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

hmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't the topic of the story say 'FreeBSD changes Pitchforks again?'

Re:About time

[peterprior]

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

They have loads of distros, including FreeBSD and Slackware.

:)

Re:About time

[Beautyon]

You can get FreeBSD rather easily in the UK actually:
http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk/bsd.html#CompleteFr eeBSD

Supporting facts???

[DAldredge]

Do you have any facts to back this up???

Re:Supporting facts???

[Quasar1999]

Do you have any facts to back this up???

Ya, I've had to work with it.

Awesome.

[bytor4232]

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.

Re:Awesome.

[Basje]

But it is really bad for FreeBSD Mall as they are now slashdotted. With only 20 comments yet

Re:About time

[boltar]

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.

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?

[reg]

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.

I think this is the whole reason that we've not seen Apple contribute back much code: Darwin hasn't really been keeping up.

This is understandable. Apple are a good year away from actually upgrading MacOS X, and what you'll find happening is that they'll spend the next six to twelve months on performance enhancements and bug fixing. Then only will we see them trying to merge changes from FreeBSD, finding that the patches don't apply cleanly, and going through the process of feeding back changes to FreeBSD.

Given Apple's corporate culture, it's quite understandable that they didn't want to get involved in selling CD's of a free OS, and cheesy coffee mugs. ;-)

Regards,
-Jeremy

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.

BSD subscriptions - what good are they?

[imrdkl]

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.

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.

Re:BSD subscriptions - what good are they?

[archen]

A nice jewl case with an insert that doesn't look like a crappy inkjet printout.

Re:BSD subscriptions - what good are they?

[stripes]

Hey, do you have any links handy for downloading a FreeBSD ISO and burning one's own FreeBSD CD?

You could try ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/IS O-IMAGES/4.4/ for ISOs, and FreeBSD.org, look on the upper right for notes on installing.

However doing that over a dial up it may make snes to buy a CD, or have someone with more bandwidth burn one and mail it.

Re:BSD subscriptions - what good are they?

[Shifman's Idol]

Thanks! There's gotta be a burner here at work somewheres.. *poof*

Re:BSD subscriptions - what good are they?

[kkenn]

Hmm, that seems a bit bass-ackwards: you're on a much slower connection, and you want to download a 700M ISO image instead of ~100M of gzipped files (for a base install)?

You're much better off downloading the distribution sets you want to install to a local source (NFS, MSDOSFS, etc), since you'll only be downloading what you actually want to install, and not all the extra crap on the iso.

Press Release

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:About time

[Beautyon]

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.

Re:this is the reason I use Solaris

[warlock]

You're obviously confusing FreeBSD with Linux. Or trolling.

BSD and Hope.....

[CDWert]

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....

Re:BSD and Hope.....

[Anonymous Coward]

They have control in how much money they spend on the project, if they hire core developers to work on specific features it's indirect control, but it's not ruling by the iron hand or anything like that.

This is similar to what you and I can do. Lets say my new FireWire card isn't supported, well, I happen to really want that feature in FreeBSD, so I buy an extra card and send it to Matt Dillon; now, hopefully, he will work on a driver for it and I have pushed the development in a direction I want.

That's about how much control the sponsors have.

Re:BSD and Hope.....

[MadAhab]

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.

Re:BSD and Hope.....

[reg]

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

Re:BSD and Hope.....

[wass]

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.

Hi Jeremy, this might sound like a troll but I really don't mean it to be, so I apologize in advance if it sounds like one. I use Debian Linux, which seems very much like a one-stop OS using apt-get from the official debian web package sites.

Thus, having settled on one specific distribution of Linux, is this really different from the "one-stop" coolness of FreeBSD? You mention FreeBSD has stable and current selections, this is also similar to Debian's selection of available packages too (Stable, Testing, and Unstable). Is there much of a maintenance difference between FreeBSD and Debian (I'm not talking about kernel or startup scripts or things like that, just the "one-stop-ness" of it all)? Thanks.

Re:BSD and Hope.....

[Sivar]

I haven't used Linux in quite a while since discovering FreeBSD, so please forgive any incorrect Linux info here.
Updating FreeBSD is done entirely with CVS. With one command, you can update the source for everything including all applications installed through the Ports collection. (Well, technically it updates the list of files to download, but it works the same)
In one command, "make buildworld", you can then recompile everything on the base system using custom compiler flags for a large increase in performance. In another command, "Make installworld", it all installs and replaces the old stuff.
Updating an application installed via ports is as simple as:
"cd /usr/ports/catagory/NameOfApp"
"make deinstall"
"make reinstall"

While the updating system is nice, I personally feel that the biggest benefit of the system is that *everything* can be compiled easily with custom compiler flags. Running a system in which nearly everything was compiled for a 386 has always irritated me, because it was holding back the performance of the system. It doesn't matter for many programs (like vi, for example) but it surely does with many other applications. Who has the time or inclination to recompile everything manually?

