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.

Comments

Re:About time

[peterprior]

Try http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk

They have loads of distros, including FreeBSD and Slackware.

:)

How About Apple?

[TRoLLaXoR]

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.

Re:How About Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, they did give us a bunch of tools that they had been using on NeXT and Darwin that would stresstest various parts of the system. fstress or something lead to Matt Dillon finding a bunch of problems with NFS, and, eventually, cleaning them up.

Re:BSD subscriptions - what good are they?

[stripes]

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?

Not a whole lot in general, some of them give money back though. It's cheaper just to download the ISO and send your money directly though.

There is also a DVD subscription, which again contains nothing you couldn't download. However it has all the tar balls for the ports, and the full CVS history of the distribution. That's pretty cool. Still if you have all the bandwidth in the world it isn't anything you can't fetch on your own.

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.

I'm not aware of any that have pre-built ports (other then the normal packages stuff), but there are multiple places selling subscriptions, so who knows.

This is a really good thing.

[Zapdos]

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.

Re:BSD and Hope..... some corrections

[big knife]

This is mostly true but there are some inaccuracies.

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. :) However, the Project is also more open about not having an official sponsor anymore.

Anyways, you were mostly on, but there were a few subtle things you didn't quite have right.

- jhb