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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.
Sorry for replying to myself, but my "line manager" (who is secretly an open source zealot) mentioned that it is quite likely that support contracts might be a hugely important spinoff.
Many geeks haven't considered support contracts as useful, but he (the manager) says he'd love to have that to back things up if I find myself unable to deal with something. (And he gets the CEO to support an open source project without making it look like a donation we don't get anything directly out of.)
Hard to say.
Right away, Nothing Happens.
Over time:
* NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD all get neat new toys.
* BSDI gets a bunch of the "non-server" driver code they've historically ignored, which means better desktop support.
* FreeBSD gets sexy new SMP.
* Over time, I believe *all* the BSD's get a better support framework.
* I get a free copy of FreeBSD in the mail.
* BSD Stronger == MS Weaker.
The last one is worth remembering; people tend to argue about Linux Vs. BSD. Screw it; the world's big enough for the both of us. The question is, how much *Microsoft* can we all displace?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
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
- 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...?
Obviously you don't have much experience with actually participating in Open Source development of operating systems.The reality of it is that people who take a freely available OS with a BSD-style license and then add on their own proprietary enhancements, have a real problem with having to constantly re-apply those patches every time the freely available version is updated. As a result, they usually are actively interested in getting those changes re-incorporated into the base system, so that they don't have to continue to maintain their own private branch.
The primary problem that maintainers of code with BSD-style licenses have is that sometimes the changes are quite big, and the maintainers are usually unpaid volunteers, thus making it rather difficult for them to incorporate changes of that scale.
These kinds of problems are precisely what the merger between BSDI and Walnut Creek will help solve, since they will now have some real money to be able to pay some programmers to take all these changes from all these various different sources and start serious work on incorporating them into the FreeBSD baseline.
--
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)