewall...
Bullshit.
Slack has some services enabled in inetd.conf. Specifically: time, ftp, telnet, comsat, shell, login, ntalk, pop3, imap2, finger and auth. This is the same list that most distros enable, though other distros may enable more of them (RH used to...to lazy to check if they still do, so take that with a large pinch of salt).
Besides, I was speaking of the the programs in the distro and the basic framework (suid root programs/scripts, group and user level security, other approriate file permissions, etc. For any given environment it is up to the admin/user to take necessary steps to provide configuration level security. Slack has had a respectably low number of security advisories over the years, esp. comared to other Linux distros. I think it would be great if setup took pains to get a reasonable take on the use intended for the machine and set configuration accordingly. But the admin/user will always need to take some steps, as there are just too many variables.
As for the new updates...I don't think Slack will disappear. Folks like it. I am concerned that it will become even more marginalized and that the Linux standards process is missing out on some good input.
You are correct about one thing, though. This is off topic. My bad.
--
If your map and the terrain differ,
trust the terrain.
This sounds like pretty good news to me. I've been attempting to push the use of FreeBSD within a certain gargantuan Financial Services company which I work for. My main stumbling block has been the lack of a corporate entity from which we could purchase the software and support. The corporate-type managers whom I have to convince to let me do this are very stubborn on that point.
At the same time, as a personal user of FreeBSD, I'm a bit apprehensive of this. Because I work in Corporate America, I have a healthy fear of companies and their motives. At the same time, however, I have faith in Hubbard, Lehey, and the rest of the FreeBSD team. They've worked long and hard, and I don't see how FreBSD could change from being open-source or free (beer, speech, take your pick). It would alienate their core user-base, and go against the grain of the thirty-year history of BSD UNIX.
All in all, I'd say this is a Good Thing(TM)
In addition, the link you posted for Info-ZIP is incorrect. Right now, most of http://www.freesoftware.com/ either redirects to http://www.cdrom.com/ or mirrors it; either way, the Info-ZIP tree on the latter is a 10-month-old broken mirror, and therefore so is anything that mirrors or redirects to it. The correct URLs for Info-ZIP and zlib are:
There is no local HTTP access to this tree currently. There are, however, mirrors overseas that provide HTTP service. Check the respective home pages, and if they don't mention "freesoftware.com" somewhere on them, they are not up to date!
--
-- GRR: Newtware, PNG Group, AlphaWorld Map, Info-ZIP, Google cluster infrastructure,
Well, Red Hat merged with / bought Cygnus earlier this year, and so far there's no sign that Cygnus's proprietary stuff such as Code Fusion will be released under GPL. Not that they are under any obligation to, of course.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
This is why supporters of both licenses have a legitimate point if they claim that their license if more free than the other one.
There is only one thing to say about this:
It is up to the author to decide whether he wants everyone to gain from his changes, or whether he wants only free-software/open-source users to gain from it.
I personally prefer to have everyone gain from my code, as small as it is. My theory is, that if someone gets to use my FOO code in their system, then that's great, because maybe their users will get a better FOO product than the original people could have provided.
On the other hand, some people like to assert in their licensing that since they provided the source code, they get to say that anyone who makes changes to it (and distributes that change) has to return their code free to the community. Unfortunately this occasionally prevents the use of that code in projects that are unable to provide the code that links with it for free for various reasons (Such as, the code was written under NDA to another company, and as such, the system provider cannot actually give that code away free, and as such, can't then use and change the "free" code that is available).
It could be (dangerously) generalized to depend on whether you're a "free everything" person, or a "improve everything" person, although I can see myself getting flamed for using such general terms. (:
I'm a committee member of a Linux User Group (even though I don't use Linux much), and after last night's meeting (on OpenBSD) we were all at the pub, drinking, as all South African open-source people seem to do, and we started getting philosophical.
An interesting, although oft-mentioned, reason why we shouldn't start slating projects that do roughly the same job is to foster competition, to have a 'biodiversity'. A case in point is qmail vs. postfix in the "secure fast mailer" section (vs. exim vs. sendmail in general too).
While it's perl's motto that "There is more than one way" to do something, I think it is almost necessary that there should be, so that there can be users of differing ways, who can have friendly competition to improve their programs against each other, leading to two or more very good products.
(But then we were drinking, so maybe this requires more thinking *grin*)
From what I read in the Daemonnews article, in the end (which may take a while), there'll be only one source tree, still called FreeBSD. It will contain roughly the existing mish-mash of BSD licensed, GPL (gcc and numerous friends), and beerware licensed code.
The only code not scheduled for inclusion is that which was written by BSDI under NDA to another company, since they're under obligation by the NDA not to release that code.
This isn't necessarily a problem.
For some people, providing good code to all takers is what makes them feel happy and fulfilled, knowing that their code is going to benefit end-users of some system, where that system does not creating their own, possibly inferior, implementation. In the end, there'll be a massive collection of good code that anyone can use. Due to various reasons, many companies make their changes, use them for a few months for some competitive advantage, and contribute them back (Netgraph and other items from Whistle are a good example).
Other licenses, by restricting their uses to open source projects, may lead a system to reimplement something poorly, and their end-users will suffer for it. However, it does end up with a massive collection of good code, and may help non-open systems become open source, which provides all the benefits of open source to that whole system, instead of just the original code.
I ran BSDI several times as Internet servers and always opted to reinstall in favor of Linux and FreeBSD. The user restrictions alone were enough to drive me nuts.
Not to mention the inherent wierdness of the way the ran the system.
Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
How is that a "feat"? AFAICS, it just illustrates the weakness of the BSD license: Anyone could easily keep a closed-source OS competitive with an open-source template that was free for the taking. What was that somebody said about "Microsoft's" implementation of DNS (or whatever it was) in Windows 2000...?
And before you call me a "zealot" again, Arandir, let me say I'm not. (Not much, anyway! :-) It's just that IMnshO, there's such a thing as too "free" -- if you want something to remain free, you better not give away the "freedom" to make it non-free. And if something can't remain free longer than it takes the first "entrepreneur" to grab it and lock it up, how "free" is it really?
But which "open source concept" is it that is "completely commercially viable"?I'm not sure about the commercial aspect -- maybe BSDi has been making money like hay, and much of the current Linux boom is just artificial stock-exchange valuations that seem totally out of whack with the real world -- but I am pretty sure that precisely this fact -- that Linux, not *BSD, is now the second-most-widely-used PC OS in the world -- says something about which licensing scheme it is that is more "viable" as an "open source concept".
Christian R. Conrad
MY opinions, not my employer's - Hedengren, Finland.
Christian R. Conrad
mail me at iki.fi ; same user ID as here
But, back on topic.. I don't think slackware is going to disappear.. if you look at the article right below this one.. slackware just released a new version!
As has been stated before, it will remain open under the terms the BSDL (BSD License) provides.
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
The BSD's, as in the people driving it, aren't interested in being on everyone's desktop.
They just want to be here. We don't really see our place as Linux competitor, but merely as another Open Source OS which strives to be around making sure people have a choice of decent OS's to use for their goals.
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
Continuing into the direction we have always headed.
Frankly the roots clearly are in the server market, but FreeBSD is just as good as for the desktop. I think the modest and non-flashy default install makes this possible.
Personally I wouldn't mind FreeBSD staying in the server side of the whole ballgame, but given the `legion' of commiters, of which I am one, we clearly have one side leaning more to servers and one side more to the desktop and this will most definately ensure that the result will be usuable for both.
Actually, FreeBSD is already there for embedded systems, in which case we call it picoBSD and which resides in the source tree as well.
And all in all, to be fair, the larger part of where the OS is going depends on the userbase, and the userbase has been predominant by ISP-like types from the start...
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
Just to clarify something, Microsoft already took BSD Licensed code.
Just strings(1) through, for example, ftp.exe.
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
No ramifications for 4.0. We have come too far into the last RELEASE cycle to delay longer. However, BSD/OS has incorporated a lot from FreeBSD in the past, so it shouldn't be that hard of an undertaking, but it remains fun to see how this all goes... =)
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
I am pleased of this merger. I'm sure the FreeBSD core team is drooling and anxiously awaiting BSDi's code.