That said, it does have a disadvantage. The kernel and the base system are very closely tied together. So closely, that if many of the base system's core files are improved in a CVS update, you not only "can" compile the full base system as well as the kernel--you *must* compile the whole thing. This takes a fairly long time. Fortunately, there are ways to speed this up immensely, but it still takes about 45 minutes even on a dual-AthlonMP with a 10,000RPM SCSI hard drive.
I know of many people that swore by apt-get and switched to FreeBSD after trying it--and I also know of many that have tried FreeBSD and went backto Linux. Usually because Linux is easier to use as a pretty graphical system since everything comes preinstalled on many distros.
...however... *My* Xfree86 and GNOME are compiled such that they are far faster than they would be on, say, Redhat. ;-) You can do the same. Give it a try. If you don't like it--no problem! You aren't using Windows either way.

Re:BSD and Hope.....

[Arandir]

In terms of "one-stop-ness", there's not much difference between FreeBSD and Debian. On either system you can upgrade from the bottom up with a single command.

However, I prefer the "flavor" of FreeBSD's one-stop-ness. The entire OS is integrated into one source tree. There's a single version for the kernel, libc, userland, core documentation, etc.

Re:BSD and Hope.....

[wass]

Hmm, that's a good point about setting the compiler flags. The Debian packages that I use have pre-compiled binaries, and I'm not sure which CPU (386?) they're compiled for.

With Debian, I can upgrade the system easily by first doing "apt-get update" which goes through the list of sources and checks for newer versions of installed packages. Then I do an "apt-get distupgrade" which loads the packages, gunzips and untars them, installs them, and also launches some configuration scripts if necessary.

These packages are binaries, though. There are ways to deal with source .deb files, but I'm not sure how to deal with them. I'm not certain, but I don't think there's anything as powerful as the 'build world' for your specific architecture as with FreeBSD. That sounds like a really cool perk.

I've bought several FreeBSD CD's from cheapBytes, but I've never gotten around to trying them out on a spare partition or harddrive. I really should give it a try one of these days.

Re:BSD and Hope.....

[reg]

I think most of your question has been answered already, but I would add the Debian is probably the closest Linux distribution to FreeBSD, in terms of the way that the Debian people think and manage their OS. There was even talk a few years ago about a Debian release using the FreeBSD kernel and libc...

My comments weren't intended as a slight of Linux, but you just have to read the two kernel hacker interviews posted today to see that patching is still a big part of running Linux. I personally have never run Linux for any significant time, mostly because when I first decided to dump Windows I couldn't figure out which Distribution was right for me. FreeBSD was easy (and had a mirror site on my LAN ;-)

As already mentioned, the big difference is that FreeBSD tends towards compiling things yourself. Some people like that, others don't.

In terms of actually running a system, you'll probably not notice that many differences. As you already mentioned, the configuration/startup stuff is different. FreeBSD support's less hardware than Linux, so in a desktop/notebook setup it's sometimes not as good (depends how you choose your hardware). Empirical evidence suggests that FreeBSD is slightly more stable, and tends to have better uniprocessor performance.

But in the long run the whole point of open source software is that you can try it and mix and match to suit your needs... I see a lot of people commenting on BSD stories on /. that they should give FreeBSD a try one day. My advice would be to just do it... Install onto a old harddisk/spare parition and just play around a bit. Install all of the stuff that you'd normally have running (using ports or packages), copy across your home directory from Linux and see what works, what doesn't work and what's different. Load the system up, try crashing things, and see how it behaves...

Regards
-Jeremy

Re:BSD and Hope.....

[RLiegh]

I would like to add an "Me Too" here...
A) AFAIK, it's easier to manage the source for the programs you're running under *BSD (this includes Net and Free; I assume it's the same for Open, but I've no working experience w/ it). Basically, you select (either manually under NetBSD or with sysinstall under FreeBSD) which parts of the base system you want to compile and it's all located under /usr/src. The closest I've seen to this "every source file in one place, compile with one command" was with slackware, many many many many years ago. Even then, slackware compiled *Individual packages* for you, instead of being able to build the whole system. I've tried (when I was attempting LFS) to figure out the SuSE and RedHat source system (you're left with the "pristine" tar balls in both cases, where do you patch from, or to?) and wasn't able to figure how to work with either.
Under FreeBSD I've re-built (from source, with compiler flags) X, Gnome and KDE...a few times now. I've tried doing that under Linux a few times and always had it bomb. I'm sure some-one will pipe up and say "well, all you have to do is >bleah"; but that's besides the point. Under *BSD all you have to do is "make && make install" (for ports) or "make world" for the base system.
It's easy enough that a non-developer (raises hand) can easily optimize their system for the best performance.

B)Try it; either way you're not running windows (bears repeating. ^_^)

Re:About time

[Beautyon]

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!

FreeBSD must be very cheap ;-D

[sinserve]

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.

Re:FreeBSD must be very cheap ;-D

[JDizzy]

I agree, its seems like the OS is a pawn-shop mode... being traded, and used. Funny thing is that I think the Deamon news cd covers look nicers, and more evil... to appeal to my devilish side... as for the Wallnut creak cd's...they suck. The cover art is lousy. OpenBSD has good cover art, and it looks like Daemon news was working on that issue for FreeBSD. The Article mentions that it is unfourtunate for Daemon news, but I think that is daemon news plays their cards right, they could end up getting more cd sales than wallnut creek. Its possible.

Re:FreeBSD must be very cheap ;-D

[JDizzy]

I do... I use both OpenBSD, and FreeBSD on a dailly basis. I have been using BSD for many years now, and feel very comfortable in Unix in general. How now do I get a troll telling me to go back to Linux just because I stick my neck out and yelp for a more purdy cover art on my FreeBSD dics.... Liek I said, the OpenBSD cover art is really good. Back to my point, the Daemon news people looks like they have a really nice cover art, while the Wallnut Creek discs have always been ugly. I have bought walnut discs for years, so I know. Anyways, in regards to the two websites selling the distro.... I think daemon news has a better reputation for being bsd advocate, and I think it would have been neat if they were the ones to get the freeBSD property from Wind river.

other sources of FreeBSD iso's

[Indy1]

ftp.linuxberg.com in the /pub/iso folder

Re:Freebsd problems

[boltar]

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.

Opinion on WindRiver and FreeBSD & Linux

[tsx]

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.

Re:Opinion on WindRiver and FreeBSD & Linux

[benedict]

It is part of a business model -- FreeBSD Mall's
business model is to sell FreeBSD-related stuff,
including CDs, books, toys and clothes.

The difference is that it's a sensible, proven,
small-scale business model, not an underpants-
stealing model from the late 90s.

Re:Opinion on WindRiver and FreeBSD & Linux

[mr]

It had nothing to do with FreeBSD.

Wind River was a big IP customer of BSDI. When it came time to re-up that contract for the IP of the TCP/IP contract, BSDi got squeezed, and walked away from the table with some cash in their pocket as opposed to the potentional of leaving the table without any money or perhaps in debt in the future.

WRS tried finding someone to pay big money for FreeBSD, but no one opened their wallet to WRS, hence this turn of events.

.net port?

[archen]

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.

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.

Why should FreeBSD be "controlled" by a company?

[Brett Glass]

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

Hope latest versions get into stores

[LM741N]

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)

Re:Hope latest versions get into stores

[Arandir]

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.

It would be nice, but I don't expect it to happen. FreeBSD has a new release every six months. It's more economical to print the books and stamp the CDs in large batches. So until FreeBSD starts selling above a certain rate, it's too expensive to do a print/press/box run every six months. It's feasible to do it with just the CDs, because there is a higher demand and there subscription program allows them to accurately predict how many they need.

Stickers?

[helixblue]

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.

Re:*BSD is dying

[Requiem]

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.

Re:Why should FreeBSD be "controlled" by a company

[cperciva]

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.

Re:About time

[Graspee_Leemoor]

" 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

Wind River Passes the Pitchfork

[yerricde]

Shouldn't the topic of the story say 'FreeBSD changes Pitchforks again?'

More like "Wind River Passes the FreeBSD Pitchfork" in the Olympic® tradition.

Re:Is it DEAD yet?

[HairyBN]

What do u mean dead??!!

Its running on a lot of big sites: Apache, Yahoo

Seems very much alive to me

But then again if you would have read the article you would know that.

Re:How About Yahoo?

[swb]

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.

Re:How About Yahoo?

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Why should FreeBSD be "controlled" by a company

[bugg]

They have just as much right to publish FreeBSD-related products, promote the operating system, and benefit from helping its user base.
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.

Re:this is the reason I use Solaris

[Art Deco]

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.

Re:About time

[d-e-w]

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.

Re:About time

[d-e-w]

Oops ... sorry, the parent was modded down so far that I didn't see it was UK-centric.

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

And in future news..

[Dr. Nonsense]

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.)

Apple Supporting BSD

[ablair]

"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.

Re:Why should FreeBSD be "controlled" by a company

[Brett Glass]

Yes, the field would benefit and does benefit, and the playing field is level.

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

Re:How About Yahoo?

[edhall]

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.

-Ed

No Tolkien Ring

[Penguinoflight]

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.

Changes hands?

[adlam.bor]

You mean the *BSDs ever take their cocks out of their hands long enough to do anything else?

Re:Changes hands?

[adlam.bor]

Sorry, that should read: You mean the *BSD developers ever take their cocks out of their hands long enough to do anything else?

Because of course, no *BSD user actually has a cock. Silly me.

Re:Changes hands?

[adlam.bor]

> Because of course, no *BSD user actually has a cock. Silly me.

there i go again, i seem to have forgotten about the one permanently lodged in their ass. i would think it a dildo of some sort, but the developers regularly pull it out to swallow a large load of sperm from it.