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Wind River lays off FreeBSD developers; Q&A
In the interests of full disclosure. I'm also nik@freebsd.org, although not a WRS employee. I was employed by BSDi in Europe, before the European team were laid off as part of the WRS acquisition. These questions were answered by WindRiver's PR department.
Q: WRS has already been through two rounds of layoffs in the recent past. Why this third set of lay offs now? Are the FreeBSD developers the only ones affected?
Wind River has only had two rounds of layoffs. During the second round Wind River decided to divest itself of the FreeBSD project. We spent several weeks looking for a suitable corporate sponsor but did not find any company with sufficient interest and financial capability in this challenging economy. This week's layoff of the FreeBSD employees is therefore Wind River's "final option" in executing the plans set in motion by the second round of layoffs.
Q: WRS currently own the trademark "FreeBSD". Do WRS plan to retain the trademark? If so, why? If not, will WRS let the trademark lapse? Or are there plans to transfer it to a third party, such as the FreeBSD Foundation?
Wind River plans to ensure continuation of the altruistic, open stewardship of the FreeBSD trademark. We feel strongly that the FreeBSD project must be protected and encouraged and that a FreeBSD trademark in the wrong hands could be very detrimental. We continue to search for the best solution. No specific third-party has yet been determined, but transfer to a suitable third-party is the leading option being considered.
Q: WRS own the "bsd.com" domain. Will that be retained?
Possibly. Wind River will continue to invest in BSD/OS and participate as a highly interested member of the *BSD community. As such, the bsd.com domain may be important for Wind River. We are weighing this against the needs of the *BSD community and hope to resolve the issue later this month.
Q: What's happening to the "FreeBSD Mall", at freebsdmall.com?
freebsdmall.com continues to operate and take orders, and all new and existing orders from customers for FreeBSD 4.4 or other products will continue to be fulfilled. Wind River is still evaluating its long term options and strategy for the FreeBSD Mall, but plans to maintain its presence and service either internally or externally.
Q: As part of the BSDi acquisition, WRS will (presumably) have picked up customers who had subscribed to the BSDi CD sets of FreeBSD. Will WRS continue to service those customers, or are their subscriptions now cancelled?
Like all customer contracts, subscription orders will continue to be fulfilled.
Q: BSDi (and, it seemed, WRS) had made some headway in producing additional FreeBSD boxed products to go in to the retail channel. Will WRS continue to do this?
Wind River is currently continuing activities to promote FreeBSD 4.4 through the retail channel. Future FreeBSD releases will probably not be produced or distributed by Wind River.
Q: Will WRS continue to produce the usual 4 disc CD sets of FreeBSD, including one for the recently released FreeBSD 4.4?
Yes, for FreeBSD 4.4.
Q: WRS had been funding work on the FreeBSD Handbook, in order to print the second edition in the near future. [ Disclaimer, I'm co-editor of this work, along with your employee, Murray Stokely ] Will WRS continue with plans to print the second edition of the FreeBSD Handbook?
Wind River will encourage any stewards that emerge to take on FreeBSD publication to complete and publish this work.
Q: WRS houses the "FreeBSD Test Lab" at its Alameda campus. Will WRS continue to host this facility?
No. Some equipment from this lab will be transferred to Yahoo! which hosts much of the build structure equipment for FreeBSD, as well as the primary CVS source repository and main FreeBSD mail server. Wind River does not plan to maintain the FreeBSD test lab at its Alameda, CA headquarters.
Your question is kind of irrelevant in a way.
They will not land with gnome, ibm, redhat, or some other branch of BSD. They remain FreeBSD developers, do you really think they will change their aims and goals because they got laid off? They merely had a chance to work on it fulltime compared to the part-time contributions of the majority of us (yes I am a FreeBSD developer too).
They will surely wind up in companies who can use their extensive skills and probably will still be heavily involved in BSD related issues at their next employer.
And then again they may not.
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
This makes little sense to me. The whole beauty of FreeBSD vs. Linux (to me) was the simplicity. I didn't want distros and rpms and a gui install and all the other crap that came with Linux when I was installing a server. How hard would it be to just maintain the current tree and work only on the really important server features, bug fixes, and essential drivers?
I suggest the FreeBSD community forks FreeBSD, GPLs it (possibly with a modified GPL to support the advertising clause, where necessary), and then continues to maintain FreeBSD by porting new Linux drivers, fixing bugs, and if there's enough manpower, adding server-only features/performance enhancements. Yahoo used to run a lot of FreeBSD machines. I assume they still do. Yahoo combining efforts with the FreeBSD community (utilizing the GPL to try to coax a little more sharing) could do it.
I'm going to look into how realistic this (forking and GPLing) would be right after I finish hitting submit.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
If you look at the OSes available right now, you see two basic types, the Microsoft supplied stuff, and the UNIX and UNIX-like types. Yes, there are others, like OS/2, Novell, etc, but the UN*X and Windows OSes have to distinct differences, each with a real strength. Microsoft's is that they've managed to get in the sweet spot as far as licensing and distribution goes, with almost all NEW computers getting their OSes. In turn, people learn to use their OSes first, and those who aren't willing to relearn something, especially something harder, won't change OSes. the UN*X OSes enjoy a different benefit, and one that helps for those who ARE willing to try something new, and that is that many are FREE. I didn't have to go pay $199.99 for my first copy of Slackware, and that gave me something that I could legitimately and legally toy with and not have to worry about cutting a check for each upgrade.
With Apple adopting OSX (which I'm pretty damn sure is pronounced oh-ess-ecks), they've somewhat changed the playing field. One can now have a fairly decent UNIX OS behind the pretty graphics, and never actually have to touch the harder stuff IF one doesn't want to. I had the opportunity to play with the Darwin core for x86 for quite a while at my previous job, and it was not a bad piece of work. There were several things that were a pain, but I never had anything actually crash or die, as well it shouldn't.
I think that the smartest thing that Apple could do would be to release a full version of OSX for the PC. Granted, it would require a lot of work to get it to work with all of the PC hardware that is on the market at the moment, but at the same time, if they could work things out with a large vendor, like Dell or Compaq or HP or something, they could build a standard configuration that would be easily supported, and they could release lists of verified hardware. It would take a lot of work to get that far, but I think it would be worth it, and with the success that I've had with Linux as my desktop, I'd be more than willing to test out another UNIX (functionality-wise) for a different desktop, especially one that was designed for easy to use features. Hopefully, someone will realise this and do it.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Linux is an operating system, the word has passed into the language with that definition due to use.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
*shrug* Some people just believe that freedom shouldn't come at the cost of coercion. They believe that their code is as free as it can ever be; and they are right. The code they have written is, indeed, freely available to the entire world. Does that necessarily have to mean that the code someone else writes has to be as well? Should it not be that other person's choice as to whether they want to release their own sweat and blood upon the world in whatever form they choose?
You see, to put it very simply, it boils down to where you want your freedoms to lay. People who choose licenses such as the GNU's General Public License believe that the code should be free, as though it somehow has rights. Or maybe it's just a control issue. "I wrote that code and you have to do what I say if you want to use it! Don't like it? TOUGH! Write you own code then, infidel!"
However, people who choose less restrictive licenses like the BSD license care more about the freedom of the people who write the code. Those folks believe that if you write code, you should get to say what can be done with it, even if that code cannot stand on it's own as part of a separate program. Their code is their gift to the world, and nothing can lessen that gift -- no, not even incorporating their code into a proprietary, closed program. They're glad that that person or company could make good use of what they had written. (And who knows; when the money starts getting thin and the coder needs employment, how much do you want to bet the company who used her code will be a little more eager to give her a job?)
So, is your free software truly free?
That's really only relevant for simple desktop boxes; there's a limit on how much power you can really use to run office software. For heavy-duty, interesting applications, more machine speed gets eaten up by more load. CPUs are getting faster, but that increase gets eaten up by projects getting larger. And faster CPUs don't help that an OS is unstable, insecure, and/or unsupportable.
I'm pretty much a pure Unix geek; I've never written a program on a Windows box. But even in this slow market, I get calls from recruiters a few times a month. Not as many as I did a year ago, but they're still calling. (Three times this week, in fact. If you're in Maryland, somebody's looking for a couple of AIX developers for a contract in Hunt Valley.) Unix is alive and well.
Yes, many Unix developers are getting laid off. Guess what? So are Windows developers. So are chip designers, grocery clerks, and auto workers. The economy's in "bust" phase. Welcome to capitalism.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Merely questions.
I know, and my comment was semi-joking, hence the smiley.
My comment was that FreeBSD was dead and dying. It started when the lead programmer and cofounder left to go work for Apple. It continued when 5.0 was pushed back by a year. Now with this news, I think it's impossible to say that FreeBSD is not dying, and personally I consider it dead.
If you think that one person is the thing which lets FreeBSD live or die then I must sadly conclude you have been comparing FreeBSD too much with Linux.
FreeBSD, ever since I joined it about 2-3 years ago, and probably before that, the project didn't fall or rise with the come or leaving of one person.
5.0 was pushed back because of a lot of the developers, including myself, requested this since we didn't believe in releasing a `product' which we found was not what we wanted it to be yet. And we now added KSE to the kernel, which is a major step forward.
Your telco could probably use FreeBSD 1.0. I'm talking about the future.
Funny remark. I foresee a wonderful career for you as psychic instead, since you are able to conjure up the systems we use here. :)
NT is getting there.
Out of there yes. At least in Europe I see less and less usage of Windows systems and the replacing of Windows systems --which ironically first replaced Unix systems-- by Unix systems again.
Stability remains an issue and with the current licensing scheme introduced...
I know nothing about the NT kernel, but I would assume it has a more tightly coupled GUI, for instance, which would pretty much guarantee that unix will always perform better and be more stable.
Yes, NT has its graphical subsystem/driver in the kernel. Performance gain, likely, stability gain, not so likely.
[...]and performance at the kernel level is becoming less and less of an issue with these faster and faster machines.
If I can buy less state of the art hardware, speedwise, by having a kernel which is better designed and optimised and thus making good use of that hardware, I will. I am not going to counter a sloppy non-optimised kernel by buying mega-expensive hardware.
I'm not worried about unix so much as my own personal career. I'm confident that unix will be around for many many many years to come, but how big of a market it will have and how many people will be hired in it.
I think it will remain big. I have had no problems finding new Unix related jobs in the last year (switched jobs twice). Granted, that's Europe.
Where are all these laid off people going to go? Let me know at least that so I can put in my application!
Assuming you are referring to the, now, ex-WRS employees. I know some are busy on their own businesses, already heard some other FreeBSD developers offering them jobs since they know their skillset and the company they work for can use people like that. And others are just looking through the wanted ads. So it basically looks like whatever any person does when they get fired/laid off.
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
Of course, there are more concrete reasons why I don't use Linux as well, but my dislike of the community that I would be forced to deal with is a big part of my allegance to the BSDs. The Debian zealots are by far the worst and I would almost rather watch FBSD die than have it absorbed into the circlejerk.
So, no, I do not need a Debian BSD and, should it happen, I'm moving to Macs.
At this point, you are required to hurl the "wow, you must be really thin-skinned" or "good riddance" remarks my way. Go ahead, it's not as though you can chase me away twice.
If you think that one person is the thing which lets FreeBSD live or die then I must sadly conclude you have been comparing FreeBSD too much with Linux.
I don't believe that projects can survive without a strong central leader. I think there needs to be a central vision, and a decision maker to stop the differences of opinion from being something which is battled out over time. When 50% of the developers want to see FreeBSD go in one direction, and 50% of the developers want to see something else, you need a leader to tell 50% of the people to submit to the other 50% for the sake of the project.
Yes, NT has its graphical subsystem/driver in the kernel. Performance gain, likely, stability gain, not so likely.