Having been introduced to unix through linux, and then introduced to FreeBSD through linux. IMHO, I am very impressed with FreeBSD 3.4 and their ports system.
Having said that, I'm not suprised in the least that BSDi wants to use freeBSD as the core of their OS. This would definitely result in faster FreeBSD developement.
I can just see it now, linux users, like myself, making a switch to freeBSD with the next killer version!
I'm also assuming BSD/OS will, essentially, be a commercially packaged FreeBSD?
"If a show of teeth is not enough, bite
That's a pretty fucked up .sig you have there. All Advantage causes half the fucking spam there is.
Phillip
That's Alphas, not Sparcs. Though a Sparc port may be in the future because of this merger.
--
My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
The most obvious question I can think of is if the result of the merger will stay open source, or if the code will become like BSDi where you can only re-link the binaries for your kernel. I am also wondering quite simply if the result will be a free operating system. I would guess that it wouldn't because of the BSDi employees who aren't just working on this in their free time.
Let us remember two things. In the years before GPL advocates tried to stir up fear that since FreeBSD is under the BSDL, the project could all of a sudden go closed and try to force its users to pay for it, etc. This was to move development over to GPL, and to hurt BSD when it was suffering after the lawsuit ended. Get em while their down, eh?
The problem with that is that its STILL UNDER THE BSD LISCENSE. There are ~200 committers, and the FreeBSD project does not pay anyone. JKH and a few others do work for WC Cdrom, but that was because they were offered jobs to work closer to full time on the project. WC was already a major supporter of FreeBSD before that. JKH and others didn't just jump out and make some firm and IPO BSD to death. They followed the code, not the $.
That said, BSDI does not own FreeBSD. What they own is WC Cdrom, who is the main distributor of FreeBSD. BSDI also employees top FreeBSD developers, but as they have no say in what FreeBSD itself does, the most they can force upon them is to merge the two codebases. If they don't feel like committing it, they can leave BSDI with their own splinter.
If BSDI did close FreeBSD with JKH's support, then the ~180 or so major developers on the project would splinter off and make it open again. The closed would die without developers. Actually, the closed would be considered a splinter from FreeBSD, and simply the developers that left.. There are FreeBSD derived OSes out there. With BSD, unless developerrs just get tired with the project, it can't die..
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
This is a very good point, and I wish the moderators would moderate it up.
My first thoughts were about the two places I'm most likely to be found at: loader and sysinstall. They are both critical elements at support, so I expect seeing new faces around soon.
And that is where my mind end up wandering to: the new faces. I have been following FreeBSD mailing lists for many, many years, and have a general knowledge of who's who among the ~200 committers. Now there will be many new faces in a short period of time, people with very strong technical background, and very familiar with certain parts of the system, and I don't know them. I wonder what the implications of that will be.
(8-DCS)
FreeBSD's bus_space is home-made, inspired on NetBSD stuff.
<p>
The newbus vs newconfig approach, though, it's quite different.
(8-DCS)
What will be difference between the purchasable BSD and the FreeBSD? What kind of corporate features and software will be available in the pay-for version?
How will this affect companies involved in virtual hosting modifications to BSDI?
Hehheh.. :) I've been trying to figure out how I can get a couple of the dolls shipped with our next subscription set and get work to pay for them. ;)
F.
#include sig.h
..and I'll form the head!!
What next, should Redhat and the other successful companies run around buying closed source companies and release their source, maybe they should do this immediately before their market price crashes :-). Even if they go belly up afterwards they still will have achieve opening up the source. A cunning idea methinks
I was really hoping that when RH aquired cygnus, it would lead to cygnus being fully opened up. Sadly this hasn't happened (yet). dammnit...
- Aidan
Yet Another Example of /.'s Broken Moderation System.
"PC operating system" They are probably discounting Apple HW for that figure. That said, is it really fair to lump all WIndows together? (x has the most, but NT has about 30 million desktops I believe. Even 3.1 probably outweighs Linux.
matt
1. They wouldn't have had to merge to accompilsh this
2. If they contribute _one_ more (they've contributed stuff in the past) thing (And they've stated intent to contribute everything save code under NDA) to FreeBSD, it's all good. We aren't reliant on them to, but it'd be great.
3. Perhaps more important than the source base is the fact that BSDI has money and resources. This is A Good Thing.
-bugg
The media hype surrounding Linux and the run up of stock prices last year fueled mergers among companies visible as "Linux companies". But the BSD world seemed to be just quietly moving forward. Nothing in the article led me to believe that there is a downside to this. I wonder if it will draw more people to BSD now that it is looking more like a unified effort to the outside world.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
phk,
thanks for your comments. I am glad to hear a non-WC core member's take on the situation.
As far as "the best connectivity in the world", may I speculate (no, I don't have any knowledge) that this might have something to do with a large corporate supporter of FreeBSD?
that is because they moved all of the software to ftp.freesoftware.com (aka ftp.wccdrom.com aka ftp.freebsd.org). Don't worry, they did it to everyone, from FreeBSD itself to Info-ZIP to Slackware...
Please provide a downloadable codebase of the BSD/OS source ASAP. There are several projects that will benefit from your generosity. When will the existing BSD/OS source be available?
Joining with FreeBSD may be a way for BSDI to get on the open source bandwagon, and save their jobs in the process.
I bought a BSDI distro once, to make my idiot IT manager happy. (He wanted to be sure we we're only running liscensed software.) It was funny to see that BSDI was at least a year behind FreeBSD on features and architecture. Looked like a bad Slakware knockoff.
The next question is, when will RH or VA buy SCO? Are there any good reasons to do so? Tarantella for example?
Be Inc. has no appreciable market share, and unless it eventually becomes profitable, it might make a good front end replacement for X. (It already implements a UNIX-flavoured backend.) But who would be willing to put up with Fearless Leader?
From what I've heard so far from people close to the source, FreeBSD will NOT be changing significantly in the way we do things. The new merged company won't have direct control over anything, but will just contribute code via the "usual mechanisms" open to everyone (submitting patches, etc).
Specifically, I'd expect to see various BSDI developers who are doing useful merge work being granted commit privileges to apply their changes to FreeBSD directly, subject to the usual architectural and review policies, overseen by FreeBSD core.
"The FreeBSD Project" is being set up as an independent, nonprofit organisation of some description to ensure it stays independent of control by BSDI/WC.
Basically, what I expect to see is pretty much what we've seen from FreeBSD's main corporate sponsor in the past (Walnut Creek), namely that they pay a number of developers to work full-time on FreeBSD as members of the wider developer community, and they profit from selling the resulting product on CDROM. Since it's open source, any other company can also sell it as well (CheapBytes does).
FreeBSD-derived distributions are another issue - if someone wants to change bits of the "official FreeBSD" and repackage it, it's arguable they should have to obtain permission to use the FreeBSD trademark, which is intended to be transferred to the Foundation.
The main difference I expect to see from the status quo that we'll get a LOT more developers contributing code, and a lot of this code will hopefully be juicy BSD/OS code (e.g. I'm told their SMP implementation is quite good). The new combined company will have a lot more resources to contribute to FreeBSD-related services, like support contracts, training, book publication, advertisement, paid development sponsoring, etc.
I think this is great!
After the CSRG at Berkeley dissolved (lost funding) a bunch of the 4.4BSD guys got together and formed BSDI (Mike Karels in particular). So in a sense this merger between BSDI and the principal sponsors of FreeBSD reunites FreeBSD with its' history.
The www.bsdi.com website has a fairly good section on the company and its history..
which came as somewhat of a surprise to the infozip people; we've still got a lot of broken links to clean up. The PNG site has also moved, to
but the cdrom.com PNG site is still there for now. At least it was last night...yup, still there.
FreeBSD is hardly optimized for the sparcs.
What advantages does the BSDi codebase have over the existing FreeBSD code? What's likely to be incorporated into FreeBSD? Other than more coders, is anything else going to change?
