BSDI + FreeBSD article

Joey the Lemur writes "I saw this article over at Yahoo! about the BSDI/Walnut Creek merger that has some good points concerning FreeBSD and Apple. The author talks about Apple's proposal to stay synced with FreeBSD (Darwin), and why they should actually follow through with it. It also has some good commentary on why BSD isn't as prominent as Linux. "

Comments

The enemy within?

[jeroenb]

Pretty strange that an article generally discussing some of the recent developments surrounding FreeBSD turns out to be used as a tool for Apple-bashing. And then the author turns out to be a macweek.com-columnist too.

Re:The enemy within?

[lomion]

The article seems to have of the common BSD misconceptions. Making it seem like the three BSD's are squabbling and are three different distros of the samething, which they are not. Also the article makes it seem like Walnut Creek owns FreeBSD, they do not. In fact the trademark is being switched over to the FreeBSD Project (dunno if it's done yet). Just another case of a journalist not getting all the facts 100%. I can't comment on the Appl related comments though.

Will Apple fall far from the tree?

[PerlStalker]

I am concerned with Apple's half-hearted support of BSD. Yes, they are going to try to stay synched with FreeBSD whereever possible. The problem they are going to run into is the same one that faced BSDI.

BSDI's BSD/OS has been trying to keep up with the variuos updates and such that have been released with the other BSDs and was always a step or two behind. Apple could end up with the same problems.

However, where BSDI took the "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" road (which, as a BSD/OS user, made me very happy), Apple may begin to view FreeBSD as "The Competition." The last thing BSD needs now is another "civil war."

The other catch is the "where ever possible." Who decides if it is "possible" to synch a particular bit of code? We could see Apple falling farther behind and/or forking away from the FreeBSD devolpment tree. I can live with that, but there may be others that can't.

In any case, any support for BSD from Apple (or any other company for that matter), no matter how small, is a good thing. People will begin to realize that there's more to life then Linux and Windows.

Re:Will Apple fall far from the tree?

[bugg]

Simple, then don't use Mac OS X.

If OS/X "falls behind" (behind what?), that's because Apple was sleeping on the job. It'd be no different than if "OS 9 fell behind"

Re:Will Apple fall far from the tree?

[Greg Koenig]

This, IMHO, is why the BSD license actually does work. I see a lot of GPL proponents saying things like, "Gee, some nasty evil organization could come in and steal all of our hard work and not give back if we release our code under a BSD-style license." Yes, this is true, and at face value seems pretty severe. But consider the amount of effort that a company has to expend to keep a non-trivial piece of software moving forward. It costs a lot of money to pay good programmers, who are getting harder and harder to find these days. This is made even more difficult if the company wants to take the software in many different directions (e.g., in the case of an operating system, they want to develop multimedia tools for it along with network tools along with any number of other hot topics in today's market). Contrast this with the fact that if the company doesn't fork their software project from the original source code, they get tons of people developing the software and adding new gizmos to it completely for free. No sane company (at least, one that understands what the hell they are doing) is going to trivially fork a major piece of software and throw away all of those potential helping hands.

This is why I favor the BSD style license. It lets companies who really feel that they need to fork and keep proprietary their intellectual investment in a piece of software do so. But, smart companies won't fork unless they really have a good reason.