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Learn From Robert Watson Of FreeBSD And TrustedBSD

Posted by Roblimo on from the many-faces-of-*bsd dept.

Robert Watson is a core developer for FreeBSD, and a member of the TrustedBSD project. He is one of the best people in the world to ask about FreeBSD security, and about FreeBSD development in general. Please post your questions below. We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated ones to Watson by email, and post his responses verbatim as soon as we get them back.

6 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. OS X based on FreeBSD by Kevinv · · Score: 5

    OS X's Darwin is based on FreeBSD. How good a member of the Open Source movement has Apple been? Have they contributed anything back to the FreeBSD project (code/money/t-shirts/etc...)?

  2. what do you do for *money*?? by gskouby · · Score: 5

    While perusing the mailing lists for -hackers, -stable, -current, etc. etc., I often wonder what people like yourself, Mike Smith, Greg Lehey, and the other core members do to pay the bills. Unless something has changed recently with the BSDi takeover, I can't imagine that the FreeBSD project keeps the food on the table. So how about a little insight into your and the other core members "real" jobs. (As if there is such a thing as a "real" job). But anyways, thanks for all the hard work for little pay!

  3. TrustedBSD and NSA secure linux by Xuther · · Score: 5

    How does TrustedBSD compare with NSA secured linux (http://www.nsa.gov/selinux) in terms of new and or improved security features? And are there any plans to eventually integrate the rest of the TrustedBSD features back into the shared BSD source tree (the extended attributes already have been committed)? How would using TrustedBSD instead of FreeBSD impact clustering applications?

    And just for my information, where did all the packages for clustering BSD go? All I can seem to find anymore is the linux stuff. And personally I don't like redhat and their rpm distribution method, all anyone wants to distribute anymore is rpms which is not near enough to standard and compatable accross the board as tar-gzip for my purposes. (One primary difference being that I can open a tar-gzip on a windows box at work during break to browse through source, and to my knowledge no one has bothered to create a "winrpm")

  4. Openpackages? by Enahs · · Score: 5

    What's your opinion on the Open Packages project? Even though I'm not currently a *BSD user, it sounds great on the surface--there's even been interest expressed in patches for Linux!--but I've got to wonder what sort of complexities need to be worked out to maintain a set of packages for FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin...

    --
    Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
  5. Unified Ports Tree? by SecretAsianMan · · Score: 5

    A while ago there was some hubbub in our community regarding the concept unifying the ports trees of the the different BSD flavors. It seems to me that this would be a mostly good thing, reducing duplication of work and making the ports both more plentiful and of a generally higher quality. Has there been any discussion of this in core? If so, does it look like this will ever happen?

    --
    SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)

    --

    Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.

  6. A few important questions: by Bob+Abooey · · Score: 5

    1) Do you ever plan on moving away from the slow and resource intensive method of VMS style paging for memory address resolution

    2) Are there plans to rewrite the TCP/IP stack to be multi threaded

    3) Will BSD ever migrate away from UFS to a more modern file system?

    4) With serious POSIX compatablity issues are there plans to use code from POSIX compliant OS's to become more commercially attractive to major corporations

    --

    All the best,
    --Bob