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OpenBSD 3.1 Preorders (And Tunes) Available
An Anonymous Coward writes: "For those bored out of their skull this morning, there are some interesting
tunes available on the OpenBSD website to enlighten (frighten?) those cow-orkers.
Also should be noted that the Canadian and European ordering site have the OpenBSD 3.1 3CD set available for pre-order, it's scheduled for release around 19 May."
Death, taxes and regular OpenBSD releases.
Its also not exactly hard to make bootable CDs. Theo copyrighted the layout and only forbad SELLING OpenBSD CDs. He never said you and your buds can't make their own and give away copies.
Would you guys please stop orking those poor cows?
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
The logic they use is flawed by using usenet posts. Take their BSD/OS theory. There are so few usenet posts for it because most users of BSD/OS are full UNIX administrators and don't need much help. I can tell you, there are more than 700 users of BSD/OS...even if you count only 1 per organization that uses it and ignores multiple servers. BSD/OS is/was an extremely popular UNIX in the early to mid days of the internet, especially for medium and small ISPs.
The songs are cute though.
de Raadt's copyright only hinders people who are trying to help him and his project.
If you want to help him out, send him another $30 and give that new copy to your friend.
OpenBSD is Theo's job. Think about that one for a bit. Sure, he could always do consulting, but then he wouldn't be working on OpenBSD. Ditto for service and support or anything else you can think of. In order for his job to bring in enough revenue to pay his wages, he has to sell something. That something happens to be an official CD set.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
OpenBSD is free. Not this free as in speech or beer RMS bullshit, but free as in no money and you can do what you please with it. If you cannot understand this then we don't want you as part of our community anyways.
But it doesn't matter, we are preaching the gospel to a deamon when it comes to explaining these things to gnu people.
That's not quite right, according to what I was told by people on the OpenBSD team.
The layout of the official CD images are copyright Theo de Raadt. There is a copyright on the back of my 2.8 CD case and I beleive I saw these on each case from 2.5 on (when I started using OpenBSD).
The official CD's tend to have many supported architectures on them and some discs can boot from multiple architectures. Theo would have to have gone to a little trouble to achieve this and I don't see how preventing people from just selling exact copies of the official CD's somehow hurts the community.
If all you use is OpenBSD i386, then just ftp/wget/rsync the i386 tree and then burn your bootable i386 CD. It's real easy and the download for i386 (3.0) is just 120MB, not including source. Or just ftp install it.
I download macppc and i386 to get the latest versions as quick as possible, but I also purchase CD's and soon a bunch of shirts.
So he does'nt want people distributing copies of the official CD's. Big deal. People who want to run OpenBSD on TEN different platforms can buy the CD's.
People like myself, who want to support this great project, can always just purchase stuff from the team.
Theo is not hindering anyone.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
The OpenBSD team doesn't ask for gratitude, they ask for money and they ask for everyone to act in accordance with Theo de Raadt's claimed copyright on the CD layout. I have provided both.
Any moron can download as many or as little in terms of supported platforms, from the OpenBSD ftp site and then make bootable CD's from that.
Not a problem in the eyes of any of the OpenBSD team, including Theo.
The only thing he does'nt want, is for people to copy the CD's he has already provided as the official CD's. Big fucking shit.
If you want to be sure that you're getting the most secure OpenBSD distro, then purchase the real CD's. ftp sites get hacked from time to time and copies of "official" CD's can be just about as trustworthy.
I also use Debian, BTW.
The team does NOT ask for money to download as much as you want from the ftp sites. Hell, they even provide floppy images to be used for making bootable CD's! They don't have to ask for gratitude, any moron can see that they deserve it. The copyrighted CD layout only applies to the offical CD's.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Debian goes to some trouble to produce multiple systems for multiple machines too. Debian needs contributions and cooperative development help as well. But Debian allows people to copy official ISOs (and sell them). I'm not interested in selling any copies of either, just sharing them at no charge with friends. Neither production effort nor financial need are revealing hinges for this issue.
The number of platforms supported and the FTP/wget/rsync availability are completely besides the point. I realize functionally equivalent duplicates are possible and I know how to make them. I'm interested in sharing an exact duplicate with my friends, not a functional equivalent.
People who pay for the official OpenBSD and abide by Theo de Raadt's layout copyright are the ones who cannot share copies of official OpenBSD discs with friends. These people could obtain ISOs online (as per the FAQ) but they choose to help the project instead. It seems ironic to me that only the people who are trying to help cannot make this kind of copy to share. With OpenBSD, unlike Debian, those who cooperate are under a limit that those who violate are not.
I don't think paying OpenBSD users need to be restricted from producing this copy. They are the ones who have demonstrated they want to give. I understand the need for money, there is no need to review that. I am among those computer users happy to give money to support Free Software efforts. As a member of the Free Software community I maintain that financial need should not interfere with my software freedom.
People don't like being limited like this when we're talking about audio CDs, DVDs, or e-books. They want to share their legally obtained data with their friends. I don't like it either, so I don't pay the publisher to get audio CDs, and I have never bought a DVD or an e-book. Similarly, I will not buy official OpenBSD. I have switched to Debian because Debian lets me copy the official disc ISOs and burn copies for my friends.
Please read carefully the extent of my comparison; I am not saying these products are all the same. I am aware proprietary products are very much unlike OpenBSD in most respects. The one respect in which they are the same is the restriction from producing an identical copy of the disc for a friend.
I am eager to contribute to Free Software causes regardless of their focus. I want to encourage Free Software development and sales. But I want software freedom in exchange.
Digital Citizen
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dead
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK