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BSDi Is Livin' On The Edge!
Again, from Daily Daemon News, it looks like the Japanese ISP, Livin' On The Edge has infused BSDi with a 5 million dollar strategic investment to keep developing the iExtreme line of servers and provide backing to the FreeBSD project. The actual press release is here.
Does this mean i have to learn japaneese to use freebsd? I learn this 6 months AFTER i turn down the class...
I am !amused.
Interesting that freebsd is used in asia-pacific so much. Want to know why? Most believe it's because MS is thought to be colluding with the US government, installing backdoors in its encryption software.... cf: _NSA crypto certificate in win95.
:)
Our friends across the big pond don't like the idea of spying or crashing an entire government full of MS OS's. Why can't we seem to take a lesson from the Chinese?
If you read the original Japanese version of the press release, it is an option for a service contract optionally worth up to 5 million over a several year period, if honored. It is not an ``investment'', it is more like a futures option or conditional promissory note.
They did.
h asize=yahoo
http://www.bsdi.com/news/press/20000310.php?emp
BSDi also announced that Yahoo! Inc. will take an equity interest in the new company.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Will i need a pair of wrap-around sunglasses to opperate these Xtreme! servers? Perhaps they com included in the package.
-- Hail Eris
BSDi donates a lot of code back to FreeBSD. Advanced SMP code is coming from them for example.
Yep. Only four BSD. Not fragmented at all. Jus four BSD: OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, BSD/OS... and Darwin.
Err, I mean five. Only five BSD. Still, BSD is not fragmented at all. Just five BSD: OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, BSD/OS, Darwin... and MacOS X.
OK. Only six BSD. Still, its not that fragmented. Only six BSD: OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, BSD/OS, Darwin, MacOSX... and 4.4 BSD Lite Mach Server.
Hmm... maybe I'll try again. Only seven BSD. If you squint, they're not fragmented at all. Just seven wafer thin BSD versions. Unless you count all the old BSD operating systems, like SunOS, Ultrix, NeXT step, etc. Only seven. Until tomorrow.
Yeah -- BSD isn't fragmented, and like you said, it never will be.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Let me reiterate why it doesn't matter a single bit whether you publish under BSD, Mozilla or GPL license. Money and stupidity.
You mention Microsoft. Point to *one* bit of code where the stole (errr... reused, it's legal after all) stuff under the BSD license. They insisted on implementing their own TCP/IP stack, rather than reusing the free BSD stack.
If the BSD license had been compatible with Linux's, Linux could have had a decent TCP/IP stack years before it did. Really, Linux is as hurt by the license rift as BSD is.
I don't care how many companies use my work for free. Obviously you do. So be it. Now go out and fight extortion, hoarding and abuse rather than bashing the other free software developers.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
Check the BSD license. They don't need to seek permission or but anything to "steal" the code, the permission is already there.
The code that is in FreeBSD stays there. BSD/OS is free to use the code. Big surprise. Even better, with BSDi's ability to pay programmers, there are a few more people getting paid to do nothing but work on open source code.
Maybe you should take a careful look at an awful lot of the code that is in Linux, when you have a spare cycle or two. BSD people don't raise a fuss about our code being used for Linux, and re-licensed. Know why? We tend to believe in freedom to use the code in _any_ _way_ you want to. (though preferably in some kind of productive way :) )
Do you realize you're as free to use the code created by FreeBSD programmers under the BSD license as BSD/OS is? (and all you have to do is give credit to the original coder.) Where's the bitterness coming from?
It's hard to be mean to a company that is paying more people to do what they love, code... it's similar to the large linux companies paying the salaries of top Linux hackers. Suddenly, gifted people aren't weighted down by other jobs, but are able to devote their time to the open source community.
Only the most rabid of "programming for money BAD!" zealots would disagree with this, I think.
-Ceren E. (who works at a company that pays both Linux and BSD hackers to do their thing)
FreeBSD'S "Strange Attractor."
cerene@uclink4.pinkfakehambad.berkeley.edu
That's a great song!! Props to Weird Al for sponsoring!!
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
I realize the comparison wasn't fair, and I didn't intend that it should be taken very seriously. In fact, I find comparing operating systems on a "fragmentation" metric to be silly under even the best of circumstances. For many reason, Unix has always been a very fragmented set of operating systems. That fact has simultaneously been one of Unix's greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses.
My honest opionion is that Linux has gained an advantage over BSD by the very nature of its fragmentation (in distributions -- not in the kernel). Some of that advantage has been technical, but much of it has been social; the wide variety of linux has allowed just about everyone to find something in linux they like. Whether you're a l337 hacker trying to learn all the "arcane" options to "1337" commands like 'tar -xf && configure && make install', or an IBM executive trying to find a distribution to offer on workstations, or a software vendor hoping to escape the Microsoft hedgonomy, there is a Linux distribution made just for you.
It can also be argued that widespread linux buy-in has lead to a much wider variety of hardware and softare available to linux, making linux more flexible than BSD, and in some sense, technically superiour to BSD. This is dangerous arguement, however, as the same arguement leads us to believe that DOS is somehow superiour to both. In fact, the exact opposite may be true -- it is possible that an unfortunate side effect of a rush to popularity is a desire to provide a laundry list of desirable sounding items, instead of a short list of necessary items done correctly. Unfortunately, it also often true that broken things are talked about much more often than working things -- there is a strange correlation between popularity and brokeness that simply can't be ignored.
Unlike most people here, I do not believe "choice is good." At least, I do not believe it in the sense that it is often said -- I see no great advantage to being able to choose KDE or Gnome, or among a half dozen Java Virtual Machines, or among a dozen or so competing Linux distributions. But choice is very important in some cases. Different computers are used for different things. The demands placed on a farm of inexpensive webservers or a mail server are very, very different than the demands placed on a personal workstation, which are very different than the demands on a 365x24x7 SPF database server. Choice here is good. The option to choose the right tool for the task is very important. It does not matter much to me if I choose among two tools available for a job, which both do pretty much the same thing. It does matter to me if I can choose one good tool for one job, and another good tool for another job. This is where the choice between linux and BSD is good.
But there is another way to interpret choice; it can be interpreted as freedom. Its the kind of freedom that RMS keeps talking about -- the freedom to improve something that needs improving. BSD and linux are not so much about giving consumers a choice of operating systems (which is good, because they're not really interchangable), but instead about giving the developers a choice to develop what they feel needs developing. If I want BSD with SMP support, its entirely my choice to make a BSD with better SMP support. If I want a journaling filesystem, its entirely my choice to make a journaling file system. Its my choice.
This kind of choice really is what has led to both the fragmentation and vitality of Unix through the years. I would have to imagine that most of us on slashdot have had more accounts on more unix varients than we can count on our fingers and toes. We've all pulled our hair out over the differences. And we've all also realized that without every vendor being free to build their own thing, and copy each other, Unix would have stagnated and died long, long ago.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Lots of wasted and duplicated efforts. Yes, Linux has alot of that.
150+ versions of Linux (wasted effort)
The GPL license causes people to have to re-write code so they can use it under license terms more acceptable than the GPL.
If it's essentially the same as Linux,
Ok... lets say we can lump Linux AND BSD in the same marketshare. And, lets say 10 million Linux users. BSD runs at 20%, 2 million. 12 million total users. Which of these 'linux' things have more than 16.6% of the 'combined market'?
So BSD is the leader in this market.
I admit to not knowing much about it,
Well, now you know that, based on conservation of efforts, BSD is a better choice.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Why is that every time BSD is mentioned on the frontpage, we end up with a bunch of linux kids storming in and screaming that BSD is terrible and evil? You know, I have an idea - just use what you want, and perhaps if you ever actually get around to using BSD you'll find that not only is it a nicer environment to work in, but it's also a nicer environment to get involved in the development of. When I have some spare time, I'm hoping to start being able to make contribs to the source, but from hanging around the freebsd lists it looks like there are a nice bunch of people out there.
Anyway, before storming in and complaining about how terrible BSD is, perhaps you should use it and try and offer constructive criticism, as BSD users generally do when they are faced with a bombardment of Linux users.
In some ways, this feels a bit like the old Amiga 500 vs. Atari ST wars. Neither side would admit that it's just cool to be able to have some reasonable processing power in your home for less than £400, they just wanted to undermine the other side. I get the feeling that the FreeBSD crowd are fitting into the under-dog Atari ST niche where their solution isn't as popular, but is better in some areas than anything else around. For the ST it was sound (they're still in use today in a lot of studios), and for FreeBSD it's stable, clean server and workstation work.
*sigh*
Why not copyright your source code and then put it in the public domain
First of all, it makes no sense to both copyright AND place it in public domain. One or the other, but not both.
Second, users of the BSD license (as well as MIT and some others) are sharing their code, not giving it away.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned