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Walnut Creek CDROM And BSDi To Merge

Posted by Nik on from the NP:-paranoimia dept.

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.

6 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Remarkable. A OpenSource first ? by caolan · · Score: 4
    Quite remarkable. Is this the first time that a fully commercial nonopen source company has been taken over (or merged with) an open source company which promptly releases all the commercial software as BSD/GPL license. Sun's community license thingy doesn't count in my mind

    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
  2. Interview Question by hork · · Score: 4

    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.

    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! ... I run FreeBSD, and I'm only reporting what I really hear friends saying).

    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.

  3. More power to the BSDs? by hattig · · Score: 4
    I have been a user of FreeBSD for around 6 months, and I like it, and how it does things a lot, although I know it isn't the be all and end all of operating systems (e.g., Linux SMP is better, but FreeBSD VM is better, etc).

    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 :-)

  4. What about Slack?! by gaj · · Score: 5
    My immediate concern is how this will affect Walnut Creek's support of Slackware. Slack has been cursed with little to no PR as it is. Granted, this is partly due to Pat's refusal to cooperate in standards processes[1]. Slack has been the most stable and secure Linux OS for as long as I can remember (which would be back when I dloaded the A series of disks of of a local Citadel86 BBS using a 1200baud modem...no idea what year that was, but it was a ways back!). It hasn't had much by way of mainstream support and recognition for a few years now.

    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.

  5. A couple of questions by ebcdic · · Score: 5
    • Which parts of BSD/OS will be merged in to FreeBSD, and which will be the "value-added" features of BSD/OS?
    • Will there be a single, public source tree for the common parts?
  6. Big implications for all BSD, and Linux too by gsutter · · Score: 5
    This merger has implications for all the other BSDs as well as Linux, since:
    • 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)