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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.

9 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. BSD subscriptions - what good are they? by imrdkl · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. BSD and Hope..... by CDWert · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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........
    1. Re:BSD and Hope..... by MadAhab · · Score: 5, Interesting
      The sponsor doesn't necessarily have more control than anyone else. You could probably have more control by hiring core developers to work on projects they found interesting. But no more or less than with Linux. Code and the vote of one's feet is about all that really matters. If you are doing a lot of work with core developers, then being the sponsor and having developers on staff would be convenient as well as a good PR move, but that's about it.

      Linux has a benevolent dictator with many, many contributors, FreeBSD has a larger number of dictators with fewer contributors. I suppose you could say that Linus operates like a beloved king and FreeBSD operates like Athenian democracy - it's democratic if and only if you can become a citizen, but even that moderate democracy seems to keep people happy, and may even be considered a more advanced political structure than Linux has; what happens if Linus gets run over by a beer truck? A crisis of succession. Probably Alan Cox, but every succession becomes more dicey. So it goes with dynasties. FreeBSD actually has more power centers and formalized political procedures, so it's pretty resistant to nonsense like these changes of sponsorship.

      --
      Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
    2. Re:BSD and Hope..... by reg · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Let's see, in the past while "FreeBSD" has been moved from Walnut Creek CDROM, to BSDi and then to Wind River, and now back to Walnut Creek CDROM (aka FreeBSD Mall). This has had one big influence on the design of FreeBSD, and that was the fine grained SMP locking for 5.0-CURRENT. BSDi released the source code of BSD/OS to FreeBSD developers, so that the kernel hackers could get into the niggly details of how they implemented their locking, which was known to work well on SMP systems.

      Wind River had little influence, although they did a lot of work on getting the FreeBSD handbook into a state where it could be published.

      The main design influences come from personal coders. The biggest recent influence on the design (remember the OS is not new) has probably been Whistle Communications, who have a number of people working on FreeBSD and have contributed a number of interesting subsystems, like NetGraph, and the kernel threading code going into 5.0-CURRENT. Yahoo! have a big influence on bug fixing, because they tend to work their boxes hard.

      But on the whole, most of the code comes from individuals, although the most productive coders are those being paid to work full time. There were a number of such people at WC/BSDi/Wind River. Discussions occur on the mailing lists (mostly freebsd-arch).

      Bandwidth has been a problem with the moves, because the main FreeBSD servers were on Walnut Creek CDROM servers. When Wind River bought BSDi, they didn't buy the CDROM bussiness, which lead to the downfall of ftp.freesoftware.com (aka ftp.freebsd.org), which used to be ftp.cdrom.com. Hopefully this change will lead to that coming back... ftp.freebsd.org is currently hosted in the Netherlands.

      The problem now is that because of the 'official sponsor' vacumn created by Wind River when they announced that they were dropping FreeBSD, two other groups stepped forward. The first was the FreeBSD Foundation, which is a non profit established to fund FreeBSD (see recent announcements concerning Java for FreeBSD), and the second is Daemon News, who recently announced their own FreeBSD CD distribution, via "BSD Mall". Confused yet? How big a problem this is is yet to be seen, but anyway, the only real reason for CD's is to give them to Linux users... ;-)

      FreeBSD has always been a one stop OS, and this is going to confuse things. If you're a Linux geek, try FreeBSD. You'll find that a one stop OS is nice; you don't have to hunt for patches, or wait till your distribution gets the latest kernel, or worry about matching glibc with your kernel... With FreeBSD you decide if you want to run -STABLE or -CURRENT, and you just track it. The only time you have to worry about versions is with external packages.

      Regards,
      -Jeremy

  3. Opinion on WindRiver and FreeBSD & Linux by tsx · · Score: 3, Interesting


    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
  4. Why should FreeBSD be "controlled" by a company? by Brett+Glass · · Score: 5, Interesting
    It doesn't seem to me that an open source project such as FreeBSD should be "controlled" by any one commercial venture. Bob Bruce has done a great deal for FreeBSD, but Chris Coleman and Daemon News have as well. They have just as much right to publish FreeBSD-related products, promote the operating system, and benefit from helping its user base.

    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

  5. Hope latest versions get into stores by LM741N · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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)

  6. Re:How About Apple? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting
    You know why they don't do it, TRoLLaXoR -- Apple doesn't want to and can't afford to hand out corporate welfare for what would amount to only a small increase in userbase.

    Contrast Apple with IBM... IBM has lots of money, and because its emerging core market is the business server, it needs to attract geeks. By supporting Linux, IBM got good publicity that was more effective and less expensive than a traditional marketing campaign, which wouldn't have been as visible to so many geeks anyway. IBM successfully transformed its public image among UNIX geeks from being the Microsoft of the 80s to a benevolent giant supporting open standards in business and academia. True, much of what IBM has done is truly wonderful, but don't think it was anything but a marketing ploy in the end -- even rich companies don't give out corporate welfare without reason.

    Now Apple, on the other hand, has a completely different market. Sure, Web Objects on Mac OS X rocks, but Apple will alway be primarily a workstation player. The BSD codebase allowed Apple to develop a better system base for future work in a short amount of time, but what do they need FreeBSD for? After all, they could rip off the existing code without issue under the BSD license. And Apple obviously isn't actively marketing to UNIX geeks, so the corporate welfare angle would be a waste for Apple -- sure, they're doing well, but they don't have dole funds to toss about like IBM does.

    It's sad to say, but FreeBSD is dying. It was able to ride the Cheap Software hype for a few years, but in the end, you can't ignore the fact that Linux is the golden child of Cheap Software operating systems -- it has all the right business application support from vendors like Oracle, Netscape, Allaire, BEA, et cetera. FreeBSD remains a truly excellent operating system, but if businesses won't pay for it, you can't recoup your losses on new development.

    I believe that the CSRG should be reinstated and FreeBSD, which has proven itself to be the best-of-breed 4.4BSD-Lite descendant, should return to academia.

    Mac OS X is cool, but Apple can't afford to concentrate on fun UNIX stuff for the time being. They need to completely reevaluate their UI for 10.2. They need to get the damn thing working at reasonable speeds. They need to encourage application support (come on, where the fuck is Photoshop for X?). Because in the meantime, users like myself who enjoy the Mac's functional aspects as well as its aesthetic ones are continuing to use System 9. OS X is about as finished as Windows 3.1 was, and while the problems haven't come to a head yet, there is growing discontent among the userbase. The issues are very well summarized by this article from The Register.

    -- The_Messenger, IPID-banned for being too damn Interesting and Insightful for the janitors to take.

  7. Re:How About Yahoo? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
    I've been told that Yahoo's systems are only based on FreeBSD. Supposedly the code was heavily modified in the early days of Yahoo!, and bears little resemblance to any modern FreeBSD release. Yahoo! even makes Debian-stable look wild.

    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!