Performance gain for the graphical applications, perhaps, but at best no effect on nongraphical applications, and more likely a detriment in performance on nongraphical applications. I'm on your side on that one.
Funny remark. I foresee a wonderful career for you as psychic instead, since you are able to conjure up the systems we use here. :)
True, true. But I can't let you get away with saying "unix works better for my telco" if you're not going to back up why. :)
If I can buy less state of the art hardware, speedwise, by having a kernel which is better designed and optimised and thus making good use of that hardware, I will. I am not going to counter a sloppy non-optimised kernel by buying mega-expensive hardware.
I'm not talking about mega-expensive hardware. Most mega-expensive hardware is built for non-microsoft operating systems anyway. And my point is that most of the performance gains in your low-end hardware is used by the applications, not by the kernel. Kernel CPU usage is growing linearly while CPU speeds are growing exponentially. As a result it is becoming much more important how well your applications are written, and much less important how the kernel is written. The most important factor in this is probably going to be marketing related. What OS system calls are the really smart programmers learning in college? Right now it's probably unix, but this could change, and that would be devestating.
Assuming you are referring to the, now, ex-WRS employees [....] it basically looks like whatever any person does when they get fired/laid off.
Well, I was more referring to the ex-HP employees, since I happen to live in NJ myself. And looking through job listings in this area, there is very little in the way of software companies using C/Unix. There are plenty of financial companies and other specific uses, and of course there are a ton of sysadmin openings, but personally I'm not so interested in writing software that's only going to be used by a single company. I'll do it for a few years, while the economy is tight, if I must, but if this is more permanent I'm going to have to consider either moving cross country, reeducating myself in Windows programming, or changing careers even more dramatically. I'm only a few years out of college, so starting my own business (presumably consulting) is not really an option. There's too much fear of us younger folk in these crazy economic times.
Of course, there is also a difference between asking How, and asking Why. I for one will always enlighten those seeking to understand, but I tell those looking for additional documented facts to open the damn book.
-WS
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
Ahhh the trappings of the BSD license, you do the work - someone else makes money by stealing it.
And releases it as Darwin. But otherwise, yeah you're right. Look at what happened to Apache and X without the protection of the GPL, they're just in the dustbin of history now, aren't they?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
BSD is much more mature than Linux in years and codebase. It's capabilities and stability are well known and respected. BSD has had a very long time (in computer industry terms) to capture mindshare with coders and users alike. With all those advantages, why did Linux's growth rate outstrip *BSD's? To put it simply, it comes down to the license (and history).
The history part relegates BSD to the Clone Wars era, as it was a participant, and is now a victim of that period.
The license part is related to the Unix Clone Wars. The BSD license is weak and flacid in a very specific sense. It doesn't discourage selfishness. The BSD developers are probably at the height of altruism, where they are willing to literally give away their hard work without to others who are willing to take it, add to it, and refuse to share their additions. BSD developers don't care whether individuals or corporations take their code and make it proprietary.
The GNU license that Linux is under, protects Linux from a vicious Clone War. Even if the Linux codebase should split, either side will always be legally able to add innovations introduced by anyone who's taken the Linux code and attempted to make their own version. In fact, that happens quite often with Linux as different groups create different capabilities for specific purposes. This mechanism propogates innovation. But, everyone still understands that there is only one Linux, and those who change the code are careful to ensure compatibility. If they don't, anyone is capable of making sure that they do by changing the code themselves, since it is not hidden.
Younger people understand that as part of true participation, one needs to share. They've just come out of their 'teens, and growing lessons are fresh in their minds. *BSD has no rules in regards to sharing other than its almost non-existant license requires perpetuity.
Younger programmers distrust corporations, and prefer protection for their code. They don't see anyone as being a part of 'their' team if their hard work is taken and made proprietary. They see that as selfish. Basically, fairness in a game is strong encouragement to continue playing.
This is why Linux is currently fashionable in regards to mindshare and *BSD's mindshare steadily gets older. GNU/Linux is truly an OS for the people, by the people. BSD has a mixed history of altruism, elitism, and proprietism.
= Appi =