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FreeBSD Changes Hands Again
wackysootroom writes: "On January 14th, Wind River Systems, Inc. agreed to transfer its sponsorship of FreeBSD to FreeBSD Mall, Inc.
This should be a good thing, since general pessimism abounded when Wind River took over Walnut Creek's BSD sponsorship. Here is the full story." There's also a story on news.com. We published a note about this in the BSD section but it deserves front-page treatment.
Bah, they don't need FreeBSD... Their port and support for their VxWorks OS is a disgrace to FreeBSD... It may be based on FreeBSD, but they took something good, and made it mediocre.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Shouldn't the topic of the story say 'FreeBSD changes Pitchforks again?'
Try http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk
They have loads of distros, including FreeBSD and Slackware.
:)
You can get FreeBSD rather easily in the UK actually:r eeBSD
http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk/bsd.html#CompleteF
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
Do you have any facts to back this up???
common Slackware has been on a sinking ship for the last 5-10 years and its still going strong despite itself
This is simply great for FreeBSD. As a long time admirer of FreeBSD, I must say I never liked the Wynd River move. I tought it did not jive with FreeBSD's philosophy. This is really FreeBSD coming home since FreeBSD Mall started about the same time that FreeBSD was beginning development back in 1991! This is really an exciting development for OpenSource, if not a victory.
-- 4 8 15 16 23 42
I'm talking about buying it in a shop, not some hopeless mail order system. I've had too much
stuff go missing in the post to bother with it anymore and I'm certainly not giving my credit
card details out online.
Apple uses quite a bit of FreeBSD code-- it is the reference platform that many libraries and userland utilities come from.
Darwin 1's "BSD layer" was based on FreeBSD 3.2 (and to be fair, signifigant chunks of NetBSD and OpenBSD).
Since then Apple engineers have kept sync with individual packages with a goal to be able to keep in step with more and more of the OS until they are A) using the latest stable branc and B) able to incorporate entire new releases with about 3-months of lag time.
ANYWAY, I am surprised that Apple hasn't stepped in to assist the FBSD group... It's where they get a lot of their OS bits & pieces from, and they have hired / are currently employing several FreeBSD coders.
What does a CD subscription to BSD get you that is better than a network download? Besides bandwidth reduction, always a good thing, what are the "pros" of buying one? If I recall, I've seen some BSD subscription services also return money (via means unknown to me) to development, is this true? I've considered subscribing to BSD, especially for pre-built ports, since I run BSD on a couple of very old machines, but I would be very interested hearing about the value of doing so.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
15 JANUARY 2002
Effective tomorrow, 16 January 2002, FreeBSD Mall will be transferring its sponsorship of the FreeBSD operating system to blairwitchproject.com. We don't anticipate that the end-user of FreeBSD will notice any of these sponsorship changes, due to FreeBSD's distributed development system.
not some hopeless mail order system
John Winters company is not hopeless, its actually excellent. I have never had a problem of any kind with them, and in fact, they have even posted me CDs when I forgot to add the postage; "no problem pay it back on your next order" was the response.
And you can hardly blame a shop because the Royal Mail sucks.
Distributing boxed software from the USA is both difficult and inneficient; you know what shops are like in the UK, and it should come as no surprise that you cant walk into Micro Anvika in Tottenham Court road and buy FreeBSD.
Its only recently that they have started selling SuSE and Mandrake, which is a small miracle on its own.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
I didn't know there WERE sections.
You're obviously confusing FreeBSD with Linux. Or trolling.
I have a couple of questions for you BSD fellows.
How much control over direction does the sponsor have ? Linux is graced or stymied by (depending on opion) A benevolent dictator Linus Himself, where does BSD gain its driection from and does the sponsor have any input ?
If they dont have any input and just throw cash and bandwith at it who cares who sponsors it ?
I hope FreeBSD can get all the kinks in what sounds like a nagging problem hammered out, I have heard many good things and If I wasnt a Linux geek might actually try it now that Solaris 9 wont be released for X86....
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
I always relied on the PC Bookshop (holborn and canon street in london). They have lots of
obscure stuff for sale and they must be one of the few places in the world (never mind the UK)
that sell OpenBSD CD-ROMS on the counter! But even they can't (as of 2 weeks ago) get hold of FreeBSD
or Slack.
But even they can't (as of 2 weeks ago) get hold of FreeBSD or Slack.
One day, all bookstores will download ISOs and burn CDs for your particular book on demand. Its crazy that they should not be able to give you a CD with the latest Slackware on it, when anyone with ADSL can get it with ease.
Dont wait for this to happen in Foyles of Charing Cross Road, where they only recently have cash registers at every counter.
Previously, you had to get the total of your purchase from the shop assistant in your section, take this "chit" to the cash desk, pay your money, get the chit stamped (twice), and then take it BACK to where you left your books with the shop assistant who would exchange your stampted chit for your books!
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
Remember how the HP-compaq acquistion shook us for
days? I personally couldn't beleive it.
Now, for FreeBSD to go from hand to hand, that easily,
and to end up at fbsdmall (of all the arms out there.)
I think the dollar value of fbsd is somewhere around
1200 dollars.
If I sell my 89 VW Fox, I might own FBSD (AYFBSDABTU)
Before you flame, I am posting this from a 4.1 stable, Ok.
ftp.linuxberg.com in the /pub/iso folder
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Wasn't there some rumour that Microsoft might port its .net framework and maybe Office to BSD
but NOT Linux? Its a long shot but perhaps one of Open Sources greatest adversaries might save one
of Open Sources greatest achievments since if MS did do this I'd predict that FreeBSD sales could
go through the roof.
I'd say both.
Wind River's acquisition of FreeBSD was to respond to Linux. Has to be. What other reason could have motivated the purchase? What did they really buy except a name (no real IP)?
Since the commercial threat of Linux has diminished (look at the market's reaction to Linux companies) Wind River doesn't need to maintain FreeBSD anymore.
Personally, I'm glad that FreeBSD won't be part of a marketing plan, a business model, or a competition strategy. The support structure for FreeBSD will be what it should be - developers writing code for the betterment of the code itself.
-------------- insert [signature] here
How you can interpret netcraft as saying BSD is dead when their longest uptimes page reports that 95% of the top 50 are BSD-based websites?
i doubt MS would do this. It seems to me that if .net was ported, that most of the development would happen on windows (no surprise), but the implementation would happen more often on BSD due to the fact that BSD is, in most respects; superior to any windows version (and far easier to secure). And what would you use to serve these web services on FreeBSD? IIS? (har har), no Apache of course - And to me that would be like MS almost admitting that IIS is a heap of crap. .net will be tied to IIS, IIS will be tied to Windows[insert version here]. In the end it's vaporware to piss of Linux advocates.
And MS Office on BSD? I don't THINK so! I'm sure bill gates would rather use a flaming x-box as a hat while riding around on a penguin on the front yard of AOL headquarters before that happens.
I like the idea of FreeBSD being removed from control of a company making a competing product.
FreeBSD is very much alive. If I pulled the FreeBSD nodes out of the Internet you wold not be able to read this. It is a large part of the backbone routing and firewalling. FreeBSD powers more than 25% of all web-sites visited daily. It powers all of Yahoo and the actual work behind the MS load balancers at Hotmail.
Get a free ipod.
The field would benefit from friendly competition, and the playing field for such competition should be level.
Alas, this is not the case. Because the FreeBSD trademark has not been transferred to the FreeBSD Foundation (as was promised more than a year ago) and will become the property of FreeBSD Mall, FreeBSD Mall has the ability to put pressure on any potential competitor by restricting its use of the trademark.
It is incumbent upon the users and developers of FreeBSD to prevent conditions so potentially destructive to competition from arising. The trademark should be transferred at once, and the FreeBSD Project should not designate either vendor as the "official" one.
--Brett Glass
Let us not forget to mention that www.apache.org runs FreeBSD :)
Because he's a Troll. YHBT YHL HAND is the saying I believe...
Driving home from work the other day I saw a buzzard eating a carcass. The carcass smelled so bad that the poor old buzzard had tears in its eyes--he could barely stomach it. Pulled over a little closer, and sure enough, the buzzard was eating FreeBSD. What a stink.
Uhh.. *confused bigtime* Roughly how many anonymous cowards are there on /. anyway?
I was always dismayed to see in stores the boxed set with the "Complete FreeBSD" book with an older version of the OS. I hope now they can get the latest versions into a box along with Greg Lehey's new FreeBSD book. Plus, if you're a Linux fan, try out FreeBSD just for the ports collection. Its the best method I've seen yet for getting software packages in a unified approach with no dependency problems (99% of the time anyway)
Does this mean we can finally buy stickers again? I've been waiting for freebsdmall.com to open again so I can buy some stickers.
Hell, I'll buy 4.5 if it comes with the stickers like the previous versions.
You're new here, aren't you?
Anonymous Coward is the account you post as if you select the "Post Anonymously" checkbox. There are hundreds if not thousands of people who post as AC on a regular basis.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Windows community when recently IDC confirmed that Windows accounts for less than a fraction of 0.1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Windows has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Windows 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 nerd to predict Windows's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Windoss faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Windows because Windows is dying. Things are looking very bad for Windows. As many of us are already aware, Windows continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Windows XP is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Windows leader Bill gates states that there are 7000 users of Windows 2000. How many users of Windows ME are there? Let's see. The number of Windows 2000 versus Windows ME posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Windows ME users. Windows XP posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Windows ME posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Windows XP. A recent article put Windows 98 at about 80 percent of the Windows market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Windows 98 users. This is consistent with the number of Windows 98 Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles at Redmond, abysmal sales and so on, Windows went out of business and was taken over by Internet Explorer who sell another troubled OS. Now Internet Explorer is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Windows has steadily declined in market share. Windows is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Windows is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. Windows continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Windows is dead.
Fact: Windows is dead
It is! Its logo is a cute demon (who wan'ts to spike billy boy and tux up the ass)
It doesn't seem to me that FreeBSD is "controlled" by any one commercial venture. If I were to name two companies which come first to mind, it would have to be Yahoo and Apple; certainly neither FreeBSD Mall nor Daemon News.
As far as the trademark goes, while I agree that it should be transferred to the FreeBSD Foundation, I doubt that FreeBSD Mall could exert any legal pressure against "legitimate" distributors of FreeBSD. If nothing else, trademark dilution law would apply: After people have been calling something "FreeBSD" for years, you can't suddenly tell them to pick a different name, trademark or not. The utility of the trademark comes in barring people from misrepresenting something else as FreeBSD.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
" I'm certainly not giving my credit
card details out online."
I was surprised that someone who wants to use an ultra-geeky os like freebsd could have such a view of online shopping- a view one associates not only more with Joe Average, but with the Joe Average of a few years back.
Giving out your cc details to an SSL-enabled web server is an order of magnitude more secure than ANY OTHER method of paying by card.
And anyway, why don't you download the ISO ? When I had a modem I regularly downloaded whole CDs- it only takes about 24 hours, so even if you're living in the dark ages ISP-wise and pay by the minute rather than a nice 15 pounds a month flat-fee for 24hour free calls then it will still work out cheaper.
And if you don't have a CD burner you could just download the boot floppies and install via FTP. Since you only then download what you need it will be even faster.
If you don't want to tie up your phone then download while you are in bed.
You see? Anything's possible if you get creative. Focus on the positive I say!
graspee
pkg_add -r [package]
Done.
They could call it FreeBSOD.
while () {
steal_this_code;
}
Don't you mean:
while () {
Linux.steal_this_code();
}
Shouldn't the topic of the story say 'FreeBSD changes Pitchforks again?'
More like "Wind River Passes the FreeBSD Pitchfork" in the Olympic® tradition.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I thought Yahoo was a major FreeBSD users. Since they're actually using it in a big networked environment as opposed to Apple's workstation-centric environment. They probably stay close to stable and would have little to lose by handing back significant patches and development to the OS itself.
All the same, it's worth thinking about, and it would definitely improve FreeBSD driver support on modern Compaq MP servers. (Yahoo! uses a lot of Compaq kit.) Not that the support isn't good already, though -- I'll never forget how impressed I was to discover that the default FreeBSD 4.x kernel supports the controllers on the old Proliant SCSI-2 RAID boxes.
Yahoo! could provide Intel hardware and buku-bandwith easily enough, that's for sure. Any Yahoo! employees here know if it's been talked about?
-- The_Messenger, IPID-banned for being so damn sexy!
you suck so nya nya
Yahoo! has donated lots of equipment (such as the bento build machines) and personnel (sorry, don't have any names handy) over the years, and continue to do so.
They're a major supporter of FreeBSD, just a quiet one.
This is correct. They do have as much right.
The field would benefit from friendly competition, and the playing field for such competition should be level.
Yes, the field would benefit and does benefit, and the playing field is level.
You seem to have a little trouble grasping what this means.
-bugg
Yea but Solaris on Intel is dying. Sun says there will be no Intel port of Solaris 9. I agree that Solaris 8 IA is pretty nice and is free for noncomerical use but the clock is ticking.
In my area, CompUSA has had the FreeBSD PowerPak, although it tends to be a release behind. The PowerPak was expensive last time I looked; I think I saw it for $70-$90 (it also comes with "The Complete FreeBSD.") Best Buy had it once or twice.
Barnes & Nobles has had The Complete FreeBSD before, with the basic CDs included. It was cheaper than the PowerPak ($50?). If the current release has been out for a month or so, they should have it on hand or be able to order it.
We've also got a local shop which has CDs with the basic ISOs for $10; take a look around at your small computer stores.
What an amazingly uninformed headline.
When will we see the corresponding "linux now owned by transmeta" article?
Oops ... sorry, the parent was modded down so far that I didn't see it was UK-centric.
This is mostly true but there are some inaccuracies.
:)
:)
:) However, the Project is also more open about not having an official sponsor anymore.
For one thing, don't underestimate the influence of BSDi and WRS in paying people to work on FreeBSD full time. A lot of work (good or bad depending on who you talk to) came out of that. WRS didn't have any bad intentions when they bought BSDi as far as FreeBSD, I think it was more that they didn't know quite what they were getting (at least some people thought BSD/OS was an enhanced version of FreeBSD) and once they had it they didn't quite know what to do with it. FreeBSD kept going despite that, however, but corporate sponsorship is still quite important to FreeBSD. The main reason is that companies have money.
Secondly, while developers who used to work at Whistle do have a pretty good chunk of influence, it isn't necessairly Whistle driving that. KSE (the scheduler activations stuff) was originally threshed out by Jason Evans, Dan Eischen, and Julian Elischer. Julian is the only one of those who used to be a Whistle employee. He is currently working on the implementation, but he hasn't been employed by Whistle in quite some time. If you wanted to list the key architects in FreeBSD, you would find that they come from several different companies all over the place, and there really isn't a massive concetration of them in one company relative to another. The only exception to that might be the old WC/BSDi of which half the group now works at Apple.
Thirdly, the bandwidth isn't quite so bad as you make it. The actual development servers have not been at WC for quite some time (at least 1.5 years now IIRC) and never were at WRS. While ftp.freebsd.org did have its ups and downs for a bit, the actual devel servers have worked without a hitch. ftp.freesoftare.com was already somewhat on the way out before WRS stepped in, they two events just happened to coincide.
As for the Foundation, it isn't really a competitor to either DN or FreeBSDMall. The Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit designed to accept donations. It doesn't have any plans to sell CD's AFAIK. The Foundation was first setup well over a year ago and may have pre-dated the WC and BSDI merger/acquisition, but I'm not sure of that. I don't think having multiple CD distributors will be all that bad. However, I think FreeBSDMall has an edge over BSDMall, so it might be interesting to see how that pans out. One thing I would point out is that like WC did in the "good ole days", FreeBSDMall employs the chief release engineer for FreeBSD.
Anyways, you were mostly on, but there were a few subtle things you didn't quite have right.
- jhb
FreeBSD Mall, Inc. to change name to...
Walnut Creek, Inc.
Whether or not they choose to merge with Slackware Linux, Inc. is yet to be seen.. (and largely moot.)
"I am surprised that Apple hasn't stepped in to assist the FBSD group [...] and they have hired / are currently employing several FreeBSD coders. "
You have just answered your own concern. Let's spell it out: they pay *BSD coders to work on BSD as well as the Darwin/OSX implementations and that constitutes support.
Besides, if Apple took over sponsorship of any *BSD other than Darwin/OSX, the cries of "attempted hijacking!" would be heard throughout the land. They have to be careful to be seen as supportive without taking over.
They have announced that they will port c# and parts of the NET platform, but it will be a limited implementation. Don't expect anything beyond Hello World to run.
lack of innovation?
you mean like devfs? or kqueue? or netgraph? or jail? or kse?
back under the bridge, troll.
No, it is not. When Walnut Creek owned the trademark originally, it stated, on the FreeBSD mailing lists, that it would not allow anyone other than itself to create "packaged" products that included FreeBSD and other software (e.g. a "FreeBSD Desktop" package with an office suite bundled in) and use the trademark "FreeBSD" in the name.
--Brett Glass
Five or six FreeBSD committers work for Yahoo!, including core team member Peter Wemm. You won't see Yahoo!'s name on these folk's contributions, but they're substantial. Yahoo! has helped FreeBSD in many other ways as well, but for various reasons chooses to keep quiet about it.
This is off-topic, but it is a reply to a genuine question. The answer BTW is to post a submision to infoanarchy.org.
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.
I'd probably be using FreeBSD as well, but without the driver support for things as tokenring, it's just not a option.
I do love FreeBSD anyway though.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
You mean the *BSDs ever take their cocks out of their hands long enough to do anything else?
I would flame you more, but you aren't intelligent or coherent enough to make for good kindling. Suffice it to say: you're a fucking moron.