Slashdot Mirror
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.
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)
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
Wind River: a fitting moniker for a company whose committment has dried up and blown away.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Please make sure you check your facts.
FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are operating systems and split off for various reasons and now serve their own niches.
Linux is only a kernel. It becomes an operating system only due to the fact that people created their own distributions.
And if we look at the distributions, there are over 100 distributions (at least).
So ask yourself, which part is more ripe for consolidation then?
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
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
Who volunteers for FreeBSD anymore?
The numbers are amazing.
FreeBSD developers chase off anyone who doesn't already have extensive experience.
That's definately not true. I have gained most of my experience during my years as part of the developers.
Furthermore, criticism isn't necessarily meant as discouragement, but don't forget that if you mention ideas to the BSD developers (speaking in general, not just the committers) that most of these people have made a living in programming and Unix before most people even heard of Linux or BSD as alternative to Windows.
There is a difference in age and mindset between the BSD community and the Linux community. I often see the BSD community to be geared around 30'ish whilst the Linux community seems to have people around 20'ish in there. Of course, both have their exceptions on the old and young ages.
Furthermore, what I noticed (and I have touched a lot of different Unix systems in my past, including different Linux distributions) is that the mindset in the BSD community seems less focused on hacking up stuff, but more on adding well-tested code -call it more mature code if you like-.
Again, this has its exceptions on both side.
And do note, I am not saying that either is technologically more advanced than the other, I am merely saying that for my wishes and desires BSD was better in that it was a full operating system with a mature way of development behind it. YMMV.
By the time someone has extensive experience, they're usually working on Linux already.
Quite possible. But everyone is allowed to send patches to the BSD projects, just make sure you take all comments merely as sharing of experience on how to approach things. I know my C skillset improved by getting `lectured' time and time again about things. And not just C, but also the ability to develop things as a team, do maintenance work, technical writing, and the list goes on.
It is quite possible that the bar to entering and hacking on Linux might be lower, but does it, in the end, make it more stable or faster or..? Do not forget, most subsystems, VFS, VM, drivers, are pretty specialist kinds of source code which do verge a lot of knowledge. Not to mention designing APIs. That's the beauty of peer review. Either people confirm my idea is sound and solid or they tell me I should recheck my understanding of things. But it is in the human nature to take most criticism as a scolding.
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai