FreeBSD 5.0 Delayed One Year

Satai writes: "FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE has been delayed a full year, until November of 2002. The reasons included a lack of support for SMPng - including a developer fall-off ratio of 15 to 1 - a desire to finish the PowerPC/Sparc64/IA64 architectures, and a general desire to robustly test the additions. The economic downturn even makes an appearance in the announcement."

Comments

Whew!

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it said FreeBSD 1.0 delayed for five years! What a relief!

"Where's my peanuts?" said the parakeet.

15 to 1 ?

[AftanGustur]

Can somebody, who knows what happened, explain to the rest of us why so many developers left the boat ?

15:1 is way above what can be regarded as "bad luck".

Re:15 to 1 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Participating for quite some time in some Open Source projects shows that wstarting any such project, there are quite some people who participate to voice their opinion but which won't ever do a line of code.

I'm afraid this doesn't explain a 15->1 ratio, though...

Re:15 to 1 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

This Sucks, FreeBSD takes the security of linux, beefs it up, slaps it on a proper server platorm, and never crashes. I Mean come on Linux is a security hole in a box, The amount of crap that gets installed and it doesn't even tell you about is stupid. FreeBSD is a fantastic OS, more developers should be in on it. 15:1 is way worse than bad luck, something is going on. Im sure

Re:15 to 1 ?

[StandardDeviant]

had to get paying jobs or had to take on more billable hours (lower contracting rates b/c of the downturn), would be my guess. either that or Linus took a hypnotism course and snuck into the last *bsd developer conclave, heh.

Re:15 to 1 ?

[Nater]

The only FreeBSD box I've ever actually seen has been r00ted on two occassions.

Re:15 to 1 ?

[hda1]

15 -1 only refers to one feature, SMPng.

I applaud the BSD leadership for working toward a realistic goal. That's good project management.

Would we prefer they strip out everything that isn't ready, and released 5.0 in two months?

Re:15 to 1 ?

[Nater]

Hmmm... I've been moderated a troll. Perhaps I should rephrase myself...

Don't think FreeBSD is impervious to the sort of misconfigurations that you've cited as faults for Linux. A naive user installing any operating system is still a naive user. I have seen in my life exactly one FreeBSD system, and it was r00ted once about three years ago and once within the last year.

Security is not platform-dependent, it is admin-dependent.

Re:15 to 1 ?

[ksb]

And I guess if you saw a Windows 98 box that actually shutdown after more than 5 minutes of use you'd assume they all do?

Personally I've never seen a BSD box, so I guess it's all made up by slashdot to get more hits ;)

Re:15 to 1 ?

[anshil]

Any your comment gives +10 score for beeing read by any microsoft user. The linux and bsd kernel and what diverse linux distro's install by default for stuff has nothing to do with each other.

-1 Troll, hitting your brother (linux) is hitting yourself (bsd).

Re:15 to 1 ?

[ksb]

Ahhh... fair enough. Although it is somewhat OS dependant, if there are bloody great holes in a system then even the best SysAdmin will be handicapped in what they can achieve security wise.

Re:15 to 1 ?

[Steeltoe]

Really? Personally, I lean to the hypothesis that the BSD-folks got abducted by aliens. Surely, their talent and philosophies can be better appreciated in a more developed society.

- Steeltoe

Re:15 to 1 ?

[cperciva]

The drop from 15 to 1 -- by the way, that one wasn't even part of the initial 15 -- is a result of the "tech slump". Companies which once had employees assigned to working on FreeBSD, seeing a need to "tighten their belts", redirected those people to other more directly profitable tasks. Hopefully this delay will spur developers into joining the SMPng project.

Re:15 to 1 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD is a worthy operating system. The license sucks.
GNU license perpetuates the goodwill of the developers through the recipiants, and so on. Very satisfying.
BSD code is used by Apple and Microsoft, who absorb the goodwill like a black hole, never giving back. Do you honestly think if Apple or MS had some sort of breathtaking improvement on a piece of BSD code, they would just give it away? Ha!
If I decide to give something away, fuck yeah there will be strings attached. Use my goodwill and pass the goodwill along. There's warmth in that. How much goodwill was reciprocated by Microsoft or Apple through their use of BSD code?
None! Corporations are reptilian. Project goodwill upon a reptile, and it will just be absorbed. I see no satisfaction in that, none whatsoever.

Re:15 to 1 ?

[Nater]

In that case, security still degenerates into a feature of the administrator or some other relevantly involved human (i.e. PHB), since no competent administrator would choose to run such an insecurable operating system.

Re:15 to 1 ?

[Bluetick]

Maybe they got hired by Apple. Heh, really I don't know. But after OSX, you'd think people with some BSD experience would be more marketable, even if the economy is taking a downturn.

Anyway, as a FreeBSD 4.4, I see this as a good move. If I feel like upgrading my OS every two months, I'd be using Linux right? Nice that they're going to be porting FreeBSD to PowerPPC as well, since I just bought a Quicksilver, and would rather go with the BSD I know than with NetBSD (or just Darwin for that matter).

Re:15 to 1 ?

[Bluetick]

On the subject of how rushing to finish a job can mess something up, in my haste I neglected to preview my shoddy HTML skills.

Re:15 to 1 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

most real security people are running B1 class systems such as Trusted IRIX, Solaris and HP/UX which FreeBSD couldnt hope to match in scalability or security. try again BSD boy.

Re:15 to 1 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure about the PowerPC platform, but FreeBSD and NetBSD aren't very different on the x86 platform (at least visibly to the user). There are a few differences here and there, but if you can use FreeBSD 4.3, then you can use NetBSD 1.5.1.

Re:15 to 1 ?

[tmark]

Would we prefer they strip out everything that isn't ready, and released 5.0 in two months?
Then we could call it RedHat 8.0.

Re:15 to 1 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

and BSD might actually generate some revenue!

Re:15 to 1 ?

[Karn]

-1, Flamebait

Re:15 to 1 ?

[connorbd]

I dunno... might be the second step of a slippery slope leading to some kind of unification between Darwin and FreeBSD (Jordan Hubbard going to Apple being the first). I'm not saying it's in the works -- I've nothing but my own guesswork saying this -- but it seems very possible.

/brian

Re:15 to 1 ?

[imp]

15:1 is way above what can be regarded as "bad luck".

First, the 15 developers haven't departed the FreeBSD project. They are just unable to devote significant time to SNMng. There's a big difference between that and what is implied by this comment.

Actually, it is abouit right for every single free software project that I've been involved in. You get a lot of interest from people that want to see something done. Then you get about a 5 to 1 "disappearing into the woodwork" once people have begun work. Lots of people want to volunteer to help, but often times they don't have the time or fully understand what they volunteered for. You get another 3-5 to 1 attrition over the next year as people need to make money in their various fields over the next year. Or as their free time patterns change, etc.

Finally, although there's only one full time developer on SMPng, there are several people that are contributing to SMPng on an irregular basis.

So it isn't all that unusual. I'm sure many examples in the Linux world could be found as well.

Warner

Re:15 to 1 ?

[uweber]

I really don't know, though my guess is that it has to do a lot with WindRiver's buyout of BSDi because the SMP stuff really only got rolling because of BSDi's involvement with FreeBSD.

Maybe somebody knows how well WindRiver is doing at this moment.

Re:15 to 1 ?

[hawk]

> Maybe they got hired by Apple.

Actually, the message says that it's only one *not counting Apple*.

So it's not quite as bad as it sounds.

hawk

Re:15 to 1 ?

[praedor]

OK, with you little illustration you've accounted for between 8 to 10 people leaving. You forgot the other half or third

Statistical fluke? Maybe. Sign of something else? At least equally likely.

Re:15 to 1 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably had something to do with this. It's an interesting comment on the still ongoing BSD license vs. GPL debate. Admittedly, Jordan Hubbard was not as single-handedly responsible for FreeBSD as Linus for Linux, but he was one of the co-founders. Apparently the GPL can handle Linus focussing on Transmeta, but the BSD License can't handle JH leaving for Apple. Then again, maybe it's just a coincidence.

Re:15 to 1 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

*BSD is dying

Yet nother crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community whn last month IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of ll servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplifid by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick nd its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at ll it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For ll practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

*BS is dying

Re:15 to 1 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

.. they use mach. MacOS/X will not benefit from SMPng in the BSD kernels. The embedded systems supplier (I will not name them cause I despise them) that bought BSDi has no interest in SMP or in servers really ... and a truckload of people who loved working with Walnut Creek and BSDi as contributors will not be working with the project any longer.

Now that BSDi is dead ARE there any companies left that are dedicated to developping BSD as a kernel and OS as part of their core business activities anymore ?? No. Except Wasabi which is pretty small still.

The reason it's delayed a year is because BSD developpment has had a serious accident and needs to be hospitalized to get itself back together. With BSDi defunct relying on Apple, Wasabi and a band of merry voluteer hackers to get SMP done means it AIN'T gonna happen.

Hello Yahoo??!! Can Yahoo afford to hire a few SMPng hackers for a year??? Oh yeah I forgot YAhho is broke too.

At this point SMP is owned by SGI Solaris and in tied in a distant third Microsoft and SCO/Caldera, an even more distant fourth Linux.

On 4 way and 8 way machines BSD is simply not in the running at this stage and even on 2 way systems out of the box RedHat7.1 is a better choice for SMP. What's more threading work done by IBM is gonna improve Linux even more on this front - even Caldera (which bought SCO Unix a quite good SMP system up to 8 ways) admits that Linux will likely overtake the SCO kernel.

When you get right down to it ... who DOES need SMP? And who needs it badly right now and is willing to pay for it?

Re:15 to 1 ?

[konmaskisin]

Yahoo uses FreeBSD in droves and droves of servers. Perhaps their priority is to have a good optimized uniprocessor system running on clusters of boxes which has it's own efficiencies and benefits.

Not everyone needs or will benefit from SMP.

Re:15 to 1 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those numbers can't be true can they? I was thinking about trying BSD but it sounds as if I shouldn't bother.

Re:15 to 1 ?

[rycamor]

Are you just playing along with the troll? This idiotic post has been circulating for 2 years now. If BSD were truly dying, I think that would have happened by now.

I was using Linux, and am now a happy FreeBSD user. If the current version of FreeBSD were the last, I would still probably be happy using FreeBSD for a few years to come.

developer fall-off

[TechnoVooDooDaddy]

As a follower/lurker to BSD-Hackers, I offered to do some device driver development, apparently not to the liking of some of the leaders on there

*cough*TIM*cough*

anyway, at least the bsd-hackers forum can be quite hostile, and i've seen it keep more than a couple people away..

Re:developer fall-off

[duffbeer703]

The policy of FreeBSD's developers is not to cater to newbies. Linux and FreeBSD are targetted towards different segments of users, why can't we just accept that? Take a look at a typical posting from a Linux user on the freebsd-newbies list. We're talking two different worlds here.
I am relatively young to the scene myself, but let's take a walk down memory lane say six years ago. Back in those days the Linux Howto's, especially the Installation Howto, were essentially Slackware Howto's. (The book I used to figure out how to install Linux was essentially the Howto's printed out.) My PC's BIOS from that era did not support booting from an ATAPI CD Rom drive. Hard drives were much smaller but the EIDE ones were coming up against a succession of limits, limits in where a kernel could be located and still be seen by a bootloader. For Linux there was a well-defined path introducing newbies: you installed and created a custom bootdisk. Linux installation instructions also told how to edit the kernel for the bootdisk floppy to change the root partition location.

From my newbie perspective, this was installation Nirvana! I didn't have to worry about LILO if I didn't want to. From the perspective of other people sharing the PC I used, other than taking up hard drive space, they didn't have to know Linux existed. And Linux could be installed in an extended partition not just a primary partition. Keep in mind that hard drives were a lot smaller then, so for dual-boot setups it was nice to be able to dedicate some more room for the Windows C: drive. And not only that but since everyone did the custom bootdisk compiling as a rite of passage, people could compile bootdisks to help others if the default floppy didn't have the right drivers.

Now from what I have read of the FreeBSD community's thoughts, they couldn't care less about such concerns. The ISP I used back then was hosted on a collection of FreeBSD boxes, abandoning a more monolothic solution with an SGI server, because the ISP's lead technical person knew how to do it. FreeBSD is more like an industrial consortium as far as the core developers go, and at least at that time there was a huge emphasis on stuff related to running ISPs. From their perspective it was laughable to devote much effort to support the most unreliable medium of all, a floppy, for custom booting a machine. And someone like an ISP wouldn't be using EIDE, they'd be using SCSI. 528MB limit, "get some real hardware, kid" I'd imagine they'd think. And they'd have their internal network and their own procedures for mass replicating setups to many machines.

Six years later I think we can see everyone got what they wanted. The Linux community developed critical mass and got wildly popular with newbies. The FreeBSD community was left alone by the newbies they didn't want to deal with.

Re:developer fall-off

[nabucco]

I have to say that I've had the totally opposite experience. FreeBSD had a very easy root/boot floppy disk procedure and network install (ie. install over the Internet), whereas slackware, had a much more complicated procedure, with many, many floppy disks needed.

A few months ago I wanted to install Red Hat on a CD-less machine I have at home, over a 56K modem. I was going to download the files to my Sun box and then NFS mount them locally. Red Hat doesn't go out of their way to advertise that they have a network install of Red Hat but a friend of mine pointed it out to me. Harkening back to the good old days, my NE-2000 compatible card didn't have the proper drivers (for RH Linux, there was no problem when it had Windows 95), and enabling/disabling Plug-and-Play, changing the IRQ and all that jazz didn't help. I hadn't done an install of FreeBSD for a while but at wit's end I did that. Imagine my surprise when I saw that it was able to install over the Internet via a modem!

Frankly, it's my opinion that FreeBSD has always been one step ahead of Linux in ease of installation for the past 5 years. I am speaking of the most popular Linux distributions, since I almost always install what the most popular dist is (although I have used Debian and so forth). The only thing Linux ever sometimes surpassed FreeBSD on was NIC cards - sometimes Linux would work with a cheap NIC card that FreeBSD wouldn't. And frankly, Windows always killed both of them in working with virtually every network card.

In terms of being memetic, ease of installation is more important than even ease of use. If you get totally stuck on installation, who cares who user-friendly GNOME is?

Re:developer fall-off

[Anonymous Coward]

This must be the third or fourth time I've seen that exact comment, word for word, on slashdot. Try being a bit creative and original next time, eh?

Re:developer fall-off

[TechnoVooDooDaddy]

ugh, i'm not trying to INSTALL IT.. installation was cake, as you pointed out... I WAS OFFERING TO HELP CODE, trying to figure out where to plug in at..

The response i got was basically "whatever"

Re:developer fall-off

[Brian Feldman]

Do you know how to write modern FreeBSD device drivers? Have you tried before? You must not know the many, many hours of work it takes for someone to learn the APIs, even if it's someone else spending HIS own hours teaching him.

It's, quite frankly, more than a little bit easier for existing FreeBSD developers to write a given driver than it is for them to teach someone what to do. Writing drivers involves intimate familiarity with the system, especially with a system where the kernel API has been in a constant state of flux in the long-running development branch.

That said, intelligent questions about an arbitrary topic with non-obvious answers are USUALLY responded to politely. You can't just say, though, "I'd like to write some drivers. Can you tell me how?" or anything even moderately like that.

Re:developer fall-off

[TechnoVooDooDaddy]

having coded device drivers as part of my job, and being a C and C++ programmer for about 10 years now, I think I'm good to go..

The questions i had were more of the lines of "What needs to be done", not "How do i do this"

Re:developer fall-off

[Anonymous Coward]

"its easier for existing developers to write a new driver than teach someone how to do it". yeah. brilliant. thats the thinking that leads to a 15:1 reduction in developers. congratulations.
teaching someone to write a driver is about the most important thing a free software developer can do. its the ONLY way that linux has been able to get so many developers on board. EVERYONE including torvalds encourages newbies to write drivers because the newbies tend to write several drivers not just one after learning how to write a single driver. read the lkml sometime and learn why FreeBSD's on a death spiral, apple or not.

Re:developer fall-off

[ethereal]

It's, quite frankly, more than a little bit easier for existing FreeBSD developers to write a given driver than it is for them to teach someone what to do.

That's an easy way to write that device driver. That's not the best way to get a whole lot of device drivers written, or to get a whole lot of new developers. Which is fine if you don't want a lot of new developers; but then people shouldn't complain when your next release gets pushed back a year :)

Re:developer fall-off

[Anonymous Coward]

TechnoVooDooDaddy, please ignore their stupid Linux criticism. I know you're an excellent person, you could easily learn to write FreeBSD drivers, and then do so with a high degree of skill. Since Linux can't compete with FreeBSD at the technological level, the users have to start attacking the FreeBSD driver developers. It's sad, isn't it? In any case, please keep up the good work, and try not to get discouraged.

Re:developer fall-off

[Anonymous Coward]

No - the sad thing is something else...

I read the thread - with some answers from the FreeBSD guys..

Yet I haven't seen a single recommendation - which book to buy? what documentation to read? maybe a simple sample driver available to learn from? what about newsgroup to contact?

You got a person (TechnoVooDooDaddy) that is willing to help the BSD guys - HELP HIM TO HELP YOU, you ego maniacs!

If it was a Linux situation - then all the person needs to do is know C well, and just buy or to read online the new Oreily books for designing a device drivers, and maybe spend few more minutes to learn how to compile the kernel and modules...

Re:developer fall-off

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a Professor who has been following FreeBSD and thinks that many features of FreeBSD are superior (the Man pages are the best I've ever seen, and the centralized packages/ports administration is good stuff too). However, it is not easy to teach its internals to my students, which means my research will probably wind up happening in a Linux environment due to the fact that they know it and can get stuff done there.

Writing device drivers is by FAR the most common kernel modification, and having a large number of device drivers GREATLY enhances the utility of an operating system. It is unfortunate that the FreeBSD community has limited documentation on this (although I've noticed some work in this area last time I looked). However, FreeBSD has a long way to go in providing adequate resources for someone who is knowledgeable in programming outside the kernel to learn to program in the kernel. What is needed is a tutorial in device driver writing, however, I had hoped at one point that an outsider could develop this, but the task is perhaps too daunting for anyone other than an insider who really knows what is going on. I hope the situation improves, it might lead to interesting projects for some students in kernel level programming, and more committers.

Re:developer fall-off

[szomb]

I don't know why VooDooDaddy got the response he got. My experience with FreeBSD development has always been good; when I wanted to learn there was always a developer willing to help, on either a mailing list, a newsgroup, or #BSDCode on EFnet. *shrug*

Maybe we're not hearing the whole story.

What's up green? :)

Re:developer fall-off

[ethereal]

Oh, come on, if that was off-topic then so's the whole thread. Phooey.

Re:developer fall-off

[painkillr]

I guess this is precisely the attitude that TVDDaddy was talking about.

If someone wants to write device drivers for your OSS, you don't rail against him and question his skills beforehand.

No wonder most of the people i encounter in #freebsd on undernet or efnet are such jerks.

Re:developer fall-off

[praedor]

Brilliant attitude! Hence, the reason the developers are falling off instead of picking up a steady stream of replacements or even gaining in number.

VERY parochial.

Helpful and optimistic new guy: "Hey guys, I'd like to help. I could code up a driver or two."

Nasty, self-stabbing *BSD coder: "Who the FUCK are YOU?! Piss off, we don't want nor need you codeboy."

Re:developer fall-off

[tim_maroney]

No wonder most of the people i encounter in #freebsd on undernet or efnet are such jerks.

After all, most people on IRC are really sweet and kind.

The hostile, immature and flamebait aspects of the free software and open source communities are certainly among their greatest barriers to success.

Tim

Re:developer fall-off

[Adnans]

It's, quite frankly, more than a little bit easier for existing FreeBSD developers to write a given driver than it is for them to teach someone what to do. Writing drivers involves intimate familiarity with the system, especially with a system where the kernel API has been in a constant state of flux in the long-running development branch.

OMG, no wonder FreeBSD is having trouble sustaining its engineering pool. What you are basically saying is that newbie driver hackers are not welcome because the existing 'established' developers, no matter how swamped they already are, can do it better and faster?! That's just silly.

-adnans

Re:developer fall-off

[TechnoVooDooDaddy]

no ideas what's up szomb.. I wanted to write a 3d-enabled device driver for the i81X chipset.. so i started in, got it kinda working, then found the bsd-hackers forum, asked if there were any similar efforts going on, and got a rash of very rude answers..