Here's a quote from the article:
"Once BSDI releases the code to FreeBSD, it wall fall under a very liberal license. Basically, if the code is incorporated into an existing open source project, it will fall under the licensing terms of that project. That means that any open source project can incorporate BSDI's code..."
If the code can be re-licensed for use by ANY open source project, would that include Linux? For those kernel hackers, is there anything in BSDI that you would like to see included in the Linux kernel, perhaps for 3.0?
Yeah - make that x86 + alpha. I personally don't see any more BSD mergers coming. BSDI never had much a 'niche' IMHO - I still don't understand the appeal of "corporate accountibility". Most people have figured out that using an open source product, in general, provides better accountibility. FreeBSD definately has its niche, as does OpenBSD. NetBSD? Sure, why not (NetBSD could be cool for the Playstation 2!)
Now I can talk about the merger.
;-)
The PLAN was to announce the merger at LinuxWorld, but that didn't happen. Very few people were asking why 2 seperate companies with 2 seperate design methodologies (OpenSourced $0 software gets community support VS 'ClosedSource' $995 we pay developers) were sharing the same booth.
Effects on Mac OS X: Bob Bruce said that "we will be working closely with Apple". So I don't see a problem WRT Mac OS X. The only problem with Apple is the mecurial nature of iCEO Jobs.
Who knows.....if FreeBSD goes IPO, with the 7 billion dollars you get for an IPO these days, FreeBSD just might buy Apple
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
They're also going to be pushing partnerships & co-marketing a lot harder, as well as a branding and pre-installation program so that you can make sure that the machine you buy is 100% compatible with FreeBSD, or you can even get FreeBSD pre-installed on the machine.
There's a lot more that they're going to be doing. I'm just waiting for the updated plans to be posted to the web pages of Jordan K. Hubbard, CTO of Walnut Creek and soon to be CTO of the merged BSD, Inc.
--
Brad Knowles
Brad Knowles
http://daily.daemonnews.org/ -- if you're not
This is one of the really huge things that the merged company will get even better at, as it will be able to grow very quickly from an infusion of venture capital, and therefore be able to hire even more engineers and telephone support staff, etc....
--
Brad Knowles
Brad Knowles
http://daily.daemonnews.org/ -- if you're not
Is this direction going to be consistent with the new FreeBSD? Some people would like to see FreeBSD hit the desktop, or move into embedded systems; Where does FreeBSD want to go today?
Read the full thing here.
I spoted an article at NewsAlert. Most Linux News sites, including LinuxPlanet, also has articles on the subject.
"Last words are for fools who haven't said enough." - Karl Marx
Since everyone is talking about Linux, where do you see the BSDs in the next few years? Will they be Sprite to Linux's 7-Up, or will they make a surprise upset and nab the market from M$ before Linux has a chance?
Or are the BSDs simply (and respectably) destined to a place other than the end user's desktop?
ICQ: 49636524
snowphoton@mindspring.com
Got Rhinos?
I would be very concerned about this announcement.
Needless to say that I'm not a FreeBSD user, so I don't really know the whole story. However, while commercial backing usually means more resources for a project, you have to question commercial entities on their interest in a project to see if it's goals match your own and if those goals are good for your community. It's a sure bet that BSDI is only interested in FreeBSD because it feels that it can gain financially from the merger. If a good balance is maintained and BSDI makes worthwhile contributions to the FreeBSD codebase then I would say this is a "Good Thing (TM)", however if BSDI comes in and hijacks the FreeBSD codebase without making any contributions back to the community then I would have a different opinion.
In any event, it's up to the FreeBSD community to make sure that BSDI isn't taking unfair advantage of them. So, when things are getting started I would urge the FreeBSD people to be cautious and watchful.
And if it doesn't turn out to be good news... well then there is the beauty of the BSDL... Another group can form and pick up from where the current group leaves off.
"Linux is now the second-most-widely-used PC operating system in the world, firm proof that the open source concept is completely commercially viable"
Is this true? You got to be shitting me, what about MacOS 8 or whatever runs on those iMac's and iBook, Linux beat out them? Cool
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
The one thing I like about your company and your site is that you sell the CD's, but you also offer ISO's to anyone who wants to download the CD's themselves. This shows that you're in it to promote Slack and FreeBSD more so than to be in it for just the money. So with that gesture alone I do plan on buying the Slack 7 CD set even though I know I can download the install ISO and grab all the utilities online.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Alphas, not SPARC. My mistake. Thanks for correcting me. Damn, I am human after all :)
Feed The Need[goatse.cx]
Before this merger, the 4 primary BSD distributions each had their own niche. BSDi had corporate accountability, FreeBSD was optimized for Intel/Sparc platforms, NetBSD supported every platform with a MMU, and OpenBSD targeted security (based on NetBSD). With BSDi and FreeBSD merging, their 'niche' market has merged, overshadowing the other 2 distributions.
Is it possible that, 2 years down the road, FreeBSDi (?) will merge with NetBSD and OpenBSD? It makes sense, as FreeBSD has already been ported to SPARC, and there are rumors of a StrongARM port as well.
If this happened, we could have 2 open source OSes vying for dominance in the global arena.
Microsoft, beware. History is about to repeat itself. You'll be fighting a war on 2 fronts, not one.
Jailbrekr.
Feed The Need[goatse.cx]
I do not know what I am allowed to say publicly yet. But I promis you this. WC CDROM has no intention of letting Slackware go. Patick, and the team work full time on the project now. I donno if the interview has been published yet. But If I recall the interview answers your questions.
-Sid
Not really a question, just a concern.
In the past, BSDI has been free to pick and choose which parts of FreeBSD to fold into their own code base, while FreeBSD has been free to develop in whatever directions they desire.
My concern is that when the time comes to merge the two code bases, political or ego-driven pissing contests could lead to decisions being made about which code to keep and which to drop that are not based strictly on the quality of the code itself. Furthermore, such an atmosphere could lead to the attrition of many otherwise loyal developers.
This may not be as complicated as it seems.
Check out http://www.bsdi.com/company/people
Simply put, BSDi just doesn't have Joe Random
Developer on staff. I don't see anyone having
a problem letting, say, Chris Torek have
commit privs.
-pvg
Wheeh, and I was one of the people present at the NLFUG (Netherlands FreeBSD Usergroup) meeting. I don't remember all the new benefits of the merge he mentioned (Jordan H.) but some were:
:)
- Much better SMP support
- FreeBSD ports to SPARC and probaly StrongARM
and a lot more
- Snowdude!
The guy had some reasonable points, with which you may agree or disagree. But, have the decency to reply to him in a comment, instead of using your moderator points to respond. Moderators who do this sort of thing are the real "Anonymous Cowards."
New XFMail home page
/bin/tcsh: Try it; you'll like it.
Over the years I recognize a lot of people working on FreeBSD, but I know nearly nothing about the folks at BSDi. Anyone has informations about their staff and the company history?
Good question, and at most we can just speculate at this stage. One would hope that it would make FreeBSD easier to get. It might also provide more leverage to get hardware vendors to release driver specifications. There would also be more employed developers, which should be great, and lead to more drivers, better code, and so forth.
Mostly, as I understand it, it will be the NDA'd drivers and related stuff that don't get freed.
And yes, the intent is a merged source tree at some future date.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
In theory, sure, someone could "steal" the resulting code.
In practice, OS-level code isn't *worth* stealing if your system isn't fairly similar, on an architectural level.
Could NT try to steal our code? Sure. Just like they could steal NetBSD or FreeBSD code today. They don't, because it's easier to engineer from scratch, using our code as a reference base - which they could have done at any point for the cost of a source license.
And yes, I think this may be YAOSL, but I think it's a temporary one only. FreeBSD will still be under the BSD license.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Probably technically a first, although be aware that drivers under NDA will stay under NDA.
It's not that big a deal; BSD/OS has always been based largely on 4.4BSD code, and we've given away code to other systems before; NetBSD-current has our 'login.conf' code, for instance.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
If the BSD/OS SMP is so awful, why is the FreeBSD one the one getting scrapped?
BSD/OS is *not* the same thing as FreeBSD, and it sure as hell isn't "the same thing two years older". It's a different system, with different goals, targeted at a different market.
I'm sorry you didn't find that BSD/OS met your needs, but I think it's a little drastic to talk about "things which don't suck nearly as much". BSD/OS may not be the be-all and end-all of systems, but it doesn't *suck*, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Anyway, as the code starts getting shared between the systems, we'll see a lot of changes for both communities, and I think they'll all be for the better. FreeBSD will get a "real" SMP, instead of a "pretty-good-hack" SMP. BSD/OS will quite possibly get the bus_space code.
(Of course, that's NetBSD's work, not FreeBSD's, originally.)
It's amazing; it's almost as though, when multiple groups of developers work on different projects, they produce different things. What's really amazing is that this surprises people.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Gauntlet may be the best known, but they're running a *very* old BSD/OS codebase, and I don't think they're doing driver updates. They got bought by Network Associates a while back, and I think that was about the point at which they stopped following our "current" releases.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
True enough, but we're talking OS stuff, not just lightweight userland utilities.
Heh. I wonder if they ever give credit for that ftp client; if not, maybe someone should whack them.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I wonder if this is the reason why, yesterday, when I wanted to install a package on my Slackware box, the /pub/linux folder on ftp.cdrom.com was empty...
I look forward to the good things that will come from this merger!
I figure that most of the obvious, and technical, stuff is going to be easy to sort out.
But, the more difficult question is going to be, what about the developers?
While I don't think anyone will have a problem with giving Mike Karels any commit privs he wants, what about Joe Random Developer inside BSDi? Will he/she have to go through the same things that FreeBSD developers have historically gone through?
Clearly, this isn't something where there are only a few developers, and I expect that most people wouldn't even be able to tell if FreeBSD added a few dozen committers (FreeBSD has a boatload already), but inside the community, this is of some importance.
As a longtime advocate of the free BSD's I have a few views I'd like to express.
;)
If Jordan thinks this is a good thing, I've know jkh long enough to know, that while he is human, generally he considers long term implications of things. the BSD's now have a commercial backing. Walnut Creek, while having funded FreeBSD developnment for a while, did not have the commercial power of BSDi.
Also, this signals the change in strategy for BSDi, instead of keeping things relatively closed, most things being distibuted by BSD Inc. will be Open Source. However I wonder about the funding of Slackware development, but I'm sure provisions have been made.
This was bound to happen, Kirk Mc. has been involved with both FreeBSD and BSDi, and it was just a matter of time before something like this happened.
I personally will wait to see what happens. while I trust jkh's judgement, I also reserve the right to be cautious
lets hope this *does* turn out to be for the best.
-Pat
-- FreeBSD - The Power to Serve NetBSD - of course it runs NetBSD OpenBSD - Armed to the Gills Three tools in our
Quite simply, how does this merger benefit the end user/purchaser?
-- On the side of the software box, in the system requirements section it said "Requires Windows 95 or better." So I i
This paragraph seems a bit confusing. First, does this really mean that there is Yet Another Open Source license available?
Furthermore, since the BSDi code will be released as part of BSD which follows the BSD license, is BSDi's code is now available for commercial operating systems (eg, Windows 2K+1?, *nix)
What steps will new company take to protect against this scenario?
Just posted this morning to the freebsd-current mailing list:
h a/4.0-20000307-CURRENT 6 /4.0-20000307-CURRENT
- IMAGES/4.0-20000307-CURRENT/
:). Thanks!
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard"
Subject: FreeBSD 4.0 release candidate #3 now available.
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/alp
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/i38
With ISO images available from:
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/ISO
.. just as soon as they finish uploading (the i386 image is already
there and the alpha image is about 8% there and should be in place by
the time most of you read this message).
This will probably be the last release candidate image before release
day unless folks find some real show-stoppers here, so please look
thoroughly
- Jordan
So, barring any big problems, FreeBSD-4.0 will be released on Monday, March 13th.
You may start to see some BSDI code being integrated in the coming months, but the two codebases probably won't be completely merged for at least a year or perhaps two. This means that 5.0-RELEASE or perhaps 6.0-RELEASE would be the first realistic version that would be completely merged.
--
Brad Knowles
Brad Knowles
http://daily.daemonnews.org/ -- if you're not
What next, should Redhat and the other successful companies run around buying closed source companies and release their source, maybe they should do this immediately before their market price crashes :-). Even if they go belly up afterwards they still will have achieve opening up the source. A cunning idea methinks
C.
I sometimes write stuff
One of the unfortunate but inevitable driving forces behind software development, once it becomes seriously involved in the commercial world, is feature-creep: adding more features so the market perceives the software as more modern, up-to-date, and desireable.
... I run FreeBSD, and I'm only reporting what I really hear friends saying).
We're all aware of how this dynamic drives the feature-rich but bug- and complexity-riddled MS offerings, but it appears that this is starting to happen in the Linux world as well. Most of the Linux users I personally know have switched from RedHat due to problems with 6.x being too unwieldy. One would hope for better from a relatively expensive boxed distro produced by a company with a huge recent IPO. (Don't flame me!
Will there be binding, concrete mechanisms, such as user-community input into decisions, or something like the sepate foundation set up to mediate the Troll/QT relationship, to prevent feature-creep from warping FreeBSD out of shape? What will these mechanisms be?
The ready answer, of course, is that the BSD license and market forces, combined with the philosophyies of the principal players in the merged company, will prevent this from happening. However, I worry that these aren't enough to stand up against the lure of big money --- or the pressure of big money from wealthy outside companies.
This is a good move for the BSDs in general. They have been losing ground to Linux, which is the more 'media friendly' OS. It is good to see that BSDi are contributing a lot of their code (except that under NDA - still available as a plus-pack though) to the BSD code base, under the BSD license (not under some other license).
I wonder what ramifications this has for FreeBSD 4.0? It hasn't been released yet, so will it be delayed while several core BSDi components are added? I doubt it, but FreeBSD 5.0 will occur before the end of the year otherwise, as I imagine the differences between FreeBSD and BSDi are significant enough to warrant a version increase. OTOH, it could just be that they will be merged smoothly into the 4.x series...
They could have called it FreeBSDi :-)
I would hate to see Slack go the way of the Dodo because of this. Granted, this announcement means that the box that I was going to wipe RH6.1 off of (I test each new RH, Deb and Slack distro as they come out and I have the time and drive space) and put Slack back onto will probably be getting a FBSD 3.4 install instead. Time to start playing in that space a bit. Most of the mainstream Linux distros (RH, Deb, SuSE, Turbo) don't suit me well. Deb is nice once it's set up, but the devel process is broken. Evolution will fix this, but I don't have the time to waste on it right now. Great distro, just not for me. RH...well, it's really not bad, but I don't much like their config style. Not the SYSV part...that's ok. The /etc/sysconfig directory mess is what I'm refering to. Makes the construction of the official admin tools easier, but at the expense of making manual or custom config/mgmt a pain. Don't even get me started about SuSE in this regard! As for Turbo, I've not done more than a simple install, so no comment. (And the crowd goes wild!!!)
Anyhoo....this rambled on longer than I had inteded. I suppose I should just email the Slack crew and WCCDROM for a real answer, rather than asking here. I would say that it was to save the time, but typing all this drivel took at least as long as the emails would have.
[1] Yes, I know they do a great job of following the file hierarchy standerd. I was refering the the LSB, which is going to be good, but would be better with Slack folk working on it, too.
--
If your map and the terrain differ,
trust the terrain.
- Most of the BSD/OS code will be available to open source projects.
- BSD now has a commercial backer on the same scale, or at least potentially so, as some of the Linux backers.
- A more competitive BSD means that Linux will have to respond to an increased rate of BSD improvements (just as BSD has had to respond to a faster rate of Linux improvements!), forcing general innovation.
(disclaimer: I work for Daemon News, and wrote the merger article)