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A Devil Of A BSDCon
Well I just got back from BSDCon, and spent some time catching up with old friends, new core team members, and cool new products. The highlight of the event was the reception and dinner at the Monterey Bay State Aquarium, which in my opinion is a must-see. All five BSDs were represented this year: MacOS X, BSD/OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.
There were some really neat talks at BSDCon, three tracks in all: general, security, and development. The highlights of the security talks were Bill Fumerola's talk on DoS attacks and the new ipfw which uses compiled rulesets for better performance, Robert Watson's TrustedBSD presentation, and Mark Murray's explanation of the /dev/urandom work he has done with FreeBSD using Yarrow. In the development track, Greg Lehey and Jason Evans presented a paper on FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT's new SMP model.
The exhibit hall itself was small, lending to a larger focus on technical issues, but there were several exhibitors that caught my eye. One was RelexUS, a company with its roots in Russia. They make a relational database called Linter which I found extremely easy to use (though commercial, it was very robust) It also bills Linux and FreeBSD among its native support list, as well as almost every other OS under the sun. It supports ODBC, stored procedures, transactions, asynchronous replication, and a host of other features. Also, the EFF were there, and I finally got around to joining.
Thursday night we piled into a bus to head on over to the Monterey Bay State Aquarium for dinner, drinks, and dessert. We had to wear Daemon horns to get in and fun was had by all. The new core team wrapped up the conference on Friday afternoon, and everyone left and went into town, tired, hungry, but satisfied with this year's turnout.
More pictures can be found at Greg Sutter and Jim Mock's pages. More coverage can be found on BSD Today.
Let us keep some historical perspective here. The Linux crowd decided to not use BSD net2 when it was freely available, but instead went off and invented their own stuff. They left the BSD community a long time ago and haven't given us enough credit or spotlight since then.
Having said that, it is good to have a convention focused on the BSD community. There are already several for the Linux community. This isn't a war or anything like that, just a chance for like horned people to get together and exchange ideas. While some members of the BSD community may indulge in excesses wrt Linux and/or its mascots from time to time, most people realize that both groups benefit by the competition and the cross fertilization that happens between the groups.
It is also a wonderful opportunity for us to meet the people that we develop the software with, or sometimes compete against, have some personal bonding and see the latest FreeBSD bondage t-shirts ;-)