Jordan Hubbard Resigns from FreeBSD Core

SteelX was one of many readers to cite this story in the Daily Daemon News which reports that "Jordan Hubbard is resigning from the FreeBSD core. Jordan is a founding member of the FreeBSD project." Note: According to this email, Hubbard is definitely not quitting FreeBSD; he's just changing the nature of his involvement with it.

Comments

Well, thanks Jordan

[Dirty Pickle]

You've done me nothing but right.

Thanks a million for all your hard work.

Re:Well, thanks Jordan

[Dirty Pickle]

It wasn't modded down. I'm kind of a bastard, and have posted some trolls in the past, so I post at 0.

I do love FreeBSD, though, and I honestly do feel a great appreciation for jkh's work. Since I'm posting a second time, thanks again, Jordan.

Oh, and I've given up trolling. It's just so freaking overdone.

Re:Well, thanks Jordan

[soapvox]

I agree! Without this man and all of the BSD crew where would computing be today? There is a reason Apple chose BSD to be the core of the greatest operating system to date. Thank you very much!

Re:Well, thanks Jordan

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree! Without this man and all of the BSD crew where would computing be today

Good question. The coniinued survival of late 70s technology like BSD Unix has always puzzled me. Even moreso now that it's managed ot outlive other paleozoic systems such as DOS/Windows. Sadly, it's not dying.

You really wonder where we would be today if the industry would have managed to replace these low-level hippy era student time-sharing systems that fester like moss in the corners of dank machine rooms.

Re:Well, thanks Jordan

[Anonymous Coward]

Jordan, you will truly be missed. Please don't stray too far away.

Best of luck with your new endevours.

Re:Well, thanks Jordan

[Anonymous Coward]

Late 70s? Try early 80s. Most of BSD's real innovations (sockets, Internet daemons) were in that decade. And yes, it was a major step up from AT&T UNIX at the time. It was the birth of the Internet as we know it today.

Re:Well, thanks Jordan

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, weall know that *BSD is a failure, but why? Why did *BSD fail? Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all knw *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities?

The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. Asthe situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting glom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.

Before the posts get out of hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

1. BSD is NOT dying. Trolls are not even dying. Right now, *bsd has, due to apple, a larger install base than even linux. Both will grow; both are good.
2. Read the article before posting. Read it. Did you read it? All of it? Really? OK, then take this article quiz:
   1. What is the "core team"?
   2. How long has JKH been on the core?
   3. Where does JKH currently work?
   4. Will JKH be replaced? Where on the net can you find procedures detailing this process?
   5. Do some research. How many people have been removed from the core? How many people have resigned from the core? What happens when a person quits the core team?
   If you got a 50% or better, then you've read the article, did a google search, read some more, and likely have something to say that is not a rumor, falsehood, or a profound misunderstanding.

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm posting without reading all those things, but this was good. I'll read up on the core team. Maybe linux can use something like this so Linus can focus on coding and not admin work.

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux does not need a core team. The e-mail hookup of Linus and Alan works just fine. Keep them patches comin' boys. (Just don't get on the same plane together. ;)

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but it's you who HBT. YHL. HAND.

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

Good idea. BTW, does anyone have any idea why the signal/noise ratio for BSD stories is so outta whack with the rest of /.? There's lots of silly stuff on /., but somehow the bsd stories attrack more whackiness and trolls.

It's too each to put this off to professional jealousy. (As if you could call the linux-trollers here professional!)

What gives?

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

How the hell did this get an informative? It is NOT faintly related- the core of OS X is taken DIRECTLY from FreeBSD, so much so that Apple commits code back to the FreeBSD project. And just because someone puts a pretty face on BSD doesnt mean its not BSD.

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[dshelt]

I dont remember the article saying where he worked. Maybe the Polish Parliment

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

JKH works at Apple.

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. The core of OS X is Mach with some stuff mostly from the early 80s BSD tapes. The FreeBSD stuff is only used in user space.

Even though OS X is sorta a relic of the late 1980s, it has a substantially more modern design than FreeBSD. NeXT and the rest of the Unix world took what they needed from Berkeley Unix and moved on a long time aog. Hubbard's a smart guy, so it probably didn't take too long at Apple before he figured out which way the winds were blowing.

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's official; Anonymous Coward confirms that Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not a troll, but flame-bait-hungry moderators will probably not read it thoroughly or the context, but here it goes. It's now TRUE. BSD is dying. Ask Wind River systems how much money the make off of BSD/OS. The total lack of SMP is also VERY, VERY convenient! BSD is coherent, it is the father of much good in the world, but aside from OpenBSD, I see almost no future. I called Wind River about BSD/OS, they don't have EVAL versions of the OS, and their sales people *stink* at trying to sell it. They actually fucking suggest VXWORKS as an alternative. Unreal. tools. You can mark me as a troll, wrongly claim BSD and OS X are synonymous when in reality Darwin OS is a very, very (useless) and loose approximation of BSD. I wanted Darwin, I wanted OS X for x86, but neither are worth crap. BeOS supported more hardware than Darwin. I think it is pathetic that Steve Jobs kyboshed BeOS in favor of Darwin and then didn't ram the spear up Bill Gate's empire.
Quote JORDAN:

Another reason, and I hate to say this but it probably needs saying, is that being in core is honestly not what it once was. For a old-timer like myself, who was used to a core team that was far more cohesive and generally on the same page, it's simply a painful experience a lot of the time. Perhaps this is due to overly rose-colored recollections of the old core on my part, and I do certainly recall us having more than our share of disagreement and inefficiency in the past, but on the balance core still feels too much like the pre-WWII Polish Parliament sometimes, where we're fully capable of arguing some issue right up to the point where tanks are rolling through the front door and rendering the whole debate somewhat moot. I'm also not blaming this on the democratic model we've adopted, a stance which would be hypocritical at best since I'm one of the folks who argued strongly in favor of it, but I guess it's going to take a few more iterations before we get it right. It will also probably be a lot easier for truly new people who don't have a lot of preconceived notions of what core is to make that happen.

Well, that is certainly poetic. Sounds like the tanks already rushed in and crushed the skulls of BSD. Yeah, we hear whiners claim Darwin is BSD, bull. Darwin on both PPC and even more so on x86 is *completely* un-usable, and you people damn right well know it. Mark me as a troll, you can, deny the truth you will (to use a Yoda-ism, death to G. Lucas) You know it. If you don't buy a MAC, an overpriced hack at a PC (whatever happened to acceptance of the superior fire wire, almost ZILCH compared to USB, also, try and find a NuBUS card, let alone a slot.), then you are screwed when it comes to Apple UNIX. I wish Apple would stop being a WHIMP and port to x86, but it seems apparent they do not have the intelligence present to PORT an OS to x86 (geeze, of all the oddest, off the wall undocumented architectures ever [facetious]. Yeah, right. Must be tuff.). Who would have thought? Well, I would have.

Remember folks, UNIX vendors killed Unix. I piss on Microsoft, but they can sell SHIT far better than UNIX vendors can sell GOLD. IBM is dumping AIX in favor of Linux, what a surprise (They are writing JFS, POSIX THREADS 2.0, and lots of NUMA for Linux, not BSD, all you BSD loons take a note of that).. Solaris has only one thing Linux doesn't have, good scalable SMP. Other than that Solaris is a flaming dogpile, I know, I have seen it in action. HP-UX is trash, lovingly known as HOCKEY PUX (and also verifiably impossible to port to and compile stuff on), they also killed the only REAL competitor to Microshit Exchange, OpenMAIL. Now OpenMAIL is a dead end Samsung product and it sucks. Mark me as a troll, you are vastly uninformed if you do, but I have actually administered OpenMAIL and have tried it relabeled from Samsung. Worth noting, I never saw OpenMAIL working on anything else besides Linux. Thanks Carly, you for killing over the only good Unix based mail MTA. Lets rip into SGI. Ha ha ha ha. The only remnant holdover of that vendor is re-appearing in Linux as XFS. The rest of that shit IRIX is DEPRECATED in favor of a GNU OS. At least stupid Sun gets giving out a free OS. You can't even try BSD/OS. It's the only BSD of interest and Wind River is killing it. The rest of the BSDs are so far behind Linux in terms of scalability its not even funny. I wish IPF was ported to Linux, I wish Linux was a better networker, it surely has room to grow, but there is nothing, nothing, nothing compelling ANYONE to develop anything for BSD. Its dead. I gets things back-ported from Linux. The only BSD worth anything is OPENBSD,. Theo is God, the rest of that whole project is shit. It's a moot, embedded only OS barely useable as a workstation OS.

So all you flaming hippie scum get behind Linux, because Apple is going to screw BSD in the rump, this is the first step, cut the chicken's head off [pry Jordan from FreeBSD]. Apple is dead ending their fork of *BSD, we know it. It won't be ported. Its sole purpose it to be eye candy for Mac zealots (boy, using an industrial grade Unix OS and Kernel for displaying EYE CANDY - that's "THINKING SMART"????). Believe you me, if Intel died tomorrow, Microsoft would move *fast* to support the next best platform. Look at the boot Intel got in the balls when Microsoft recently licked Hammer's (Opeteron's) nuts instead of Itanic Itanium.

You better hope IBM buys out the now Defunct Sun, fixes up Java so it doesn't totally SUCK, throws out all the garbage that is named Solaris and SPARC, and makes a serious attempt at dominating the market. Otherwise, it wont be BSD dying as a troll, it will be UNIX having serious R&D funding problems. The party will end if big corporation abandon Unix, and oh, yes, it *can* happen. I sure hope it doesn't.

Sure mod me as a troll. Do it. But facts are facts. Apple BSD is a niche. *BSD is losing market share. OpenBSD is awesome, but very, very niche. Linux is being underwritten by IBM, Sun (through Cobalt, which is *pathetic). HP/Compaq are also earnestly supporting Linux, not BSD. The writing is on the wall, folks. Sniff some glue.

BSD IS DYING. Knowing now what I just told you, read it and see the humor. It may not be entirely true, but its FUNNY. I think BSD use will continue to drop steadily.

It is now official: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent 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 fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test. Coupled with the sudden departure of FreeBSD's main designer, all that remains is the eulogy.

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 dilettante 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 dying

I am a *BSD user
and I try hard to be brave
That is a tall order
*BSD's foot is in the grave.

I tap at my toy keyboard
and whistle a cheerful tune
but keeping happy is so hard,
*BSD will be dead soon.

Each day I wake and softly sob
Nightfall finds me crying
Not only am I a zit faced slob
but *BSD is dying.

Sure this is half troll, half truth, but be open minded and see some writing on the wall.

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[56ker Fucker]

HEY >:o/

I did NOT get a troll account so I can "read the article" or "do some research".

Maybe you is the one who should do a research, and
lookup "troll" in your karmwhore dictionary.

The BSD section is for us trolls, to make fools of ourselves, now BACK OFF.

--

Spot idiocy, Adopt a KarmaWhore

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a *BS user
and I try hard to be brave
That is a tall order
*BSD's foot is in the grave.

I tap at my toy keyboard
and whistle a cheerful tune
but keeping happy is so hard,
*BSD will be dead soon.

Each day I wake and softly sob
Nightfall finds me crying
Not only am I a zit faced slob
but *BSD is dying.

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Paul Komarek]

One of the things I like best about GNU/Linux, the operating system, is that it doesn't have a core team. It is a less-conservative approach than that of FreeBSD, and is part of the differentiation between GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. I personally prefer the GNU/Linux style, because among those 100+ distributions are some neat, innovative ideas. FreeBSD also has neat, innovative ideas, but I believe that their centralized control reduces the speed at which they can test these ideas. That said, FreeBSD can provide consistency and quality control in a way that GNU/Linux can't. Though an individual vendor can provide quality and consistency within their distrobution, it cannot enforce consistency between distrobutions (though the LSB is a good step toward identifying where it is important to be consistent).

Linux, the kernel, has an informal core body, with people wandering in and out. It is a much smaller project than FreeBSD, since FreeBSD is more than just a kernel. Therefore, one should be careful when reasoning about the benefits FreeBSD development methodology would bring to Linux.

-Paul Komarek

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep thanks to Apple, the de-facto BSD implementation now consists almost entirely of closed source software. Thanks to Apple, software that might have once run on Linux or FreeBSD will now only run on OS X thanks to their proprietary GUI! Thanks again Apple! Oh and thanks for that port of Quicktime to FreeBSD too, Apple! Not!

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Paul Komarek]

I thought the installed base statistic with OS X/BSD was for desktops, not machines total. Is there another statistic that relates total BSD machines (I assume we're limiting ourselves to Open/Net/FreeBSD and OS X) to total GNU/Linux machines? The linux counter has 125,000 linux users and 95,000+ registered machines. They estimate 18 million total users (but don't say for machines). I've seen other estimates between, geez, I think it was 2 million and 60 million installed machines? Quite a range.

While we're on that topic, it would be interesting to see something about the embedded market as well. It's always tough to guage these things because GNU/Linux has huge popularity compared to the *BSD operating systems.

-Paul Komarek

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[toddhisattva]

1. What is the "core team"?
2. How long has JKH been on the core?
3. Where does JKH currently work?
4. Will JKH be replaced? Where on the net can you find procedures detailing this process?
5. Do some research. How many people have been removed from the core? How many people have resigned from the core? What happens when a person quits the core team?

But what does any of that have to do with a rhetorical request to

Imagine a beowulf cluster of Jordan Hubbards

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[jo42]

The main reason I don't like Linux is because it doesn't have a core team. The main reason I don't like Linux is because it has 101 different distributions.

Have you ever tried to release a significant piece of software with 101 different target platforms that vary so much? The reason Microsoft became such a success was because they provided the software developer a stable, standard platform to target (then Microsoft got its head up its arse, but that is a different topic). As long as Linux is such a raging mish mash, it will never become a success. FreeBSD, due do its development style, has the ability to surpass Linux as the alternate desktop OS to Windblows. However, the issue here is, that too many people have their heads up Linus' gaping arse to grok.

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

182 Linux Distributions so far

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

May I ask you for the motivation of your crusade?

You talk about the context: what do you mean?

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[jonnythan]

The Linux Counter is about as inaccurate as you can get. I've registered three computers there, and no longer use linux anywhere. I've moved everything to OpenBSD and Windows XP.

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Asmodai]

FreeBSD went out of business?

How on earth can an open source project go out of business?

Please, take your trolling elsewhere.

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, you're absolutely right. I look around and see all the significant software being released on FreeBSD (because of its cohension) and the lack of same on Linux, and understand the truth of your argument - fucktard.

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[frost22]

One of the things I like best about GNU/Linux, the operating system, is that it doesn't have a core team

Well, you might be in for a surprise. There will be a day, when you read on Slashdot: "Linus quits kernel maintenace". And at that point, if Linux doesn't have a core team, Linux will be in trouble.
Yes, I know. "X" will take over, "X" beeing Alan Cox or Matt Welsh or another of the handful of persons assumed to have sufficient standing with the community. But even if that works - Linux names him successor - it will work only in this first iteration. And I doubt even that.

f.

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Paradise Pete]

Damn. Nobody told me there was going to be a quiz. Did you annouce this? I was up late studying for Mr. Burnttoast's Linux test this afternoon. I didn't even think about BSD. This is so unfair.

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Paul Komarek]

"Have you ever tried to release a significant piece of software with 101 different target platforms that vary so much?"

No, I haven't. Have you? I have never seen any major project attempt to support every platform with precompiled binaries. Source availability is a major part of things working at all. It seems that developers usually choose to support one or two distros, and leave support for the remaining distros to interested 3rd parties. This is a sensible way to distribute the load.

If one wishes to release one's software binary-only, then I am not very interested in the difficulties encountered. I'll take source code over convenience any day.

-Paul Komarek

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Paul Komarek]

And I've added three linux machines (ipaq, laptop, and old desktop) that aren't yet registered at the Linux Counter. I imagine that, for instance, embedded linux companies fail to register every embedded machine they use.

Microsoft counts OEM Windows sales as equivalent to Windows usage. They could use registration numbers, but those would be too low. And then there is "piracy" in the case of Windows.

I figure the Linux Counter isn't any worse than any other estimation method -- especially since we're not even being careful to define what we mean by "user". At any rate, they guy's estimate of 18 million linux users falls between the research companies' estimates of 2 million to 60 million. =-)

-Paul Komarek

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Paul Komarek]

As I pointed out above, Linus works on Linux the kernel and not on a distribution. As you quote, I like it that "GNU/Linux, the operating system" doesn't have a core team. As far as the kernel goes, I'm more optimistic than you that the current "core" structure is adequate.

-Paul Komarek

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Ranma]

Troll -1

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL you're sure out of date with your knowledge and information... LOL!

You have A LOT to learn little boy.

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck Linux

Re:Before the posts get out of hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Linux is the choice of drooling Microsoft-haters, script kiddies, painfully ignorant execs, leet haxors everywhere. Like Windows, its sucess is by accident and it's often an accident waiting to happen.

as long as he stays with the project

[bytes256]

As long as he doesn't leave FreeBSD i'll be happy...he's done a lot of great work for it...he practically invented Ports...which is an incredible system

More confirmation: Trolls are retards.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's official; Scientists confirm that the only way the "BSD is Dying Troll" will ever come close to being correct, is if he continues to make this same prediction for the next 15-30 billion years. For those of you unfamiliar with astrophysics, this is the estimated time it will take for the universe to collapse back on itself into a massive blackhole in an event known as the "Big Crunch" (Berkely Breathed coined the phrase).

At this point, it will actually be true that BSD is dead, because it is logically impossible to continue development of open source projects from within a singularity of infinite mass. Of course, the "BSD is Dying" Troll will no doubt fail to mention that everything else - even the universe itself - will die along with it.

For Christ's sake, you weeny, can't you be bothered to at least come up with a fresh trolling? I've been reading slashdot for 3 years, and I swear I saw this one the first day. The general rule of thumb is that this won't become tradition or a classic for almost another 20 years. If you make me suffer that long, I may have to hunt you down and fillet you.

Re:More confirmation: Trolls are retards.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's responses like yours which give people like me the incentive to continue trolling. Your diatribe make a hundred more BSD Is Dying posts worthwhile.

Oh yes, ObEnding: YHBT. IANAL. HAND.

Re:More confirmation: Trolls are retards.

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to suck using a monospace font.

Re:More confirmation: Trolls are retards.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying

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

Now the real work begins

[ablair]

I think it's actually good news for *BSD that Hubbard has quit core. Besides wasting his talents on administrative tasks, he obviously didn't like the squabbling anymore. Now someone with managerial enthusiasm can move into his core position, and Jordan can focus on what he does best for *BSD - contribute good code. A good deal all around.

Re:Now the real work begins

[Anonymous Coward]

This was random enough to make me laugh.

hee hee

Re:Now the real work begins

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, I don't remember that last time I heard any good BSD news. It has been a downward spiral since
Walnut Creek bit the dust. This move by Hubbard bodes ill for the future.

Re:Now the real work begins

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't remember that last time I heard any good BSD news. It has been a downward spiral since Walnut Creek bit the dust.

Funny you should say that. If you focused on the code and not the politics, you'd see some real progress lately.

Re:Now the real work begins

[Anonymous Coward]

In his own words:

I hate to say this but it probably needs saying, is that being in core is honestly not what it once was. For a old-timer like myself, who was used to a core team that was far more cohesive and generally on the same page, it's simply a painful experience a lot of the time. Perhaps this is due to overly rose-colored recollections of the old core on my part, and I do certainly recall us having more than our share of disagreement and inefficiency in the past, but on the balance core still feels too much like the pre-WWII Polish Parliment sometimes, where we're fully capable of arguing some issue right up to the point where tanks are rolling through the front door and rendering the whole debate somewhat moot. I'm also not blaming this on the democratic model we've adopted, a stance which would be hypocritical at best since I'm one of the folks who argued strongly in favor of it, but I guess it's going to take a few more iterations before we get it right. It will also probably be a lot easier for truly new people who don't have a lot of preconceived notions of what core is to make that happen.

I'm just not having any fun, really...

