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

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.

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 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: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.

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

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.....

[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.