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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.
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
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
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.
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........
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.
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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
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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
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