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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.
I would like to preface this by saying that *BSD is NOT dying.
Thank you.
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
I'd like to know.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
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
What happens to "free" OS's when corporate greed^H^H^H^H^H financing (the so-called saviour) takes over? Corporations traditionally gut anything not making money - what's to become of the carcass?
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
What I'd like WRS to do is this:
In short, if they are *not* interested in FreeBSD, which seems to be the case, they should just let it be. As others have pointed out, Wind River was mainly interested in BSD/OS, the closed-source BSD. They have got what they wanted, so firing people makes sense... Unfortunately.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Correct.
We have 5.0 standing for November 2002 [this was changed from November 2001 due to the fact that we weren't quite satisfied with the current state and thought things were missing].
Until we release 5.0 in 2002 we continue to work on 4.x, so we will most likely see 4.5, 4.6, 4.7 and possible 4.8.
Releases will very probably be going through DaemonNews, since it looked like WRS shows no interest of doing so after 4.4.
So possibly all of you subscribers might want to look for a new distributor.
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
Wind River: a fitting moniker for a company whose committment has dried up and blown away.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Ok, a silly question from somebody who doesn't really follow *BSD:
Is there any chance of some consolidation in the *BSDs? I always thought it strange that there were three of them, but then I don't really know the history behind it.
I'm all in favour of competition, but four free Unix-like OSs (Linux + 3 * BSD) does some a little much to me.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
- Company of bright people gets bought by larger company.
- Larger company fires everyone from smaller company.
- Smaller company no longer exists, nor does their product nor whatever research they were doing.
This just seems awfully wierd to me. It seems to me like you still have the same bunch of people open, aand they collectively have whatever money was used to buy them out; Why don't they just immediately reform back into the company they were? Sometimes there are intellectual property concerns, true, but not if the company subsisted primarily on research or if (like dynamix) they just got completely finished with a product and it was time to start on something else, or if their product is *cough* available under the BSD license. (Except it looks like what happened here was that there was a company that existed to create funding for FreeBSD, and a larger company bought it, took the bits that created funding, and stranded FreeBSD without either funding from them or funding from the funding mechanisms FreeBSD had created.. is this accurate?)I'm not sure what my question was. I'm just looking for comments on what seems like an odd issue to me, and wondering if anyone could try to show me why that if you're a small company with something actually sellable, it wouldn't at this point be a really foolish idea to trust another company enough to let them buy you. Given that you seem to have little proof that you're doing anything other than quietly signing your company out of existence after a three month grace period. I mean, if you just want to get rid of your products and logo, you could sell those things independently of the company itself.
Unless the reason these companies actually get bought is that some larger company wants to destroy a smaller company before they innovate themselves into being a competitor.
Unless the reason these companies get sold is that the CEO wants to quit, and he can get more money by steering the company into being sold than he can in a severance package.
Someone closer to the industry want to explain to me what is happening here?
So, WRS has divested the majority of its expenses related to FreeBSD, but will still sell merchandise and profit from it. Anyone know if they plan to contribute financially to the project based upon revenues/profits from the CD sales? Let's Hope...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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?
There is another small BSD offshoot in the name of emBSD. It is a stripped down version of OpenBSD and its primary objective is to create a firewall and/or router using as little hardware as possible (ideally with not moving parts like a hard drive).
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)
Idiots and trolls, please post your 'FreeBSD is dying' messages here, so that they may be summarily ignored.
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...
I wish I could say I was surprised by this turn of events, but having the misfortune of dealing with WRS professionally, I cannot. My experience with WRS has been pretty dismal - of the 10 severe problems I've had with their products, their FAEs have solved only 1 for me; all others I have either had to live with or have solved myself. The company I work for has been told "Y'know that version of VxWorks you have licensed? Well, we aren't going to support it anymore, but you still have to pay us for a service contract if you want to continue to ship. Oh, and you will STILL have to pay us a per-unit license fee on top of that. But don't call us with any problems."
When they bought BSD I really wondered what they were thinking, as I was at a loss to see how BSD fit into their corporate strategy. The BSD kernel is much more competent than the VxWorks kernel, but being Free Software there is little value added from WRS - I can just embed BSD and avoid dealing with WRS. If they had a good history of decent board support packages I might see where they would be of value to me, but given how poorly they've supported VxWorks with BSPs, I have little confidence they would really have a benefit for their support.
Now, had WRS been able to buy Cygnus before RedHat, that would have made sense - Tornado (Wind River's VxWorks development package) uses the GCC toolchain, so owning the primary developers for GCC would have made sense. But I cannot see where the advantage to owning BSD is to WRS.
However, this just goes to show the power of Free Software - while WRS may screw up BSD.COM, they can never kill BSD.
#include <std-disclaimer.h>
The views expressed here are mine, not my employer.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Serious. :)
Carl G. Jung
--
"With one breath, with one flow, You will know Synchronicity" -La Policia
The point of the license is that it *wasn't* stolen.
You many not agree with the author's choices in licenses but please don't accuse others or make up stories. The authors determined what license best fit their needs and goals and Apple used it accordingly.
It's to Apple's credit that they've since maintained an Open Source distribution of this along with paying for engineers to port it to a platform they're not on, hosting the web-site, and keeping it current with their commercial distribution.
Disagreement is a fair thing, misinformation and calumny are not.
Note: You are perfectly free to choose whatever license you like when/if you produce something.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
The current naming system seems like every other abusive overuse of popular catch words: they sound good but they lack meaning and in the end are generally confusing to the public.
:0)
I think the names were chosen long before anyone considered what the public might find confusing, and long before they were catchwords
*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?
>Actually this was largely due to the BSD-style >code which was in the kernel (Sys V was much
>easier to SMPize), but from the little I know
>about the FreeBSD kernel they didn't have nearly
>the same problems as HP-UX.
Why is it every source I've ever seen are under the impression that HP-UX is (and has been) based on the AT&T codebase (originally SVR2 iirc, currently SVR3.2 with SVR4 extentions)? I would think that the HP/UX instructors and engineers wouldn't lie to me about such things.
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
Snide jokes aside, FreeBSD is the eldest of the currently used BSD-4.4 family, and has been very heavily optimized for the x86 family of procesors. FreeBSD's primary goal is to be fast and stable.
;)
NetBSD grew out of FreeBSD during an uncomfortable time when the FreeBSD regents, the individuals who guide FreeBSD's growth in a kind of guiding council, were focussed on ix86, and only ix86 for their OS. The NetBSD team's goal has been portability above all else, and can be likened to rabbits. You name the platform, the NetBSD guys are already installed there, or working on a distro for it.
OpenBSD grew out of NetBSD, as certain individuals wanted a stronger emphasis on security. OpenBSD inherited a fairly wide platform base from its NetBSD foundation, but their primary goal is security by default.
If you needed a system to sit exposed to the internet, I cannot recommend OpenBSD strongly enough. If you need a system to serve data quickly using inexpensive hardware, FreeBSD has many performance advantages, even over the linux 2.4 tree. And, if you want Unix on your Atari Falcon, go grab NetBSD, you nutcase. =)
Oh, and if you want a Unix your grandmother can be comfortable with, go get OS X.
Weapons of Mass Analysis
No. You do not know what Mach is.
Mach is a microkernel. You do not know what a microkernel is.
Mach is meant to float between your OS kernel and your hardware. It is there to let your OS kernel interface with the hardware. It is there to provide a layer of abstraction so that os x, and things developed for os x, are less hardware-dependent.
Those are not "BSD compatibility libraries" sitting on top of mach. They are actual BSD code. They were originally a version of FreeBSD, but NeXT/apple has (like with the xMach and mkLinux projects) tweaked the system from being a monolithic kernel to using mach.
If you really care whether what you're talking about makes any sense or not, maybe you should go read some of the excellent developer documentation at apple's website. I suggest you don't listen to anything i've said, as some of what i've said above may have been slightly innacurate and instead find out for yourself what is happening, starting with here, which is an overview of the kernel environment of os x and appears to go into the relationship between the mach and bsd portions of the system. There is also lots of helpful low-level documentation linked from Apple's roadmap to Darwin documentation. Had you spent three minutes using search engines, you could have found these documents yourselves.
I'm going back to bed.
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.
Yahoo is one possibility, but I think Apple has the bigger stake in the future of FreeBSD (after all, they do now employ Jordan Hubbard). I do think, however, that FreeBSD's future as a separate entity is hazy at best; there's more of a need for OpenBSD and NetBSD (security fortress and OS-of-last-resort, respectively), and except for licensing issues FreeBSD and Darwin would appear to potentially occupy roughly the same niche in the market.
I don't know...
/Brian
FreeBSD runs on i386, and Alpha.
Btw, just for information: Sparc64, PPC and IA-64 are being worked on and committed to the sourcetree.
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
What I'm wondering is how working on 4.x and 5.0 at the same time will affect FreeBSD. Is most of the work being done on 5.0 independent of the work involved in 4.x++ ? I'm just hoping that FreeBSD working on 2 different streams at the same time doesn't significantly slow down progress.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
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.
There are errors in your history.
/usr/share/misc/bsd-family-tree and visit http://www.daemonnews.org/200104/bsd_family.html.
NetBSD and FreeBSD simultaneously grew out of the 386BSD project which was headed by Bill Jolitz. It was a project that ported 4.4BSD to the i386.
There's no such thing as "FreeBSD regents". You're thinking of the Regents of the University of California, who owned the (open source) license to BSD. They're a bunch of university administrators and have nothing to do with operating system development.
In fact, NetBSD is technically older than "FreeBSD", as FreeBSD was then just a handful of people (4 or 5) who started releasing patches to 386BSD called the "386BSD Patchkit".
You're right about the rest.
For your (and anyone reading this) review, see
--
My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
OS X uses some code from FreeBSD, but it's not "build on FreeBSD" in the sense that Win 3.1 was built on DOS.
As others pointed out, the whole point of the BSD license is that the contributors are philosophically happy with having their code used in commercial products.
Man, the clueless Linux bigots are really out in force today.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Yahoo already employs at least one FreeBSD Core Team member, Peter Wemm.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Don't forget that Apple employs Mike Smith too, who's also on FreeBSD's Core Team.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
It's pronounced "Oh Ess Ten".
Apple is a profitable hardware manufacturer. It's no coincidence that none of the people calling for them to port OS X to the PC are Apple stockholders. It would be fiscal suicide.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
JKH didn't "leave" FreeBSD any more than Jeremy Allison "left" SAMBA when VALinux laid him off. Nor any more than Linus "left" Linux when he went to work for Transmeta.
Apparently much of the open source community has no idea how open source projects actually function. Anyone who reads the FreeBSD mailing lists has seen major FreeBSD developers change jobs many times without losing their commitment to the project.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
I work in Yahoo's infrastructure group, and I've never even heard of iPlant. However, I do know that we use FreeBSD boxes by the thousands
Yahoo use FreeBSD as the OS and iPlanet (which is another name for Netscape Enterprise Server afaicr) as their web server.
The percentage may be small, but you neglected to report the fact that it's growing
Not according to the latest Netcraft survey. I personally I like FreeBSD but Linux has so many easy to use tools and so much support which for me is more important than raw performance.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
There once has a fabulous apple tree. No matter how many apples one would take from it, there were just as many as before! When this was heard by the villagers they all rushed to the apple tree and took apples. But no matter how many they took, there were just as many apples as before. But some of them came and took apples and locked them within a chest, so that none could steal them. And they laughed at the other villagers, saying, "Look, they do not protect their apples. Surely a thief will come and steal them."
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Does the uncertainty of having a retail publisher for FreeBSD have anything to do with the fact that 4.4 was released as a 4-iso set for download?
No. The reasons why the ISOs are available is because the "free" in FreeBSD means "free". As in BOTH gratuis and libre. Download it for no cost then use it with no restriction.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
May I suggest:
:-)
s/FreeBSD/AvailableBSD/g
or
s/FreeBSD/BestBSD/g
The first is a suggestion of stability, openness, etc. The problems are that available is too long, and the acronym looks strange -- ABSD (but perhaps all acronyms look starnge at first).
The second seems a bit vainglorious. Perhaps you could just call it BBSD and hint that it was used for bulletin boards.
(I like Linux, but you've got great names.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
There are other such buy-outs that were virtually all-stock. With 1-year lock-ins so that the founders can't sell stock. With non-compete clauses in the contract. Etc. There's one word for those small company founders now that the stocks they were paid with are worthless: SCREWED.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Regarding Linux, probably 60-75% of Linux originates overseas with part-time developers. Virtually all of KDE, QT, major subsystems of the Linux kernel, etc. were developed overseas. These people are unlikely to quit developing Linux just because a few American dot-coms go bust. For that matter, I no longer work for a Linux company myself, and still fix the occasional bugs that are found with the software I support (or with hardware that it drives, which sometimes requires the software to be hacked to make a certain piece of brain dead hardware work :-(. )
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Though true, it also was due in part to a conflict of personalities. Pretty much anyone who knows (or of him, I've never met him personally) Theo de Raadt see him as immensely talented, but also fairly abrasive. This had about as much to do with him leaving and forming OpenBSD as anything else.
This is not to disparage Theo. He has contributed a lot to not only OpenBSD, but other systems as well. There is a lot more code sharing among the BSDs than most people realize. Any holes found in OpenBSD get notified elsewhere. I know that the USB stack is fairly common across all systems, in facet the code has CVS ident strings for both FreeBSD and NetBSD.
You are an idiot.
Considering you said "GPL on the otherhand is the best of both free and proprietary," I would wager good money that it's you who are the idiot. Why in hell would I wish to use a license you claim is the best of proprietary?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The funny thing is, that's the sort of arrogance I like, and is one of the reasons I run his software. Then again, I also use a lot of djbware, for the same reason. They're two people who have earned their arrogance, and even though I'v been (indirectly) put down by djb(*), I still respect both of them and will use their software.
(*For those who are curious, DJB once posted to bugtraq saying that there aren't any patches to qmail he will endorse, and that mast of them are shit. I've produced a patch or two for qmail, and he's right. Compared to the quality of code he writes, my stuff and most everyone else's stuff is shit.)
When I was able to do my own spam-armoring, you got a chance to email me. Now you can only hope I see your reply.
I think that the smartest thing that Apple could do would be to release a full version of OSX for the PC.
Smartest thing for whom?
Keep in mind that Darwin/x86 currently doesn't support VIA or AMD motherboards, and doesn't support IDE hard drives. They've got a loooong way to go before it's ready for the market.
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$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Looking at the bad (humiliating) treatment of BSD (specially the way the FreeBSD team has been treated) at the hand of the commercial/for-profit world, may I humbly suggest that perhaps it's time to combine the talent pool of BSDs (Net- / Free- / Open-) and merge their effort to Linux, so that their effort will NOT be wasted, or be humiliated again.
I do understand the underlying philosophical differences existing between the BSD and Linux, but that was _before_ the BSD being so humiliated.
The spirit of BSD is such that they produce stuffs for the world and EXPECT NOTHING IN RETURN, so much so that they even ALLOW those for-profit entities to RAKE IN TRUCKLOADS OF MULLAH (read: Apple/Sun) but the irony is that the artruistic spirit of the BSD team (while now only confined to the FreeBSD team, it may spread to the Net- and Open- camp as well in the future, who know?) has not only being violated, they are being totally humiliated by being singled out, given pink slips, and shown the door.
The second irony is that the humiliation is happening EXACTLY at the 10th anniversary of Linux's first code appearing to the world - which took place at 5th, October, 1991.
And by the way, HAPPY 10th Birthday, Linux !
I think that it is time to throw away the philosophical differences between the BSD camp and Linux. Merging the talents from both camps would be a plus, since the Linux camp's adherence to the GPL spirit - you ain't gonna exploit my contribution to the world and MAKE MONEY FOR YOURSELF ONLY - may be the ticket to strike back at the humiliation by those hungry for-profit baddies.
But of course, my humble suggestion will forever remain a suggestion. It's up to y'all to decide what to do.
Thank y'all for reading.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !