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FreeBSD Changes Hands Again

Posted by michael on from the hot-potato dept.

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.

2 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. How About Apple? by TRoLLaXoR · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:BSD subscriptions - what good are they? by stripes · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.