My persuit for collaboration turned into flamefest, so i discontinued my active participation...

I'm having fun with my little driver, but it's not getting checked into any publicly available builds, as I don't wish to fight to get it there.

Re:developer fall-off

[starslab]

3D enabled driver for the i81x?

Perhaps you were flamed off because 3D stuff belongs in XFree86, not in FreeBSD?

Just a thought from a FreeBSD user who very much likes the system, and doesen't work with Linux anymore.

Re:developer fall-off

[Arandir]

There is a hierarchy of development. At the top is the core team. Below them are the contributors. As a newbie, no matter how experienced in writing drivers for Linux, Solaris or even OpenBSD, you will have to work your way up. Even if Bill Joy decided to join in FreeBSD development, he would have to start at the bottom like everyone else.

But it can be done. Just because they won't except a driver from someone they never heard of doesn't mean that they don't want drivers. If your driver is fully tested, then send it to one of the contributors lower on the rungs, and maybe he or she will bounce it up higher.

Re:developer fall-off

[dinivin]

Perhaps you were flamed off because 3D stuff belongs in XFree86, not in FreeBSD?

Except that if it's a port of the Linux 3D DRI driver for that chipset (as the other 3D DRI drivers under FreeBSD are), it still requires a kernel driver.

Dinivin

Re:developer fall-off

[Anonymous Coward]

I wanted to write a 3d-enabled device driver for the i81X chipset

Actually I think that was the greatest downfall of FreeBSD, trying to get into the client workstation space when they had no advantages to Linux. They should have (and still could but they won't) concentrated on the server side of things, which is where they were best suited.

Re:developer fall-off

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a script available to get you started with your development. Exploring the system would have turned this up. As far as tutorials, you should just look at the existing drivers. Reading the source code isn't a bad place to start. Pencil and paper first should be everyones moto!
Programmers and students are just becoming too lazy. Taking a Saturday to looking around a BSD system would turn up alot of information. Its really sad that people don't take the time to look before they ask. Probably your going to say, Well you try teaching BSD to students in 18 weeks. My reply, " You dont' have too." College students can teach themselves. /usr/share/doc is a great place to start.

peace

Re:developer fall-off

[Anonymous Coward]

My Reply is of the Bad News/Good News form:

Bad News First: Some "Old School" BSD people are not real keen on providing interested students and budding developers with a well defined entry point. The key to learning is directed exploration and you need to point people to a good starting place, not at a sea of code. Getting students to work with Linux is easier,
since the internals guide in addition to the source are available. What you cannot tell students who want to get started is that FreeBSD is well documented,just in C. Sure only seasoned developers will write code for such a system, but if they have other commitments (like feeding themselves and their families) you lose.

Good News: The new school of FreeBSD developer is a bit more aware of this, and documentation is beginning to hit the street, the New Bus documentation is a very good start. FreeBSD needs a system call writers guide (actually Pragmatic of THC had a very good guide but my links to it have died from bit rot).
When is the update to McKusick et al.'s book on 4.4 BSD coming out? I expected a FreeBSD oriented successor to come out this summer.

Re:developer fall-off

[Metrol]

The policy of FreeBSD's developers is not to cater to newbies

Okay, I've asked this question once before of someone spouting this same line. Just where exactly is this "policy"? In talking to a number of developers on the various FreeBSD lists I have never gotten that impression. They're busy folks, and they can be rather short and to the point with comments, but certainly no more so than on Linux lists.

As someone coming from the world of Windows, I started out with RedHat. I was totally convinced at that time that everything I had heard about Unix being too damn hard to learn was true. Fate stepped in and crashed my drive, which is when I decided to try out FreeBSD. Never looked back! As a relative newbie to Unix, I found it FAR simpler to use.

Then I got to looking to put a *nix onto a laptop I've got here. Thought I'd try out Mandrake on it just to see. Very pretty installer, but it didn't know how to talk to my NIC. So I bought a new NIC it did know how to talk to. Then I was having all kinds of weird problems with the GUI network settings. Kept reseting my IP to something different. I decided to have a look at the config files themselves to see if I could edit them manually. Oh God, talk about a sea with no bottom! Mandrake off, FreeBSD on.

FreeBSD was able to talk just fine to the NIC card that Mandrake wasn't. I was able to install more up to date software through the ports tree than I was through that god awful slow RPM database. Lastly, the system config files were short, to the point, and readable by a human without a 3 inch thick book next to me.

In all fairness I did have some problems with recent changes to the pccard code that went into the STABLE branch. That code has mostly been fixed up now, as I'm typing this on the very laptop in question. The fact that I'm up and running now was largely due to direct help from one of the FreeBSD developers on the mobile mailing list.

I want to see this mythical policy! I want to see the comments that show how FreeBSD folks aren't concerned with installation issues, helping newbies get started, or any of the other FUD you're tossing out here. Quoting from a FreeBSD 2.0 bug sheet is not backing you up.

Re:developer fall-off

[einhverfr]

read the lkml sometime and learn why FreeBSD's on a death spiral, apple or not.

Ever hear of the BSD is Dying Troll? Altough this story seems to indicate that it is, this is premature for now.

Netcraft's numbers indicate that Linux is hurting BSD in the web server market, but it is hurting Solaris, Tru64, and others worse. BSD has suffered marketshare greatly at the hands of proprietary Unices, and its experience was what the GPL sought to avoid (ok, so they are ideologically different, but anyway).

I think that the hardware market will continue to slow for sometime and that this will KILL proprietary OS's. If this happens, Linux and BSD will compete more as equals than they are today. I think actually, that Linux's rise may be a very good thing for BSD.

However, regarding your main point:

teaching someone to write a driver is about the most important thing a free software developer can do. its the ONLY way that linux has been able to get so many developers on board. EVERYONE including torvalds encourages newbies to write drivers because the newbies tend to write several drivers not just one after learning how to write a single driver.

You are absolutely right. Developer mindshare is not everything, but it is close. Encouraging participation is a good long-term strategy, and it has helped Linux tremendously. I think that the BSD community could learn some things from it.

Also note that Apache, whose license is based on the BSD license, has generally encouraged newbies to help development. This is important and has no doubt helped Apache rise to the top, regarding marketshare. Sure right now Apache has continued to lose market-share for two straight months, but this is explained by a closer look at the numbers :)

Re:developer fall-off

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh they where talking about newbie DEVELOPERS, not some IRC kiddie walking some wanker that can't even get mandrake to work (bwahahah) through a FreeBSD install.

Why don't you just go back to Windows. The BSD developers don't need idiots like you trying to defend them ok.

Re:developer fall-off

[}}mons{{]

Amen to that. Just try one of their forums....

Re:developer fall-off

[Brian Feldman]

The release isn't waiting for new drivers much if at all. The release is waiting for large API changes that affect every part of the kernel and have widespread ramifications through the entire system -- case in point, transition from processes to threads, processes, and KSEs.

If you want more specific examples, something quite common is someone wanting to support a new $10 ethernet card. We already have a developer that given the documents can crank them out faster and better than anyone else has proven possible.

When you luck out is when someone appears out of the woodwork, has been doing his/her homework, and pops up with a genuinely useful working driver because of having done the most important thing possible, going off examples and getting experience.

Asking vaguely "How do I write a driver?" isn't going to help anyone, but providing everything you know, what you want to do, and where you'd like to go next is both expected and welcome.

Re:developer fall-off

[Brian Feldman]

... which is being done by a separate, none-FreeBSD project such as this one.

Re:developer fall-off

[Brian Feldman]

Falling off? Not gaining in number? Look at the CVS logs of, for example, our CVSROOT/access. You'll see what things are really like.

Wanting to code "a driver" doesn't help anybody. Having a piece of hardware you'd specifically like being supported, finding all the info you can on it and possible leads for support of something like it already in the system, and then investigating leads in the form of what everyone else thinks would be the best course of action to take would be.
It's not easy for someone without experience to code a driver from scratch. Then again, you may get that impression from looking at the sheer number of drivers existant in Linux, and not at their quality, and wondering why it's so much easier. FreeBSD, in specific, has a higher expectation of quality in drivers; if the device has a DMA mode, a driver with only PIO support is laughable. If it only "kinda-works" it's probably not going in.

Re:developer fall-off

[Brian Feldman]

Or commit it themselves. There is no need to get approval from Core to commit new drivers to the system. If you can convince a developer of the quality of your driver there's no reason they can't decide to commit it themselves.

Re:developer fall-off

[Brian Feldman]

Many in the FreeBSD community, including myself and the people that helped me way back when, are more than willing to help newbies with installation with the expectation after that that the new user will have enthusiasm to learn, ask good questions, and know the system well with the documentation that's also already there.

This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[The_Jazzman]

I'm an avid open-source supporter, using windows NT at work, 95 at home, and ME on my laptop.

Now, this story seems quite interesting. In this day and age where we are increasing only interested how quickly we can churn out things, it's good that a developer (or rather, group) has decided to admit that things do need time, in this case a year, to be improved and have the features users want implemented to a satisfactory level.

Look at Netscape 4 - definately a rush job, as anyone who has to get CSS and / or javascript working with it will tell you - it's pretty obvious that little testing took place on it, hence even *really* obvious bugs stick out like a sore thumb.

Whilst users always like new features, ooh-ing and ahh-ing over them, it's no good if the features themselves are ridden with bugs. If a few more developers were to spend enough time testing and really ironing out the problems in their applications, the program would slowly come together, gaining a reputation for itself as it does so.

The only problem with this is that in a year, people will be looking at BSD, hoping for some king of uber operating system. I really do hope that the developers live up to expectations - it would be a real shame if they didn't.

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[duffbeer703]

I don't want to start a FreeBSD vs Linux battle. I get enough of that from some of the people I know. But I have to admit that after using several Linux distros and using FreeBSD, the choice (for me) was quite clear. That's not to say I didn't like some of the Linux distros I tried. Not at all. I really liked Storm and I fully intend to install either Debian or Slackware on an IBM I have sitting in the corner. But when it came time to choose a system of the many I tried to run my web-server off of, I had to settle on FreeBSD.

At first I was a little wery about going with something slightly less mainstream than Linux, but good Linux binary compatibility (not to mention the Ports Collection) was a plus that won me over to FreeBSD.

With FreeBSD the first few days were really rough because there were several major annoyances I had, and none of my Linux friends had any useful insight. But I quickly solved most of my problems on my own. I feel I have learned much more this way. Plus, when I needed quick answers, web-searches almost always provided immediate and exact answers because there is only one FreeBSD and many other users have experienced the exact same problems.

It's something of a shame that Storm went the way of the wind, but after I made my choice to run FreeBSD it hasn't mattered too much. As for my soon-to-be Linux system, that just shows that I'm not knocking Linux at all (how could I?) it's just that I made the choice based on my needs and what I like. I personally don't feel I was moving forward fast enough with any of the Linux distros, but I felt comfortable with FreeBSD very quickly.

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[Jon Peterson]

Well, it's pretty bad news if you are a manager in a company and fought for using BSD.

Boss - "So, are we on schedule to start rolling out the 4-way file servers in July next year?"

Me - "Um, no, that will have to wait until, maybe, Jan 2003".

Boss - "Errr, why's that? You said to me last quarter that the new SMP stuff would be ready by the end of this year? Surely 6 months is plenty of safety margin?"

Me - "Actually, the release date slipped by 12 months. I just found out now. I think it was due to most of the developers leaving the project."

Boss - "What?!?!?!! They fired 14 kernel developers?! I thought you said this organisation wouldn't be affected by the economy, on account of not being an evil capitalist outfit that only cares about their quarterly results!"

Me - "Yeah, well, no-one got fired, it's more like, they, uh, just kind of stopped doing any work. I guess maybe they got bored."

Boss - "OK, that does it. We're going with Solaris x86, I don't care what you say."

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[WickedLittleSlaveBoy]

it seems to me that it isn't even really about churning things out, these days. it's all about the number...if my number is higher than yours, it must be better, right? take the Slackware jump as an example, everyone else is at 7.0, so we have to be, too.

why not back off on the numbers and start spending some time fixing the issues you already know exist....maybe the open source companies should start looking at making a stable release, then releasing stable updates at regular intervals, like Sun, IBM, Apple and others.

it's fine now, but it seems like the marketing scheme starts to back fire as the numbers start to get higher....one would hope that when Mandrake gets to release 10(next month?), it would be an "uber operating system"....I mean they've had at least 10 tries, right? that's what the numbers are supposed say.

and they still haven't gotten it right.

as long as development is continuing, I see no reason to see this as a bad thing.

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[Dashslot]

If you didn't want to start a FreeBSD vs Linux battle, why on earth did you post this, which has absolutely nothing to do with the article?

I myself don't use *BSD simply because I prefer the Sys V init, and I find myself typing ps -ef far more than ps auxw. Thats all. But I am comfortable enough with my choice not to have to post off topic messages about it*

* Yes, the irony has been noted.

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[WickedLittleSlaveBoy]

>>I myself don't use *BSD simply because I prefer the Sys V init

it would be easy enough to modify the init process and the startup scripts to behave more like SysV, if that's what you like.

>>ps -ef far more than ps auxw

you could always create an alias and just type 'ps'. if you wanted to, depending on the shell you're using, of course.

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[Dashslot]

I could do that, yes, or I could wait for Debian/BSD to come along, but instead I think I'll just continue using Linux, which currently does everything I need, thank you very much.

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[WickedLittleSlaveBoy]

I wasn't suggesting that you switch, personally I prefer Solaris to either...

I was simply suggesting that the reasons for the choice you supplied were trivial.

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[Dashslot]

I know they're trivial. That was my point. I could have mentioned a third reason that had I switched when I had thought about it, I would have thought of myself as an elitist who only junked Linux when it started getting popular.

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahaha... Debian/BSD.. you know they were stoned when they came up with that one!

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha get real.. most Bosses don't even know what Unix is, let alone SMP, and the differences between BSD and Solaris!

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[grifferz]

Well, it's pretty bad news if you are a manager in a company and fought for using BSD.

My answer to these people is: Maybe you should have taken the money you saved by not buying Solaris, and spent it by allocating half of one of your developer's time to the FreeBSD project?

Supporting Open Source has to mean actually doing some coding somewhere, or there isn't any source to support. Who better to code the features than those who genuinely need to use them?

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[Anonymous Coward]

My answer to these people is: Maybe you should have taken the money you saved by not buying Solaris, and spent it by allocating half of one of your developer's time to the FreeBSD project?

Solaris will cost you only the price of media ($75 for SPARC, $45 for x86) if you have an 8- or less- way machine. You can even download and burn your own CD's. Check out this [sun.com].

--- Nikolay

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[honold]

$75 for NON-COMMERICAL use.

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[honold]

file servers that need 4 cpus and wait on operating system releases?

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[slaytanic killer]

Application programmers != OS programmers.

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[Anonymous Coward]

no. its bundled for free with all sun boxes for commercial use as well.

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[Anonymous Coward]

Full price, it's only about the cost of a single developer day.

You're not gonna tell me otherwise, now, are you?

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok dipshit, it's $45 for intel or $75 for sparc. And to quote Sun:

Now you can use the Solaris[tm] 8 Operating Environment at home or at work -- without paying a license fee. For only the cost of media ($75 U.S.) plus shipping, you can use the software on an unlimited number of computers with a capacity of eight or fewer CPUs. FREE downloads are also available.

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[SurfsUp]

It's something of a shame that Storm went the way of the wind, but after I made my choice to run FreeBSD it hasn't mattered too much.

Well, there's hope, it looks like Xandros is stepping up to fill the niche: debian-based desktop Linux distro. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see them bring some of the Storm team on board.

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[Anonymous Coward]

*BSD is dying

Yet nother crippling bombshell hit th beleaguered *BSD community when last month IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of ll servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick nd its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For ll practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

*BS is dying

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, that does it. We're going with Solaris x86, I don't care what you say.

Having been a programmer for an OS Company (HP/UX), I can tell you that 12 month slips are not solely reserved for free software. About the only difference is that FreeBSD tells you up front that it's 12 months, while HP says 1 month 12 times. That being said, I'd have my company start the migration to Linux immediately.

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[Anonymous Coward]

This should be marked as INSIGHTFUL, not FUNNY.

Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[Anonymous Coward]

Ignoring the fact that said developers didn't leave the project, they just didn't follow through with sustained development effort towards SMPng, you're being unfair to FreeBSD.

Remember the Linux 2.4 kernel?

Remember how long it was delayed from the initial release date promised by Linus, through the never-ending series of 2.3.99 prereleases, to the eventual release of 2.4? In case you've forgotten, they slipped by MORE than a year.

What would you boss have done if you had committed to Linux 2.4 in this situation?
The moral of your story is that you're stupid to stake your bets on the features targetted for future releases of ANY open source project. There just isn't enough control over what the developers choose to spend their time on to make firm guarantees about feature X being finished in a set time frame.

time has shown

[jlemmerer]

that better tested products last longer. maybe the year they now take for testing and developing will help them build a system that is competitive for 5 years or longer. perherps. i will use linux though.

:(

[isudoru]

that's a shame :( i really wanted to see 5.0

Re::(

[Anonymous Coward]

what? you won't be on this earth next year to see 5.0 get released? Are you terminally ill or something?

Fear not! just run CURRENT!

Re:*BSD is Dying, now STFU!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't listen to this loser. In fact, add an extra paragraph about the loss of 93% of the developers in his honour!

filesystem

[archen]

that's too bad. I know that Free BSD 5 is actually going to be able to grow the filesystem on the fly (like AIX) and I really wanted to see how it works. Just recently I switched from Linux to Free BSD and I'm quite happy with what I already have, so I suppose waiting a year won't kill me...

Re:filesystem

[Anonymous Coward]

You should try out the 5.0-CURRENT branch on a spare system.

Re:filesystem

[Anonymous Coward]

see growfs(8) on your 4-STABLE box.

Re:filesystem

[be-fan]

IIRC, XFS does that too. In theory the same is possible with NTFS too, but MS chose not to implement it.

Re:filesystem

[Brad Wilson]

Actually, NTFS can "dynamically grow" by creating a volume set. It's sort of similar to a stripe set without parity, except that it's just all bundled together into a larger, single volume. No striping, no performance benefit. When you fill one physical partition, you start filling the other one.

Re:filesystem

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus, you're dumb. Even with the quotation marks, that is not how dynamic allocation works.

Re:filesystem

[Brad Wilson]

What was the point of your post? To show how much of a "man" you can be by insulting someone else?

I realized that volumes were not the same thing as the original post. That's precisely why I put it in quotes. However, the end result is the same -- more drive space in the partition. I think you need to lighten up.

Re:filesystem

[Anonymous Coward]

What AIX uses is journaling for the FS, this sounds like something else. AIX also has a specific scheme for working with storage hardware. all the phisical volumes can be grouped into various volume groups, then you create logical volumes that may or may not span multipule drives or be mirrored/striped. What AIX does when you tell it to make a Logical volume larger is increase the size of the Logical Volume, then extend the FS to that amount.

Not very good news, nevertheless...

[Noryungi]

As others have pointed out, it's good that the FreeBSD developers have decided to push the deadline by several (14) months.

But I can't help but wonder if the FreeBSD "core" isn't trying to do too much with too little.

SMPng is great. Porting FreeBSD to dozens of architecture may not be -- I thought NetBSD was the one group that was supposed to focus on portability? Stick with Intel CPUs, guys! =)

Nevertheless, a magnificent OS, and one that I use very often...

Re:Not very good news, nevertheless...

[Ded Bob]

Porting FreeBSD to dozens of architecture may not be -- I thought NetBSD was the one group that was supposed to focus on portability?

I believe the mandate was to port FreeBSD to the most popular architectures (for ISP's?).

Re:Not very good news, nevertheless...

[szomb]

SMPng is great. Porting FreeBSD to dozens of architecture may not be -- I thought NetBSD was the one group that was supposed to focus on portability? Stick with Intel CPUs, guys! =)

No. NetBSD's goal is to be as portable as possible, at which it succeeds greatly (the current count is 45 or 46 architectures and it's probably running on that DSL or Cable router.

FreeBSD is not even approaching that level. FreeBSD is a server OS, however, and as such it is a worthwhile goal to have it run on the best and most commonly used server hardware. SUN4U fits into this category.

slackware jump

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I heard and read, Patrick did that to be sarcastic about the version inflation in other distributions.

Re:slackware jump

[WickedLittleSlaveBoy]

yes, that's why he bothered to tell us he was upgrading to "Linux 7.0", instead of letting us believe that 5 and 6 were development versions that didn't make the cut, as reported elsewhere.

BUT, he still made the jump to 8 for whatever reason.

No death certificate...

[linatux]

Though not currently running FreeBSD, it is a system I *really* like and it has a lot (ports, licence...) going for it. Unfortunately, excess developers isn't on the list, it seems.

I hope that all that talent isn't lost forever.

To be honest, I'd like to see some shrinkage in the number of projects going on out there, in the hope (perhaps mistakenly) we'd see quality products turned out faster, rather than just more of them.

eg. There seems to be about a dozen HelpDesk projects out there, but none offer what our horrible old Win3.1 version did - let alone what our current crappy Win32 system does.

But I'd hate to see FreeBSD be part of the shrinkage!

Re:No death certificate...

[Anonymous Coward]

*BSD is dying

Yet nother crippling bombshell hit th beleaguered *BSD community when last month IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of ll servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick nd its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For ll practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

*BS is dying

Maybe its the BSD licence....

[Anonymous Coward]

I know I've worked on a few open source projects and I'm not a huge fan of writing software that will then be repackaged by a company and sold without them having to give back anything. Working on the Linux kernel means all improvements are shared by *everyone* and can't be horded by companies.

Re:Maybe its the BSD licence....

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you're not an advocate of freedom.

Whatever.

No, the real reason is...

[jsse]

The reasons included a lack of support for SMPng - including a developer fall-off ratio of 15 to 1 - a desire to finish the PowerPC/Sparc64/IA64 architectures, and a general desire to robustly test the additions. The economic downturn even makes an appearance in the announcement."

You didn't take Butterfly Effect into account.

Failing to take into acount a butterfly flapping its wings in the country called Elbonia could cause the delay of its release up to several month, even a year.

My story

[Anonymous Coward]

I started out with FreeBSD and had no end of problems - crashes, general screw ups (ok, so some were my fault I was learning), and my Lord it was slow.

I started to get the hang of it, but by that time I was fed up and tried Redhat Linux. To be honest, I've never looked back. Not only was the system more responsive and stable, it was easier to use too. I learned more in the few weeks after installing Linux than the entire frustrating time I spent fighting with FreeBSD.

Sorry guys, maybe I'm just lame, but it doesn't surprise me that FreeBSD is losing developers and mindshare.

Re:My story

[Anonymous Coward]

You must not be doing much with Linux then. I use Linux at work all the time because I work on a Linux based product. One day I decided to try FreeBSD. I have never regretted it or wanted to go back to linux since. Its everything I wished linux would be but never will be due to the rapid development pace.

Read through some kernel code in linux then read through kernel code in FBSD... I think you will get the drift right away. The license differences alone should be enough reason to get more corporate backing behind FBSD over linux.

So why don't people use it?

Its the media attention. The GNU freaks have also helped Linux quite a bit by dressing like Obi Wan and picketing/protesting outside Microsoft. They are more agressive than the BSD folk. Real BSD people don't have a problem with proprietary software that works. The community has met OSX with mostly open arms.

Re:My story

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is slow, crash-prone, and it's not FreeBSD. Oh? What's this?! It's all true, but the little Linux weenies can't accept that. Man of the Sun!

Re:My story

[Ded Bob]

Typical - and people wonder why BSD is dying.

Since BSD is not dying, your comment is the comment of a troll.

With quotes like ... my Lord it [FreeBSD] was slow and ... fighting with FreeBSD, it sure looks like a troll. If it acts, looks, and smells like a troll, it probably is.

BTW, I can take criticism. Saying something is really slow without any proof is not criticism. As a person who uses both Linux and FreeBSD at work, I have seen little if any difference between the two in speed.

Linux, on the other hand, is vital and alive with people fixing and improving it.

The same with FreeBSD and the other BSD's.

Re:My story

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is a case of "User error" rather than "Program error"

It's an excellent choice

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been a FreeBSD user since 2.2.6, and lately I've sen a decrease in quality over the releases.

The switch to 3.0 was painful (a.out to ELF) and the switch to 4.x did not meet my expectactions (I even saw a FreeBSD box crash - something I never saw with FreeBSD 2.2). Surprisingly, during the same time FreeBSD would get the attention of the media (not to the same extent as Linux, but still).

I'm really happy to see that the FreeBSD team chose to delay version 5.0 for 14 whole months (a move which is not media friendly) rather than releasing a buggy FreeBSD 5.0 which would have started to be stable in release 5.5 or worse (not a troll, but look at linux 2.4 - it was released too early. So early in fact that nobody speaks about the stability of open source programs any more, just price and freedom).

So I consider the FreeBSD team to be on the right track, and I applaud them for that choice !

Re:Guess what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, this was funny. Hint for those that didn't get the joke: Numbers of usenet-posts does in no way imply numbers of users. Do you post on Usenet? :) Considering as well that NetBSD is all that will run on quite a few, eh, older machines, the joke gets even better.

Re:Guess what? yes, parent trolling...

[CSC]

The parent deserves some moderation : (+1, Troll smart enough to cut-and-paste)

Delayed 1 year? I can wait...

[Anonymous Coward]

I get enough Free BSDs already with Windows.

Why Give A Date?

[Sonicated]

Why are they setting dates in the first place? Can't they just say that they will release it when feature A, B and C are implemented and stable?

Re:Why Give A Date?

[Earthquake]

Why are they setting dates in the first place? Can't they just say that they will release it when feature A, B and C are implemented and stable?

Setting a date helps to ensure that the project stays on track. It gives everyone a sense of a real goal, and urges developers to complete their portions of the project on time. If you just say "We'll release it when it's done," you often end up with everyone thinking "Oh, I've got lots of time... I'll work on my code tomorrow" and nothing gets done.

It's not setting development deadlines that's a bad thing. It's having deadlines that are cast in stone and set by people who have no appreciation for how long it takes to develop the software that is bad. I'm very glad to see that FreeBSD is setting deadlines, attempting to meet those deadlines, and adjusting those deadlines as required to ensure success of the project.

Guess what? yes, parent is a homo

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you're a smart one, arent you.

Feeding the trolls makes them worse

Re:Guess what? yes, parent is a homo

[Anonymous Coward]

Pissing in the trolls' eyes makes them run away.

Not necessarily bad news

[dglo]

This isn't as bad as it might sound to Linux users.

FreeBSD has multiple branches:
* 5.0, aka -CURRENT, currently the target of
most new development.
* 4.4, the next release in the 4.x series,
due to be released today
* 4.3-RELEASE, which is updated with security
fixes as necessary
* 3.x, which is still being used, so it
occasionally gets a fix or two.

What this delay means is that the general public won't see most of the nifty 5.0 features until the end of next year.

That doesn't mean, however, that we won't get *any* new features; the list of 4.4 improvements will be evidence of that...

Re:Not necessarily bad news

[Anonymous Coward]

2.2 Linux kernel users received a lot of 2.4 features back ported so I do not see any reason BSD cannot do the same.

Re:Not necessarily bad news

[Baki]

Plus, if you read the announcement w.r.t. the delay well, new features shall be backported from 5.0 to 4.x in the meantime.

In fact the time between 4.0 and 5.0 won't be that exceptional. 2.0 to 3.0 took 4 years (1994 to 1998). See this page for a nice overview of past releases. Note that 4.0 -> 5.0 will be a relatively large jump compared to past major releases.

Re:Not necessarily bad news

[Arandir]

Ditto. For Linux users that don't know the difference, this would be like Linus saying "3.0 is delayed a year, but 2.4 is going strong, and we'll do a 2.6 if necessary."

The FreeBSD 5.0 branch will have some MAJOR changes to the architecture. Delaying it is a Good Thing(tm).

Re:Not necessarily bad news

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how FreeBSD works... Changes are made in 5.0 and then merged into 4.X. But some of the bigger features, such as SMPng, won't backport easily enough because they're basically completely rewrites of large sections of code.

Two ways to respond to such news...

[Leimy]

You can sit and whine about how its being delayed or you can get off your duff and help.

Even taking some time to run what parts of FreeBSD 5 do exist to give some valuable feedback as to how it behaves on your system could be useful.

I am just as dissapointed as anyone else about the news but I can't help but feel motivated to lend a hand in such bad times.

I will probably try FBSD 5 this weekend and see what's what. Too bad I don't have SMP...

Re:Two ways to respond to such news...

[Anonymous Coward]

i could test the SMP for them... ain't going to. If I want to be flamed crispy for innocently trying to help, there's far easier places to do it.

Re:Two ways to respond to such news...

[aozilla]

You can sit and whine about how its being delayed or you can get off your duff and help.

I was a FreeBSD advocate since 1995 or so. I started to lose interest back when Jordan Hubbard left the project to work for Apple. I imagine a lot of others did too. With this announcement I'm completely moving away from FreeBSD. I've already switched my workstation to Linux, and I now plan to switch all my servers over too, and won't deploy any new FreeBSD servers. I guess the GPL really did beat the BSD license. It's too bad, really, FreeBSD was a much cleaner solution, IMHO.

another way to look at this..

[TechnoVooDooDaddy]

13-Mar-2000 FreeBSD 4.0 has been released

hmm... so a little over a year and a half for another major labeled release..

wow, most corporate software would be GREEN with envy. No pressure guys, you're still outperforming Microsoft and the rest of them.

Re:another way to look at this..

[Anonymous Coward]

outperforming microsoft?
get real. fbsd has no features at all - it's only good for stuff like www/mail/ftp servers. When .NET comes out, we'll see who is the leader.

-------------
www.softstyle.com

I like BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

I signed up for a "Unix" class at the local Community College... Went to buy the books and found out it was "Guide to Unix, using Linux" well I was a little disappointed that they were using Linux, simply because Linux can teach you some bad habits. Turns out that the class got cancelled. So I signed up for the class at another Community College and this one teaches FreeBSD. I was much happier. To top that off, the text book was dated 1994, before every "Unix" book had a chapter on Linux in it. Now don't get me wrong, I do use Linux, but I like BSD's style.

Re:I like BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

I am glad I was able to build up a good library of books on Unix before the Linux plague hit.

Re:I like BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

The Unix style and the BSD style are quite different. If you are looking to learn Unix, then BSD will teach you nothing but bad habits. Linux is far closer to Unix than BSD ever will be, and is used in many schools as a 'poor mans solaris'.

Re:I like BSD

[AndrewLankford]

Really? When's the last time Linux had an up-to-date man page?

Re:I like BSD

[AndrewLankford]

What's really ironic is that SysV unix incorporates a lot of features that BSD introduced over the years... long before Linux existed. TCP/IP for instance?

Re:No surprise..

[Leimy]

"Companies like Microsoft, with thousands of hard working, dedicated fulltimers are deemed to prevail..."

I don't know about you but I get tired of seeing MS Word not work when I can play the pinball game "easter egg" that comes with it just fine. I think your "dedicated developer" theory is a bunch of bullshit. I mean have you ever even used ME? Its a piece of crap. Caveat Emptor!! [Brady Bunch quote]...

Troll assmunch go home

How will this affect Slackware?

[TrollMaster3000]

Since FreeBSD & Slackware are both made by the same company, I am wondering how this will affect Slackware? If it will at all?

As a Slackware advocate, and former *BSD user I really hate to see somthing like this happen. Slackware is a GOOD system that basicly is a BSD system running a Linux architecture. Ive seen FBSD 4.3 and its quite nice, even though I don't use FBSD, I can't help but to wonder about how/if this will affect their other projects.

Re:How will this affect Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its good to see that slashdot hasn't lost its idiot pretending to know what they're talking about factor. Slackware is a Linux kernel running GNU utils with a BSD style init and config file locations.

Re:How will this affect Slackware?

[howardjp]

Slackware was released on CD by Walnut Creek just like FreeBSD was released on CD by Walnut Creek. WC also employed some developers for both, but WC did not produce either package. As it is, Slackware was abandoned after the buyout of BSDi by WindRiver. So, Slackware is unaffected. Even if they were still both released on CD by WC, they are wholly seperate projects and have nothing to do with each other.

OS X is BSD

[kiwipeso]

Guess what? OS X has 1 million users.
That doesn't include pirated copies, so it could be 1.25 million users of mac on a BSD base.
As apache is bundled with OS X, there could be 125,000 servers running on BSD from OS X alone.
OS X is doing great from all the unix apps for it.

Re:OS X is BSD

[dangermouse]

Yeah, wouldn't it be cool if Apple included a damn compiler?

I got 10.0.3 (upgraded it to 10.0.4) and of course, I have no toolchain. That kinda sucks.

Re:OS X is BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

OS X is neither FreeBSD nor Free

Re:OS X is BSD

[Tachys]

Install the Developers tools for the developers tools CD. It installs an compiler

Re:OS X is BSD

[dangermouse]

I seem to be missing that disc. Others (thanks, all) have mentioned a download, but as of yet I haven't found it.

Still looking...

Re:OS X is BSD

[dangermouse]

Aha!

Found it after registering for the Apple Developer Connection and digging through the downloads that are hidden in there. Downloading it now.

Doesn't that seem a bit much just to get binary packages of the toolchain?

Perhaps I'll rebuild gcc and whatnot and make some tarballs available. For some reason, nobody else seems to have done so.

Re:OS X is BSD

[kiwipeso]

OS X is based on FreeBSD 3.4 and you can get the FreeBSD base for free download via apple.

Free BSD Developers

[kiwipeso]

They've probably been lured to work on Darwin, OS X's BSD base.
I guess they'll be back right after they figure out how to fix the dual processor dialup error.

realism

[benedict]

About a week ago, I saw the latest FreeBSD Development Report, compiled by Robert Watson. It's a simple report, including a paragraph or two on the state of all the major projects.

After reading the report, I decided to be a little bit scared of 5.0, because there were a lot of ambitious projects slated for inclusion therein.

This move strikes me as a recognition of a reality: it's going to take a lot of time to integrate all those projects and turn the result into something worthy of being called FreeBSD-RELEASE.

Quality vs. Quantity

[RinkSpringer]

Hi everyone,

Despite all those annoying trolls who claim *BSD is dead, I say it lives. I've used FreeBSD since 2.1.6 and it's so good to see all the progress, in my favourite OS.

Even if we have a release date that is in the not-so-distant future, I'd prefer to see quality instead of quantity.

I'd prefer a stable OS instead of something that has releases every few weeks to fix bugs... and I think a lot of users will agree with me on that. This is one of the reasons why FreeBSD is used much on servers: for it's stability.

On the sidenote, why not give FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT a try, if you're dying to see what it looks like? It won't hurt you (much), apart from some possible problems. But why not contact the developers when your box, say, gives some core dumps? It's with our support that this product is made! We don't pay for it, so don't whine!

Re:Quality vs. Quantity

[Anonymous Coward]

I totaly agree with you, and I'm also sute mostly everyone else does too.

Re:Quality vs. Quantity

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you! I did pay for it! First I paid Walnut Creek for it, then I paid BSDi for it, then I paid Wind River for it and now I'm paying Apple for it...so take your fucking "it's free don't bitch" attitude and sit on it sidewise you penguin raping bastard!

Linux is biting...

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew this was going to happen sooner or later... Linux has spread so far and wide that people are (gasp) ditching FreeBSD for Linux, or the more-secure OpenBSD.
There is only a limited number of developers and admins. Although the number increases with every passing year, and will continue to do so for perhaps another 20, their is only so much talent for all the Open Source projects to draw from. Linux is pulling people away from FreeBSD, just as how AtheOS is pulling a handfull of people from the sphere of Linux development.
I don't FreeBSD is going to be able to continue like it has unless it has a clear rationale for existing. If you want a system like how FreeBSD evangelizers describe, then it is alot more convient (note - not "easier") to use Slackware Linux.
Having 3 seperate BSD efforts furthermore reduces the production capiblities of the BSD developersphere.

no big deal.

[mattc]

While this is obviously bad news, I'm not worried. FreeBSD still beats Linux easily.

I like to use a system that feels like it is a cohesive whole, and not a patchwork of often incompatible packages. It is the little details that make the difference. Something like better written manpages might not make that much of a difference to a clueless newbie, but when you get to know the system they do make a difference. Man pages are just one example though... FreeBSD as a whole system (not just a kernel like linux) has an organized, well-though out design, as opposed to the messed up patchwork that is (Debian|Redhat|Suse|whatever) Linux.

A cathedral will always be more beautiful and well-engineered than a bazaar. Even linux peasants should be able to figure that out.

Re:no big deal.

[GauteL]

"A cathedral will always be more beautiful and well-engineered than a bazaar. Even linux peasants should be able to figure that out."

Nice analogy. Should we take it a bit further?
1. A bazaar is always a better place to find open and valid information than a cathedral. Sure, you find a bit misinformation, but at least you have more than one source of it.

2. The sheer amount of activity at a bazaar is much much more than that of a cathedral. What point is there to beautiful engineering if noone uses it?

3. A cathedral takes ages to create. As a concrete example, the cathedral of Trondheim, "Nidarosdomen", was just finished this year, after starting in the 1400s. It took so long to build, that patchwork to make keep the current standards have been done for several hundred years before the building was actually finished.

4. The bazaar generates a huge amount of money and trade, compared to the cathedral.

Re:no big deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but when you're robbed in the bazaar, you have no way of identifying the perp - in the cathedral, you know who's hands dipping in your pocket.

Oh wait...nm ;-P

Re:no big deal.

[asullivan]

1. A bazaar is always a better place to find open and valid information than a cathedral.

Why do you say this? You think that the medieval Church scholars were somehow more poorly informed than the people in the bazaar? It seems obvious that your bazaar has informed you rather badly about history, then.

Re:no big deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you say this? You think that the medieval Church scholars were somehow more poorly informed than the people in the bazaar?

This one was true until about the Renaissance. After that the Church was less of a source of *open* and valid information. It was the place of the dogma, the sterile hair-splitting scholastic, and old fashioned ideas. How valid is the idea that the Sun revolves around the Earth ?

It seems obvious that your bazaar has informed you rather badly about history, then.

No, I think he was talking about the post-Dark Ages area.

Re:no big deal.

[DarkHelmet433]

> While this is obviously bad news, I'm not worried.

Actually, depending on how you look at it, it could almost be considered good news.

I'm one of the people who semi-regularly works on it and I can pretty comfortably say that the November 2001 target was unrealistic for a polished system. We were planning on having something that we wouldn't be embarressed about in about another 4 to 6 months.

Do not be suprised if 5.0 happens about then, and not in November 2002. If so, it will be something we will be pleased to have released rather than something that we spend the next few months fighting fires over.

As long as the non-SMPng / non-KSE stuff keeps going into the 4.x branch, we should be in good shape. That will make the 5.0 release basically like "4.x plus SMPng + KSE (threads done right)"

This would be funny...

[Anonymous Coward]

If I weren't in those shoes. I recently migrated our Solaris/SPARC infrastructure to a FreeBSD/x86 infrastructure.

FreeBSD has been loads better to admin, but I was really really looking forward to a FreeBSD 5.0 release soon to fix the little things that I think FreeBSD is way behind in.

I'm still not looking back at my decision, though. It was a good one, saved the (taxpayer funded) organization tons of money, and got high- end x86 servers that scream. Sun has been getting increasingly "evil" the past few years.

This is a big disappointment in my book. I can understand 3 months, even 6 months, but a year indicates a serious problem. Oh well, I'll wait.

Re:This would be funny...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you choosed FreeBSD for features of the 5.0, then you are a fool. Sorry to say that, but it is true.

I would love to have snapshots, and look forward 5.0 too. But, even if it never ship, it won't be a real problem for me.

Funny people

[Anonymous Coward]

As amusing as it is, the clueless OS junkies are out rumbling again over OS X issues. OS X has nothing to do with BSD. It is Mach in its core. Kernel is a MACH kernel. Repeat after me, MACH is not BSD. It is just using a single BSD server which converts the BSD based programs' system calls to Mach system calls. It is the cheapest way to implement TCP/IP and all other complex and well established packages. I am hearing those ambitious "knows nothing but logining in and the name of the OS" junkies sweating already. Well not everybody in this planet have an above avarage IQ, but they all darn have that growling super EGO. tsk tsk.

Re:Funny people

[Anonymous Coward]

OS X has nothing to do with BSD

That's funny. The OS X team and the FreeBSD project share a lead developer. Most of my man pages in OS X say "BSD Experiemental" or "4th Berkeley Distribution" at the bottom. You can even buy darwin at Daemonnews (you know, the BSD magazine?). Oh yeah, you can even have the FreeBSD ports tree on Darwin.

Wow! It certainly seems like OS X has just a little bit to do with BSD. There is more to an operating system than just the kernel, you know.

Re:Funny people

[Graymalkin]

Aw fuck man are you telling me all the Ports I have running on Darwin right now don't really work? You're a life saver, I don't know what would have happened if someone didn't come along to tell me that my software was tricking me. It's good to know all those man pages talking about BSD Unix are fakes. Phew. In a world of bad apples you're a dumb piece of shit.

Re:Funny people

[Anonymous Coward]

So if i get apt-get running on OS X and use GNU man pages instead of BSD, OS X is now a Linux system?

Re:Funny people

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes! you are being tricked by those evil man pages. Now here is a question for you, what is a man page and where all these man pages are coming from?

Cause for pause

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it me, or does anyone else see the irony in a free software, developed by a free community of voluteers, suffering from economic problems? Of course I understand the reasoning given but, at the same time I have to wonder.

If these developers believe so strongly in the movement and in the FreeBSD product, why are they abandoning it. It seems to me that layoffs would leave these developers with even more free time on their hands. This would cause me to think that there should be growing contributions to the cause, rather than shrinking support.

I find it equally disturbing that this trend is not limited to FreeBSD. I have noticed a sharp decline in contributions to Linux as well. Sure new projects are always popping up but, most of them seem half hearted and stalled. Even the larger established projects have shown a significant decline in productivity. Does this indicate a growing lack of interest on the part of free developers? Are the developers growing tired of giving their work away and are instead turning to more profitable work?

Solaris you have got to be kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you seen the scripts available for suckaris?
You are an ignorant ass!

Re:Solaris you have got to be kidding?

[Brian Knotts]

He's talking about Trusted Solaris, not regular Solaris.

Re:Solaris you have got to be kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

The main reason FreeBSD doesn't go for B1 certification is the cost: they would have to put up about $10,000, which of course they don't have...

Re:Solaris you have got to be kidding?

[Mr. Piccolo]

Well, gee, if all 10,000 users contributed just $1 each, there wouldn't be a problem, would there?

Re:Solaris you have got to be kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't let that BSD sheep fool ya, B1 requires mandatory access controls, something that FreeBSD does not have...well maybe in 2002, we'll see.

Of course there are versions of Linux that can already do this.

Re:Solaris you have got to be kidding?

[AndrewLankford]

http://www.trustedbsd.com/news/

Impact to Blackcomb due to postponed BSD 5?

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider one heretofore unanticipated cascade effect. Any group with software dependent upon BSD code might also have to wait...so MS would not be able update Windows Blackcomb or it's successor with the benefits of 'validated' BSD 5 code until 5 is released.

Any guess as to how much this could delay that version? WOuld it affect MS's one OS release per year marketing strategy? Ok, maybe not.

Re:No surprise..

[Anonymous Coward]

I see a lot of crap from you, but no real arguments. What exactly is your problem with Word? An incidental problem doesn't make Word 'bad' by the way. Whay would it be used by millions of companies? Because it's a standard, that's why!

economic downturn...

[DraKKon]

Economic Downturn! HA! We ALL know that's a huge load of crap..err.. what? we like BSD stuff? Damn Economic Downturn!

Slashdolt double standard strikes again!

Moderators: do your worst! (like you usually do.) Screw Karma.

Darwin and FreeBSD merging

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there any license conflicts in doing that?

A Recommendation

[MO!]

I read further down that you basically asked "What needs to be done?", and you believe this to be an acceptible question to post. Not being a direct part of the FreeBSD-Hackers discussions, I can perhaps give some advice from a long time user who's done minor work on ports from time to time.

A better approach:

1) Find some piece of hardware that isn't supported, but you think could be useful to more than a couple people worldwide ;-)

2) Post the question "Is anyone else working on a driver for [cool piece of hardware]?"

3) Commence work with any answering "I am" to #2 - or on your own, referring to driver-writing documentation included in the source tree.

4) Once working in a stable manner - post "Hey it works! Anyone want to help hammer it and make sure it's up to par?"

5) Gain respect and appreciation for your contribution to FreeBSD.

Simply asking "What needs to be done?" is like asking a star for a specific particle of light!

Re:Guess what? The troll has a name.

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone with a brain please mod parent up.

That's funny?

[Anonymous Coward]

f'n dorks

Well, how about READING first...

[keepper]

Well, a simple search would have given you quite a bit of information..

I mean no flame, but if you're as knowledgeable as you claim to be... the current available docs would be enough. I mean, there's even a sample device driver to start yourself on.

When you email technical lists, with very vague questions, you get bad answers...

'tis the nature of geeks :)

*BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

*BSD is dying

Yet nother crippling bombshell hit th beleaguered *BSD community when last month IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of ll servers. Coming on the heel> the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick nd its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For ll practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

BSD delayed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do people actually still use this OS? I mean, why bother when you have the better Linux OS and Windows 2000 sitting at the top of the chain.

FreeBSD is gone, the developers are gone to better environments, let it die already!

My Reply Violated The Lameness Filter

[istartedi]

My reply to post #2239121 violated the lameness filter. Something about postsubj compression filter. That lameness filter is, well... lame.

Re:My Reply Violated The Lameness Filter

[Anonymous Coward]

au contraire... the lameness filter is finally working...

C'mon. You knew *somebody* would jump on such an easy line.

Download the developer tools

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that hard. And it makes sense since ALL Mac users won't want a compiler anyways, so just have the people that want the compiler go get it. It doesn't cost anything. What are you waiting for?

The failure of *BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

So why now? Why did *BSD fail? Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities?

The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shround over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.

Re:The failure of *BSD

[arielb]

Wrong. Amiga Forever!

Lack of clean driver APIs == Sign of poor design

[Valdrax]

It's, quite frankly, more than a little bit easier for existing FreeBSD developers to write a given driver than it is for them to teach someone what to do. Writing drivers involves intimate familiarity with the system, especially with a system where the kernel API has been in a constant state of flux in the long-running development branch.

Quite frankly, that sounds like a very poor design. If you are changing your internal APIs so often and don't have a good abstraction layer in place for basic driver work, then you're shooting yourself in the foot. The internal APIs being in a "constant state of flux" shows that you need to get your heads out of the implementation detail, step back, and do some actual design work first.

A good OS should have clean interfaces for writing drivers that anyone can support. You should be ashamed that it requires an "expert" in the system to write one of the most commmonly needed contributions to the system.

I've written Linux device drivers as part of a class, including block and character devices with full /dev support and /proc filesystem support for configuring the devices. The Linux device driver model is so simple and easy to use that you can teach a class with a new, more complex driver as a biweekly assignment. It was basically a trivial task once you read through a little documentation. What is so wrong with FreeBSD that you can't simply do that?

That said, intelligent questions about an arbitrary topic with non-obvious answers are USUALLY responded to politely. You can't just say, though, "I'd like to write some drivers. Can you tell me how?" or anything even moderately like that.

Funny, if it wasn't an elite "boys club" on the list and if the kernel APIs were well designed, then you should be able to politely point someone to a HOWTO, FAQ, or book. Instead, snobbery and insults fly when it's really your own shoddy workmanship that is at fault.

Drivers are import to system adoption. Driver writing should be the low-level entry to kernel hacking for your OS. It's a good way to see who can code well and to enhance your system. Of course, if neither of these are your goal, then don't be whine when the supposedly "inferior" Linux kernel leads them to a higher mindshare in the developer community.

Register at developer.apple.com

[Anonymous Coward]

And download the developer tools - it has all the compiler/libraries you need.

What a pathetic and misguided attitude

[MO!]

Oops! Here goes my Karma! - Oh well...

Fact: Jordan Hubbard did not leave the project - he simply changed employers. He is still the FreeBSD Release Engineer, and still active member of the CORE team.

Fact: FreeBSD-Current (5.x branch) has so many changes that pushing back the switch of Current to Stable does not mean that features from Current won't be MFC'd back to Stable during the course of the year. It just means the whole of it won't.

Assuming this is some sort of "writing on the wall" of FreeBSD's demise is incredibly short-sighted. If you truly have been involved in FreeBSD for 6 years, I would expect you to know better. The 4.x branch was delayed many times due to the amount of changes to various subsystems - some of which were then MFC'd to the then 3.x-Stable branch.

Passing FUD about the GPL beating BSD is just further evidence of your troll.

Re:What a pathetic and misguided attitude

[aozilla]

I am aware that Jordan Hubbard merely changed employers, which is precisely why I compared it to Linus working for Transmeta. The fact of the matter is that Jordan no longer has time to work on FreeBSD in ways that it does not further the goals of Apple, and is not even required to provide his work to the community at all. While that wasn't enough for me to jump off the FreeBSD bandwagon, reading this announcement was.

The push back in the schedule is not the kicker, although the fact that it was by a whole year is disturbing. That 14 of the 15 people working on SMPng have not been active in the project in 6 months is writing on the wall.

Finally, I hope that the developers working on 5.0-CURRENT don't take this as an excuse to down tools and take a few months off since that will only ensure that we slip again. We've taken on some truly significant challenges with 5.0 and it will take everyone working as hard as they can to both meet this new deadline and release something
that lives up to everyone's expectations.

You know that's exactly what the developers are going to do. No one wants to contribute to a sinking ship, at least not without getting paid for it. If the November 2002 date requires everyone working as hard as they can then I guarantee you that date will not be met.

By "involved in FreeBSD for 6 years", I don't mean to imply that I contributed any code. I used the software for every server I had control over, and convinced my employer to use it for some as well.

This wasn't meant to be a troll, just an honest opinion as to my particular guess as to where the FreeBSD project is going, and the fact that they have lost me as a user. Perhaps others feel the same way (at least 14 others apparently do). Maybe not. Personally I've decided to spend my time and energy on Linux from now on. While the demise of FreeBSD is by no means certain, it has become a reasonable possibility and I guarantee you that Linux will survive longer than FreeBSD.

Re:What a pathetic and misguided attitude

[kkenn]

Please stop trolling.

#1) Jordan is as active as he's ever been in FreeBSD despite the move in his daytime job to Apple. He's even paid to work on FreeBSD during the week. The fact of the matter is that Jordan isn't an active developer anyway, he's more of a publicist and manager. If you're choosing to move away from FreeBSD because you think the PR spokesman is no longer dedicated to his job, well, that seems like a misguided decision to make.

#2) The "14 developers who haven't been working on SMPng" have NOT left FreeBSD and continue to do their work in the other areas of the system they work on. The announcement merely stated the lack of current developer activity on the SMPng project within FreeBSD. These people have not left FreeBSD and there certainly hasn't been any massive behind-the-scenes "rift" in the developer community, as some of the replies to this thread seem to be assuming.

FreeBSD developer activity continues to increase, and in fact has probably never been better in the history of the project

Re:What a pathetic and misguided attitude

[aozilla]

Please stop trolling.

You know FreeBSD sucks, and you just won't admit it.

Re:What a pathetic and misguided attitude

[Brian Feldman]

Please stop trolling.

You know my dad can beat up your dad, and you just won't admit it.

This is a good thing...

[zentex]

I'd rather see a product delayed because it's "not how they want it" when it ships, rather than see it Rushed Out the Door.

Classic Examples of ROD Products: Windows, Red Hat, PS2, and the Ford Pinto :-)

Which PROVES 1 out of 4 Rushed Products "Blow up" on the consumer (pinto anyone?).

Re:This is a good thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, BSD simply blows; so what's your point devil-boy?

Very true

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just another atempt of the slashdot editors to skew the facts to damage FreeBSD. The announcement actually says:

There were 15 people (not counting Apple's participating engineers) involved at the SMPng kick-off, for example, yet not a single one of them has been actively involved with the project for the last 6 months, all such work falling to a single engineer (John Baldwin) who was not even present at the first planning meeting.

Which cannot be reasonably called a developer fall-off ratio of 15 to 1 without at least mentioning that it is only about SMPng.

I only ever had one wish for FreeBSD.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Please catch up with the JDK and other Java API versions. Please!
That'll make my life much easier and FreeBSD much more popular.

Re:Lack of clean driver APIs == Sign of poor desig

[Espen Skoglund]

Quite frankly, that sounds like a very poor design. If you are changing your internal APIs so often and don't have a good abstraction layer in place for basic driver work, then you're shooting yourself in the foot. The internal APIs being in a "constant state of flux" shows that you need to get your heads out of the implementation detail, step back, and do some actual design work first.

There do exist instructions on how to construct drivers. One can even run shell scripts located in /usr/share/examples/drivers which creates working skeleton drivers. Then there exist the option of reading manual pages. Driver(9) might be a good place to start.

As for the kernel API being in a constant state of flux, I believe that the poster didn't mean it that litterally. Sure, some things do change over time, but I find most of the stuff to be very clear and well documented (note, I'm not a FreeBSD kernel hacker/developer). I also find the newbus scheme a very compelling infrastructure for driver development.

15:1 developer drop isn't what it seems

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently, what happened was that those
developers worked on things other than SMPng,
they didn't leave the project. So there are lots
of other new things, but the SMPng work needs
more dedication. Go figure.

Hard times for BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

This is very bad news for *BSD. It may be the final blow. Consider that because they use Mach, MacOS will not benefit from SMPng in the BSD kernels. The embedded systems supplier (I will not name them cause I despise them) that bought BSDi has no interest in SMP or in servers really ... and a truckload of people who loved working with Walnut Creek and BSDi as contributors will not be working with the project any longer.

Now that BSDi is dead ARE there any companies left that are dedicated to developing BSD as a kernel and OS as part of their core business activities anymore ?? No. Except Wasabi which is pretty small still.

The reason it's delayed a year is because BSD development has had a serious accident and needs to be hospitalized to get itself back together. With BSDi defunct relying on Apple, Wasabi and a band of merry volunteer hackers to get SMP done means it AIN'T gonna happen.

Hello Yahoo??!! Can Yahoo afford to hire a few SMPng hackers for a year??? Oh yeah I forgot Yahoo is broke too.

At this point SMP is owned by SGI Solaris and in tied in a distant third Microsoft and SCO/Caldera, an even more distant fourth Linux.

On 4 way and 8 way machines BSD is simply not in the running at this stage and even on 2 way systems out of the box RedHat7.1 is a better choice for SMP. What's more threading work done by IBM is gonna improve Linux even more on this front - even Caldera (which bought SCO Unix a quite good SMP system up to 8 ways) admits that Linux will likely overtake the SCO kernel.

When you get right down to it ... who DOES need SMP? And who needs it badly right now and is willing to pay for it?

Moderators!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

if you would stop smoking crack for a minute you would realize that this post is not a troll. It is a very relevant comment considering the topic of the story

Thanks for links and additional thoughts

[Valdrax]

It seems that this newbus bit may add a level of nice abstraction like that of the Linux kernel. It's good to see steps being taken in this direction. Hopefully, there will be more open-minded people willing to assist interested parties learn this interface.

What bothered me was the usual snobbery about it not being their "place" to help newbies learn how to write drivers. The whole API being in flux issue is mostly a red herring since they could simply request that the person submit their drivers against a frozen architecture, such as the FreeBSD 4.X branches -- unless these too are in a "constant state of flux." I mean, big deal -- the Linux driver models were quite different between 1.2 & 2.0 and between 2.0 and 2.2. That doesn't mean that people were turned away from submitting new drivers under the older stable tree during the 1.3 & 2.1 development cycles.

If they have a good interface, then they should really have documentation to help people add system support for the stable branches. I mean, really, the main "expert" developers shouldn't be bothering themselves with device driver writing. For one thing, it requires them to take time away from their usual projects to learn the interface for a new piece of hardware -- which should be the hardest part of writing a driver under a good architecture. Device driver writing is exactly what newbies should be doing. The kernel interfaces should be a trivial matter -- let the newbies worry about learning the actual hardware while the main developers work on more important core issues.

As for the kernel API being in a constant state of flux, I believe that the poster didn't mean it that litterally. Sure, some things do change over time, but I find most of the stuff to be very clear and well documented (note, I'm not a FreeBSD kernel hacker/developer).

What bothers me is that this guy is. You can see his name all over FreeBSD mailing lists and code fixes. A quick search turns up that he's been a committer to the FreeBSD source tree since June 1999. This guy is in on things, and he's displaying this level of snobbery towards new developers. What a great way to gain mindshare! They're squandering a great resource.

Re:Thanks for links and additional thoughts

[edhall]

This guy is in on things, and he's displaying this level of snobbery towards new developers.

Don't take it too seriously -- as a regular reader of freebsd-current, I can say that he sometimes displays the same level of snobbery to old developers, too.

FreeBSD doesn't vet its developers on the basis of their personalities, but rather on their ability to contribute. Truth to tell, Feldman isn't the only one who sometimes takes a condescending attitude, but most of the FreeBSD folks I've encountered take a considerably more helpful attitude than what Feldman's post displays. He most assuredly doesn't speak for FreeBSD; he's not in the core group, and even core generally lets Jordan Hubbard be the only one who speaks for FreeBSD.

I might also mention that a few days spent reading the Linux Kernel Mailing List will turn up similar attitudes; they don't vet developers on the basis of personality, either. Even the Great Penguin Himself takes an attitude now and then.

As other posters have pointed out, reports of extreme difficulty in writing FreeBSD drivers are greatly exaggerated. But like most open-source projects, you are generally going to have to "show them the code" to have your questions on writing drivers taken credibly. If you aren't able to hunt down the docs that are part of the system (they aren't hidden), model your efforts after existing drivers, and at least have the framework built before asking questions, you aren't going to get much of a response.

Once again, this is true in the Linux world as well, though by the law of large numbers you have a greater chance of getting lucky and finding a competent mentor if you don't know how to get started. But don't expect it.

-Ed

Re:Thanks for links and additional thoughts

[Brian Feldman]

You raise some good points. Thanks for pointing out that this isn't snobbery, just expecting a reasonable amount of effort up front from someone expecting to get lots of other people's time (the most valuable asset one has) for free.

Also, FreeBSD has APIs that are definitely sometimes harder to learn in the first place. That's quite often due to them being designed properly and being able to do so much more. Would you like to compare the VFS of Linux to that of FreeBSD? One has definitely an "easier" bar of entry, whereas another definitely has a hell of a lot more functionality.

Features aimed at enterprise servers anyhow

[.Natalie_Portman]

Work in-progress includes support for fine-grained
SMP locking in kernel, allowing higher performance on multi-processor machines, support for Scheduler Activations, allowing parallelism in threaded programs, file system snapshots, fsck-free booting, network optimizations such as zero-copy sockets and event-driven socket IO, ACPI support, and advanced security features such as Mandatory Access Control.

None of these features are needed by the average user. I don't find the slip surprising or a big deal considering the tech economy. Just look at yer VALinux corporate strategy, or some stock prices at LWN.

These hackers are in it for the long haul, FreeBSD will continue to be one of the best OS's around.

uh oh

[Anonymous Coward]

I really hope for FreeBSD's sake that Yahoo never switches to another OS. This seems to be just about the only example of someone actually using this antiquated OS in the real world.

Re:uh oh

[Anonymous Coward]

MSN uses only enterprise level operating systems such as Windows 2000, not relic novelty OSes that had their heyday in the early 90s.

Re:uh oh I meant hotmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Not any more, seems like someone is living in the past, oops.

"The site www.hotmail.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000."

Well at least the FreeBSD community can still reminisce about how leet they used to be in 93.

Re:uh oh I meant hotmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Check it out at netcraft.







This is some extra shit i'm typing so the stupid "postercomment compression filter" doesn't get all pissy.

Re:uh oh I meant hotmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya FreeBSDs pathetic license does allow large corporations to steal their code, but that still won't stop them from dying, in fact it's part of the reaosn 93% percent of their developers quit.

Even when faced with the undeniable truth the BSD luser will stick his head in the sand, unable to face facts.

Netcraft doesn't lie dumbass.

Another M$ FOOL !!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Look Satan. Another M$ user. He replies without knowing anything about what the guy posted.

Re:OS X has BSD compiler disc

[kiwipeso]

dude, it's available as individual downloads if you can't find the disc.

Re:Lack of clean driver APIs == Sign of poor desig

[Brian Feldman]

I quite _did_ mean that I run, and develop on, -CURRENT, and it is in a definite constant state of flux. There are many huge architectural design changes. Go read the -CURRENT mailing list for examples.