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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.
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
FreeBSD 4.5
Do remember that there never WAS nor HAS BEEN any official development of FreeBSD.
It is and will remain a volunteer project.
The matter that corporations decide(d) to employ certain developers full-time to work on FreeBSD was only for the corporation's own benefit.
For god's sake people, it is not like the people they laid off now cease to exist.
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
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
Hmm, no.
FreeBSD is still very much alive, and development of both 4-STABLE and -CURRENT continue as ever. AFAIK, none of the people being laid off are core team members or even really active source developers. Most of them work(ed) on documentation and improving the FreeBSD product line (CD box sets, etc.).
At the moment the release date for 5.x has been pushed out until late next year, partly because we've lost a few developers to real work, but also because we bit off more than we could chew... Rewriting the kernel for preemptive fine grain threading is a big task.
Other aspects of the project continue to be very actively developed. The Ports collection is almost at 6000 ports.
It is really sad to see people laid off, but this is just a side effect of the dotcom crash.
Regards,
-Jeremy
FreeBSD 5.0 is well into development, and will most likely be finished ...
5 .0.1 i386
It seems relatively decent, with no obvious problems...
It's somewhat disheartening to see this the same night I upped my box to 5.0...
jeff@boris [2:53am] ~: uname -a
FreeBSD boris.st.hmc.edu 5.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT #0: Thu Oct 4 17:49:06 PDT 2001 root@boris.st.hmc.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/BORIS.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
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...
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.
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.
When I started using FreeBSD in 1995, they were in worse shape than they are now. No commercial support at all, except for one little server donated by Walnut Creek. The FAQ was scary. IIRC, there was no Handbook. And they *still* kicked butt over anything else out there.
And GPLing is not at all necessary. Or desired. Many BSD developers consider the GPL less free than the BSD license. If all your BSD expertise is not interested in GPL'd work, where would you get developers from?
This is a setback, but nothing more. Times have been hard before. They have been good before. They will be both, again and again.
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
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.
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.