[JordanH]

I think the article says it all. I'm really not having any fun anymore. Thanks for all your encouragement through the years.

Wait, I'm not Jordan Hubbard... Not even the same middle initial. What was I thinking? Uhh, never mind.

i want to meet the original BSD Is Dying troll

[Anonymous Coward]

It has to be the most long-lasting troll (that still receives a hefty number of responses) of all time. The sheer cunning and craftmanship that has gone into the piece of work is clearly the product of an unsung genius.

Re:i want to meet the original BSD Is Dying troll

[Anonymous Coward]

his name is linux torvalds, and no he isn't an unsung genius. :)

Re:i want to meet the original BSD Is Dying troll

[Anonymous Coward]

My wang thanks you for the compliment. Normally it gets complements on size, girth, and dexterity, but it's glad to hear you like its foray into literary fiction.

Re:i want to meet the original BSD Is Dying troll

[lessthan0]

Jordon Hubbard is DYING.

Re:i want to meet the original BSD Is Dying troll

[hawk]

>Jordon Hubbard is DYING.

Not yet, he's not. Doesn't he have to do something with some actress, hot breakfast cereal, and pebbles first?

Then, and only then, can he run off on the UFO's with Elvis . . .

:)

hawk

Haiku for *BSD

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Is dying, BSD
Ugly Troll screams into night
Nobody listens

Re:Haiku for *BSD

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Crap. You're right, that's 6 syllables. Am I bad.

Re:Haiku for *BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

You certainly are.

Re:Haiku for *BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Its ok.. it was still funny as hell. =)

Re:Haiku for *BSD

[IronChef]

In a true haiku there is always a reference to a season.

Please re-submit your haiku for moderation.

Re:Haiku for *BSD

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I'm pretty sure the "night" reference counts as a kigo. Maybe I'm wrong...

bds dying?

[evi1b0b]

last i checked, the bsd-based OSX has all these *nix fiends peeing in their pants for the right mix of commercial and open source development as well as the *nixities everyone has come to know and love.

Apple?

[nougatmachine]

Wasn't he going to work on OS X at Apple anyway? I seem to recall reading that somewhere.

Re:Apple?

[espo812]

You're thinking of Jordan Hubbard.

Re:Apple?

[espo812]

Well... the same person. But that article has the details of what he went to do with apple.

Sorry to see him go...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hubbard has done a lot to make FreeBSD exist in the
form he does today. The rest of the core team
is really strong, but clearly his involvement
will be missed. An interesting question for the
Linux side of things will be how long some of their
mainstays (Torvalds, Cox, et al) will hang in.
Everyone needs a change of direction sometime--
no one expects these people to want to do the same
thing for the rest of their lives, and it would
be unrealistic to do so.

Re:Sorry to see him go...

[Anonymous Coward]

Jordan Hubbard knows that *BSD is dying.

Re:Sorry to see him go...

[Listen Up]

What the world is horribly short on are people who follow their dreams. Yes, it is completely reasonable to follow you dreams for the rest of your entire life. That was the point of my previous post. If everyone followed their dream for the rest of their lives, this world would be such a better place.

Re:Sorry to see him go...

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately for BSD users, Hubbard did nothing to nurture BSD software. The BSD software landscape is best characterized as a sterile wasteland. BSD software is mostly hand-me-downs from other projects. The pointis that no major software emanates from FreeBSD - none.

Gnome, KDE, Samba, Wine, etc., all of these were started by the Linux community. They are at their heart Linux software. Hey, even FreeBSD had to switch their object file format because Linux did. BSD object files were dropped by the GCC project. Oh and Red Hat owns GCC now since buying out Cygnus. You know it. I know it. Deal with it.

It doesn't work man

[Anonymous Coward]

damn, can't you get it through your head?

The widener doesn't work... DOES. NOT. WORK.

Limerick for *BSD

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

There once was a troll from slashdot
To hear him, you'd think him a crackpot
He kept screaming "BSD IS DYING!"
With false statistics, exaggeration, and lying
In truth, his rants were less pleasant than crotch-rot

Re:Limerick for *BSD

[no_l0gic]

Great limerick!

I couldn't resist "rewriting" it in 'proper' limerick form, however...

There once was a troll found on slashdot
Whose posts made him seem like a crackpot
Something's wrong with his head
Screaming BSD's dead
Thanks to Darwin it's just hit the jackpot

It does lack some of the panache of the original...

AFAIK, a limerick must follow these general conventions:
w S w w S w w S w - a
w S w w S w w S w - a
w w S w w S - b
w w S w w S - b
w w S w w S w w S w - a

(w=weak / S=strong / [ab]=rhyme scheme)

Cheers =)

Re:Limerick for *BSD

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Touche. I like yours better. Hell, I messed up the haiku too, as far as that goes.

Re:Limerick for *BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Listen man, don't know what false statistics you are talking about, but read this:

It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers.
Coming on the heels of a recent 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 fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] [amdest.com] 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 dilettante 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 dying

Re:Limerick for *BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Darwin is only BSD in the deranged worlds of the ultra-BSD zealot terrified by the rise of Linux, and the Apple PR department.

Get over it.

A question for freebsd people

[Burgundy Advocate]

I have quite a bit of experience in the linux community. I remember way back when, installing Redhat 5.0 and struggling to get it to work, and work at all decently. I remember when Gnome 1.0 came out, leaving coredumps all over your desktop (I'm just glad it got better). I remember when Mozilla went open-source, and when the Gimp decided to break the standards and create it's own toolkit. I used to read FreshMeat and marvel at all the new, cool projects that would come out.

However, I see very little projects from the FreeBSD community. Of course there's the occasional release of version 3.2 or whatever, but that's about it. No cool software for it.

So, my question is this: why the lack of enthusiasm? Hubbard resigning is just the latest sympton I've noticed. Is it because of the controlled development model? Is it because of the poor quality of development tools? Is it because there's no companies involved?

It seems to me that without a little more enthusiasm, FreeBSD won't go anywhere. If you want to give Linux a run for it's money, you can't just sit on your butt.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to have missed out on all the cool
projects going on -- their next generation
smp implementation, the trustedbsd work (and
the port of selinux), scheduler activations, etc.
Perhaps the problem is you're speaking out of
your butt :-)

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Anonymous Coward]

Lemme guess. You don't do any networking, right?

Thought so, given the gnome comments. BTW, what's a desktop? Is that were you can put your ISPec-enabled router?

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Dirty Pickle]

"If you want to give Linux a run for it's money, you can't just sit on your butt."

You've got it all wrong, these aren't businesses. It's not a competition. Nobody wants to see the other guy go under. It's all about cooperation.

I think the lack of BSD projects is best explained by the huge number of Linux projects. Linux is cool, it's flashy, it goes with your gucci shoes, baby. It excites the hell out of people, which is a really good thing. Lots and lots of projects get created.

FreeBSD, on the other hand, isn't so exciting. There's not a fire under anyone's ass to get things done, since things are working pretty well as is.

I could be wrong, and if I am (even just a little bit), I'm sure someone will by kind enough to point out how.

Oh, and if this was a troll, bravo. No offense or anything, it just kind of has that ring to it.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[archen]

That sort of depends on your definition of "cool software". If you mean by, software that is exclusive to FreeBSD, then probably there isn't much. Generally the vast majority of Open Source stuff that's worth anything (in MY opinion) works under FreeBSD, it's just that FreeBSD and every other BSD falls into the "other Unix type OS". Usually the only other drawback is that you have to wait a little while (week or so) for tweaking to get someone that releases something that compiles nicely under FreeBSD - or even better a package. With linux binary compatability there are even more things that you can run with a minimum of hassle.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you want to give Linux a run for it's money, you can't just sit on your butt."

You've got it all wrong, these aren't businesses. It's not a competition. Nobody wants to see the other guy go under. It's all about cooperation.

You've both got it wrong. We (I speak for all of us, and the other ussesses know who us is) don't care about Linux any more than to offer some compatability.

You guys go on and try to topple Windows. Maybe you will, maybe you won't. We're content to have a stable OS on the DT that can't be beaten when it comes to heavy volume servers.

I'm not trolling, but if you guys ever have to maintain a box (not just a developer's workstation, or a play machine at home)... a full on mission critical server, you will find yourself securely seated with me in the BSD camp.

That is, if you can convince the powers that be to let go of Sun for a minute or two.

Anyway, FreeBSD is going somewhere. It will keep going towards that somewhere, regardless of what you think, or who nVidia releases drivers for, or whatever. BSD's community has a different spirit and you won't understand it until you look into it.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[MavEtJu]

You are comparing the Operating System with Applications (except for the RedHat thing)

Gnome: application, works fine under FreeBSD
Mozilla: application, works fine under FreeBSD
The Gimp: application, works fine under FreeBSD.

No cool software for it.

What is it you are missing? Groupware? Last week I installed Evolution, without problems. Keep in mind, all these well-developed 'Linux' applications are actually well-developed 'Unix' applications and run under every Unix-like Operating System.

So, next time please consider: Linux (any distribution) is nothing more than Unix-like, *BSD (any flavour) is nothing more than Unix-like and *x (any commercial version) is nothing more than Unix-like. And they all are capable of running the same software, just ./configure-and-make-install it!

Edwin

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Anonymous Coward]

I think in his heart Jordan knows that FreeBSD is starting to decline. He has made off the record comments suggesting that. Take a look at the development tools. If you remove the GNU tools from consideration, there are almost no development tools available for FreeBSD. Ever try to get a *good* C++ compiler for FreeBSD? No can do. I tried because I had a client who was interested in me porting one of his projects to FreeBSD, but I couldn't find a decent C++ compiler. Heck, even Linux has second source development tools so you aren't tied to GCC and kin.

If you are honest you will have to accept that FreeBSD has no significant third party support. Native state of the art development tools are not available. Windows, Solaris, Linux, and just about everyone else has more tool suppot to offer the developer. There really isn't enough tool support in FreeBSD for myself and others to make it worth our effort.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Arandir]

I'm not really sure I understand your question.

Gnome is not a Linux program. Mozilla is not a Linux program. Gimp is not a Linux program. They all run just fine under FreeBSD.

GCC, bash, XFree86, tar, Perl, Windowmaker, etc, etc, etc, aren't Linux programs either. They're all Open Source Unix programs that work just fine under just about every Unix OS there is.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had more trouble getting native Linux applications to work under (name your favorite distro of Linux) than getting native Linux apps working under FreeBSD.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because FreeBSD doesn't emulate (your favorite distro), it emulates RedHat Linux 6.x, which is as close to the gold standard as you could get with commercial Linux.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[benedict]

All of the software you mentioned runs on FreeBSD.
Including Red Hat, if you use VMware.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Anonymous Coward]

Portland group C++ and Fortran compilers are working pretty weel for me, as well as Intel compiler. The trick is to use commercial compiler to generate .o files, but use native linker to build binary. There are even rumors about getting whole distribution compiled with Intel compilers in FreeBSD/i386.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD didn't have to switch object file formats because Linux did. Go read the discussion in the FreeBSD mailing list archives for the real reasons.

Linux had to switch object file formats (and so much earlier) because the a.out conventions used by Linux were crappy and getting in the way.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Tet]

Keep in mind, all these well-developed 'Linux' applications are actually well-developed 'Unix' applications and run under every Unix-like Operating System.

Actually, that's not true any more. As with anything, the arrival of the masses lowers the quality. As Linux has got more popular, the number of poorly written Linux-specific applications has increased dramatically, and the portability of a lot of software has significantly decreased. Yes, a lot of it does still work, but there's plenty that doesn't. Interesting to note that all three applications you cited are portable at least in part thanks to the design and portability of gtk and gdk.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't really emulate a particular distro. It has a kernel interrupt translator, and a stock glibc. That's pretty much it.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't SAMBA started on *BSD? That's a pretty big project and not from Linux. Okay, they seem to use it far more (especially the client) but if you really want to assign it to an OS I think BSD can claim this one.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Asmodai]

I am not sure what you are getting at. Your argumentation (or lack of) is so fundamentally flawed it is hard to correct it.

There are a lot of people who started a project and developed it on Linux because that was what they had installed, the same goes for FreeBSD.
The Apache people started on BSD unixes, the PostgreSQL people on BSD as well. MySQL on Linux, etc etc.

And how many of these people do start side projects, but do not do any kernel work related to either FreeBSD or Linux?

Isn't a typical release of a Linux distribution not the same as a FreeBSD, NetBSD, or whatever other OS distribution? A new kernel containing fixes, enhancements, and new features combined with very recent userland utilities.

I also doubt you did proper research with regard to the rest of the items you mentioned:

- the cool software is the same as for the Linux community
- the development tools are the standard CVS, binutils, gcc, gdb

I won't even continue to comment on the rest, since you need to do some proper research before spreading FUD (which will than automagically be no FUD, or at least less).

Have a nice day.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Asmodai]

No rumours.

ICC works on FreeBSD, which funnily is the Linux binary.

Furthermore I am at the moment revamping TenDRA in order to have an extra alternative. Takes time to get it up to par, but it is slowly coming about.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[m_ilya]

It has ... and a stock glibc

AFAIK most linux ports on FreeBSD install linux libraries and software from RedHat's RPM. Including glibc.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[schweikh]

Being a FreeBSD committer, I might qualify as one of the "freebsd people" your question is addressed to.

First, I can see no lack of enthusiasm, not from jkh, let alone the BSD commiters, developers or user base. The steadily growing mailing list subscriptions are only one of many indicators. If you had read jkh's letter you would not have missed that he is not stopping work on FreeBSD, on the contrary, without the managerial work as a core member he can actually contribute *more* code and knowing jkh I am sure he'll raise his voice on many issues concerning the BSDs in the future.

The rest of your article seems to miss the current state of affairs so much that Richard P Feynman would probably attribute it with the same line he used for crank theories -- "not even wrong". To be more specific:

"poor quality of development tools" -- you mean make(1), gcc(1), cvs(1) or what? Care to elaborate when they are actually the same tools any linux (or for that matter unix) hacker uses? Typing

$ cd /usr/src; cvs update; make world

for the first time and watching the complete system being built was one of the most beautiful experiences in my hacker life.

"Very little projects from the FreeBSD community": You apparently have a different understanding of what constitutes a Linux or FreeBSD project than I have. Linux being kernel-only, lets address kernel projects going on in FreeBSD:

• fine grained SMP locking
• fine-grained privileges (capabilities)
• Access Control Lists
• KAME Project, a free IPv6/IPsec stack for BSD
• Mandatory Access Control
• Soft Updates: Asynchronous Meta-data Protection in File Systems

And there's tons more for the userland, e.g. the POSIX 2001 = IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 comformance project (which I regard my baby to some extent). Have a look at http://www.de.freebsd.org/projects/index.html for an exhaustive list of projects.

"controlled development model"? In FreeBSD more than 300 committers have write access to the repository. How does that compare to Linus, the benevolent dictator over the linux kernel? Funny that arch linux hacker Alan Cox is also actively working on the FreeBSD kernel. He seems to have no fear of working for both camps, heck, he might even be working on the Hurd and other OSes. The FreeBSD people couldn't care less. We value everybody's technical expertise and that is exactly what makes our community a place to be. Come to think of it: instead of uttering FUD why not learn from each other about strengths and weaknesses? Why the NIH attitude?

I give you a half point on the "no companies involved" issue. To be frank, the Windriver episode was not something to be proud of. I have no real insights into what went on inside WRS, but if I had to guess, I'd attribute it to lack of real enthusiasm. Other companies in the meantime have taken the role Walnut Creek had in the past, notably http://www.freebsdservices.com/ and http://www.freebsdmall.com/ They seem to do so well that I got the FreeBSD 4.5 DVD for free (like all 300+ committers).

With all this combined enthusiasm I have absolutely no doubt that FreeBSD will continue to have a great future.

Regards,
Jens, who is proud being a part of it.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you are wrong when you says, that no cool projects for FreeBSD. I would say that they do exist lot of cool project. Look at:
http://www.freebsd.org/projects/index.html

Just for name some of them:
Scalable SMP, Softupdates, IPv6, PAO, etc...

FreeBSD people can accept if somebody did a great software and they will integrate into the port collection, that we have over 6600! applications.

I would say, that it is difficult work with opensource in the slowing down world of economy. But that can be also a big advantage, since everybody become more and more sensitive for the prices, and open source can fulfill most of the requirements.

About the development model, wish Linux or some commercial company had such a quality control and assurance as FreeBSD has.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Anonymous Coward]

That's true on a low-level, but check the ports. The package is even called "linux-6.1" or something and clearly is of RedHat orgin.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Arandir]

BSD software is mostly hand-me-downs from other projects.

You need to get a clue and find out what BSD really is. BSD predates Linux and GNU. BSD is more Unix than most systems that can claim that trademark.

On the other hand, did you realize that the original (unofficial) logo for Linux was the platypus? That's because Linux was, and is, a patchwork of of "hand-me-downs from other projects". It's a kernel from one project, binutils and libc from another, daemons from a third, filesystems from others, etc. And glue from the distros to hold it all together.

On the third hand, FreeBSD is a complete integrated OS. Everything from the OS to the shell is one complete source tree. Some of the stuff is contributed, of course, like tcsh and gcc, but the vast majority of it is pure BSD software.

The point is that no major software emanates from FreeBSD - none.

FreeBSD does not claim or want to be a clearinghouse for every open source project under the sun. Neither does Linus Torvalds for that matter.

Your silly rant is puerile. You're like some kid shouting that your dad can beat my dad up. The actual fact is that every project that you mentioned as major contributors from every distro and freenix out there. Including FreeBSD. You would be surprised at how many Gnome and KDE developers use FreeBSD.

p.s. Redhat doesn't own GCC. The FSF owns GCC. Go look at the copyright.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[jonbelson]

Hiya

That's a different Alan Cox ;^)

--Jon

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Arandir]

That's only for native linux binaries. The only thing I use it for is Acroread and Staroffice. Everything else I use is the FreeBSD version.

Sure, there's a linux-gtk, but I prefer real gtk straight out of the box like Mom used to make.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Anonymous Coward]

>>fine grained SMP locking
fine-grained privileges (capabilities)
Access Control Lists
KAME Project, a free IPv6/IPsec stack for BSD
Mandatory Access Control
Soft Updates: Asynchronous Meta-data Protection in File Systems

OK, except may be the KAME project, Linux development touch on those as well.

Then why not drop the fud about the kernel only crap?? It is illogical to say the least.

Re:A question for freebsd people

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD software is mostly hand-me-downs from other projects. The pointis that no major software emanates from FreeBSD - none.

Gnome, KDE, Samba, Wine, etc., all of these were started by the Linux community. They are at their heart Linux software. Hy, even FreeBSD had to switch their object file format because Linux did. BSD object files were dropped by the GCC project. Oh and Red Hat owns GCC now since buying out Cygnus. You know it. I know it. Deal with it.

Too much success?

[Titusdot Groan]

Thanks for all the hard work and effort to date Jordan! Take all your time and energy and put it into Mac X -- the OS of my next computer!

To all the "See BSD IS dying" trolls -- seems Jordan is leaving in a large part because of the bureaucracy and management overhead. Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't those signs of too much growth?

GNOME is next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but what is happening in GNOME since the GNOME Foundation? I fear GNOME Foundation was copying FreeBSD and since then things have gone downhill.

Somebody had to say it.

Re:GNOME is next?

[alfredo]

Gnome is nice on Darwin, and OSX. Downhill? NFW

I just hope...

[Anonymous Coward]

...they hurry up and get the damn nVidia GL working under FreeBSD.

I've waited so freaking long for this, it's insane how longs it has taken to get it ported. I would be running *BSD on my main desktop if I only had nVidia (well, and VMware) support.

Re:I just hope...

[Julian Plamann]

Umm... VMware runs great under FreeBSD. It's in ports.

/usr/ports/emulators/vmware2
/usr/ports/em ulators/vmware-tools

etc, etc

Re:I just hope...

[Anonymous Coward]

I need a few things before I migrate to BSD. NVIDIA GLX is obviously one. (FYI: there is a vmware port) Something like devfs is another. BSD style pseudoterminals also piss me off; any word on how to use the standard naming convention? Kernel preemption would be nice; at least Linux has patches for that...

Re:I just hope...

[Asmodai]

There are NVidia drivers out there thanks to Matthew Dodd.

He was busy on the GL part when NVidia put him on the backburner due to the GF4 release being near.
I am sure that work has now resumed and it will only be a matter of time.

The platypus versus the daemon...

[connorbd]

As Jordan Hubbard becomes more and more a MacOS X posession, I just imagine Hexley vs. Beastie in a Celebrity Deathmatch.

It is sort of sad to see something like that happen, though. One could assume it was inevitable, though I suppose that would be hard without knowing what exactly he does at Apple.

/Brian

Re:The platypus versus the daemon...

[pythas]

However, there's one important component missing.

WHERE THE FUCK CAN I BUY A HEXLEY T-SHIRT????

Re:The platypus versus the daemon...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do a Hexley search on Google.

Follow the first link. There's a link to an online store selling Hexley t-shirts at the bottom of that short page.

It's sad how easy that was.

Re:The platypus versus the daemon...

[pythas]

The sad thing was, I think I've done this search before, but couldn't find it.

I'm also sad because AFGF (ask fucking google first) is a phrase I'm very fond of. I've had my googling schools questioned by an AC. I'm humbled, sir. Humbled.

Re:The platypus versus the daemon...

[Midnight Thunder]

In the meantime you could always get a t-shirt printing kit for your ink-jet printer and a white t-shirt. Not exactly the same thing, but at least its a solution.

Re:The platypus versus the daemon...

[Vodalian]

Find a t-shirt here.

Re:Interesting response from Linus

[Anonymous Coward]

What's taking so long? I usually get modded down into oblivion within 10 milliseconds. Must be a slow day.

Link to Hubbard Hired by Apple...

[dasspunk]

here's a link to the /. story about Hubbard joining Apple . (not much of a read though...)

This is depressing.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Can you truly prove that the trolls aren't dying? I've had my faith tested before, but it would come as a shocking blow to know that these weenies might somehow achieve immortality. Certainly, they have to be vulnerable to everything the rest of us are... can they not be killed?

Sooner or later, real life karma HAS TO catch up with them. We may never know for certain, but I for one, am looking for that strange little article on page 4 of the newspapers, describing how the most unbelievable set of circumstances managed to simultaneously drown, decapitate, burn, crush and and poison some pimply faced jerk of a teenager. This will be the one clue we have... that, and the slight S/N ratio increase here on /.

Job well done Jordan.

[Anonymous Coward]

When will your first Linux kernel patch be ready? Just kidding! :)

Again, job well done, and all the best.

Hexley vs. Beastie?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who/what the heck are they?

Re:Hexley vs. Beastie?

[pythas]

Hexley is the Darwin mascot

Beastie is the FreeBSD mascot

Note to moderators: Mod parent to +5 Insightful

[Anonymous Coward]

do that now

Re:THIS IS AN ASS SANDWICH

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, do you ever just fart on your hand after going without a shower or taking a shit for about 3 or 4 days and think something dead crawled up your asshole and died? Oh my lord.

hmm...

[AnimeFreak]

I wonder if those trolls had something to do with it? :P

I switched my webserver from Linux to FreeBSD and haven't looked back.

Re:hmm...

[totallygeek]

[Your signature]

rm -fr /bin/laden

You don't want to watch? rm -frv /bin/laden

Cluster

[borg05]

Can You Imagine A beowulf Cluster Of These

Re:To take his rightful place....

[Anonymous Coward]

I finally got the joke - very funny!
You rock!

Re:troll says...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you a Sim, or Arseface from Preacher?

You're half right...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

It's not a competition. Agreed.

There isn't a huge number of linux projects (please read on before modding as troll).

There also isn't a huge number of BSD projects.

Actually, most of these projects... GNOME, KDE, etc... are pretty kernel/distribution independent. Remember, linux is only the kernel. Most of what you think of as linux, is GNU software. And it's all pretty portable, to a certain extent, even to windows (barf).

Linux and BSD don't compete for projects, they share them.

Slightly offtopic: What's with the "bsd is dying troll" variant that claims BSD lacks SMP? Will the next version claim that BSD has no keyboard support or shell prompt?

Re:You're half right...

[Dirty Pickle]

True enough, all of it.

The SMP thing didn't bother the SMP FreeBSD box next to me one bit.

Re:You're half right...

[rtaylor]

And the keyboard thing didn't bother the BSD box next to me running by serial console.

Indeed -- no keyboard...

Re:You're half right...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Hehe... but that's by choice, of course. Gotta be careful, or those trolls will be quoting you in the next rant "even FreeBSD users admit there is no keyboard support!".

Re:You're half right...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am *BSD user
and I try hard to be brave
That is a tall order
*BSD's foot is in the grave.

I tap t my toy keyboard
and whistle a cheerful tune
but keeping happy is so hard,
*BSD will be dead soon.

Each day I wake and softly sob
Nightfall finds me crying
Not only am I a zit faced slob
but *BSD is dying.

Re:You're half right...

[Anonymous Coward]

He's right... FreeBSD keyboard support is dying.

That's why we use the ancient mouse gestures handed down to us by the elders.

Re:You're half right...

[glenkim]

Oh my god! FreeBSD has no keyboard support! I'm deleting my 5.0 dev preview image now!

Re:You're half right...

[duffbeer703]

It probaly would bother your OpenBSD box though.

What I want to know is...

[pschmied]

...Does Jordan drink beer. Because I would really like to find a way to send him some Moose Drool.

I find that after a really hard semester during which I've done nothing but pound my head at school and work. A good beer is the best way to unwind and relax. Jordan most definitely deserves it.

Best of luck to you Jordan, and thank you for all the really great work you've done for the world's best OS.

-Peter

Re:What I want to know is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, one whole beer per semester? You're one wild and crazy guy!

Re:What I want to know is...

[evilned]

Ahh yeah... the beer of the gods. I take a case home with me on each trip to montana. its still better straight from the brewery in the 64 oz growlers though.

Re:What I want to know is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, he does'nt. I offered him one at BSDConUK, he told me that he doesn't drink. Top Guy though, hopefully this is for the better and there will be even more cool code comming our way!

Dan

Re:What I want to know is...

[apuku]

Moose Drool is good, but try a manly Montana brew: Black Widow from Yellowstone Valley Brewing

Re:What I want to know is...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he doesn't drink beer. I once offered to buy him a drink, and he just wanted a Coke. Apparently he gave up drinking some time ago because he got tired of forgetting things the next morning or something. Nice bloke.

FreeBSD will continue without him, and in many ways it was time for a bit of a shake-up. As long as his commits still keep rolling in, we'll be fine. :-)

Re:What I want to know is...

[pschmied]

You obviously haven't had a full growler of Moose Drool :-)

-Peter

Re:What I want to know is...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://people.freebsd.org/~jkh/moi/index.html

BSD + Apple + M$

[Anonymous Coward]

While I have respect for Apples hardware, It scares me that M$ is a major share holder of Apple. With Apple now realying so heavily on BSD, I have to wonder what will change in BSD in the future, and will it be in the best interest of the consumers. I predict that 90% of BSD users will be mac users if not so already. Did Apple just steal control of the BSD code, as it did to ideas created at xerox park. Did M$ just take out another competing OS.

Re:BSD + Apple + M$

[norwoodites]

MS has non voting stocks.

Re:BSD + Apple + M$

[good soldier svejk]

1) MS was not that major a stockholder, about $100 million in non-voting, non-transferable, dividend bearing preferred stock in a company with a market cap of $7billion. 2) MS sold the stock at a huge profit not long after it became convertible to common stock at 4:1. 3) You can't steal control of BSD code. 4) PARC did not create most of the ideas you claim Apple stole from them. However, Apple did unsuccessfully try to make them proprietary.

Re:BSD + Apple + M$

[Melantha_Bacchae]

norwoodites wrote:

> MS has non voting stocks.

MS *had* non-voting stocks. They dumped them onto the market in the fall of 2000. That, plus a couple of blunders/mis-timings Apple made, plus the impending industry-wide disaster made Apple stumble badly that quarter. During the victory party for Apple's supposed demise, the earnings warnings started to come in as the computer makers one by one fell on their collective faces. Apple bounced back to profitability the very next quarter. The rest of the industry was not so fortunate.

Don't worry about MS influencing Apple anymore. The five year contract was a one time deal to give Apple the cash to get back on their feet. The deal is up in August, and both parties seem happy to return to Microsoft's former role as 3rd party developer/OS competitor.

"Mothra, you are Life Eternal! Hear the prayers of your servants. Come back to us from out of the legend. Come and save us with your power of Life!"
- From the US release of "Mothra" May 10, 1962
(Interesting that the last day of the WWDC falls on Mothra's 40th anniversary in America.)

Re:BSD + Apple + M$

[Anonymous Coward]

3) You can't steal control of BSD code.

Ummm... hate to tell you but you most certainly CAN "steal" BSD code. True, you cannot take a particular open implementation out of circulation, but what you can do is take an open implementation (FreeBSD + Mach, etc), throw in some proprietary stuff to make it incompatible with the open stuff (Aqua vs. X) and then market the hell out of it. Apple recently announced that Mac OS X is beating Linux as a desktop OS. This means that Mac OS X is now the de facto *BSD implementation, moving FreeBSD to a very distant #2. With more and more applications being ported to Apple's OS X API's, rather than X, it is only a matter of time before developers see no reason o support X/BSD. But hey, at least Apple didn't "steal" the code, huh.

Re:BSD + Apple + M$

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you could always put the advertisement clause in your license. Blame FSF for lobbying to remove it.

Re:BSD + Apple + M$

[good soldier svejk]

The five year contract was a one time deal to give Apple the cash to get back on their feet.

Your observations are correct, however I would point out that cash was not the issue in the stock deal. Apple had already issued a convertible debenture that raised something like $6 billion, IIRC. They had also sold off a number of capital assets. The actual deal was an MS commitment to five years of Office development in exchange for Apple dropping some outstanding legal claims. The stock deal was essentially window dressing to show solidarity and MS confidence. That said, MS received amazingly favorable terms on the purchase. The bought the stock, which after three years became convertible to common shares at 4:1, for just under the common share market value of about $16. Unlike Apple common stock, this preferred stock paid a dividend as well! Conspicuously absent from the deal was an MS commitment to port Office to OS X, which is what Gil Amelio had been holding out for. Luckily for Apple, MS decided to go that route of their own free will.

But BSD trolls ARE dying!

[Anonymous Coward]

Original Post

Sure, we all know that the *BSD is dying guy is a failure, but why? Why did he fail? Once you get past the green, warty skin and the fact that his attention is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible toll-collection schemes under bridges, there is the historical record that he is a weenie. *BSD is dying guy experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles (kindergarten). Since then, his social skills have been in steady decline. We all know *BSD is dying guy isn't getting any, but why? Is it the problematic personality? Or is it larger than that?

The record is clear on one thing: no personality this bad has ever recovered. Efforts to get *BSD is dying guy laid are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the *BSD is dying guy, sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shroud over his warty exterior. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia for the good old days (before the restraining order) has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD is dying guy.

Re:Hard times for *BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

vendor support. oracle on FreeBSD? You can kinda run it, but oracle only supports it for the major
UNIXes--and linux. You'll find that for almost all commercial software.

Oracle shmoracle. That's not something I'm concerned with. Besides, FreeBSD has Linux emulation which usually works quite well when you need to run Linux binaries.

And what about hardware? Those shiny new Dell Poweredge and Compaq DL*'s actually work with
Linux, because their developers have put time into writing drivers & contributing the source back into the
kernel tree.

Yeah, what about hardware? The drivers are open source as you mentioned so if I ever need to use them I can pluck them right out of Linux and modify them for use with FreeBSD.

Really. Thanks jkh.

[juuri]

If it wasn't for Jordan, FreeBSD would really be dead. Many of you don't remember because you weren't around but when jkh started working his ass off on FreeBSD it was a pile of stinking refuse. This was during the time of the rising linux kernel (around rev .99? or earlier?). Unix on peecees was not pretty and not in way reliable. I worked at one of the first small ISPs (this was when Gopher was king) and a coworker convinced us to migrate from linux to FreeBSD because of some really bad linux fs bugs at the time (INN+linux was asking for trouble).

We never looked back. Over the years I've built at least 50 servers based on FreeBSD and at least that many based on linux. I've found them both to be reliable and good enough for commercial use but thanks to jkh and his pragmatic views on an OS distribution FreeBSD has been the more "stable" OS over the years.

Re:Really. Thanks jkh.

[siliconinc.net]

Over the last few years of contracts and ISP migrations, Ive built somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 fbsd machines. I still have maintenance retainers on a lot of them, and spend less time working on them than I do the handful of windows and redhat machines I have to deal with now. Its quite possibly the most stable OS (with the possible exception of IRIX) Ive ever dealt with. Big thanks for jkh for making it all possible, and saving me from a few late night support calls.

Anyone know how we could send jkh a nice case of beer and a pizza in return for the great work?

Re:Really. Thanks jkh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know how we could send jkh a nice case of beer and a pizza in return for the great work?

Better make it Lite beer and rice wafers.

Re:Really. Thanks jkh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Without Jordan, NetBSD would still be around. Wasn't NetBSD founded independently of FreeBSD? (Although both were based on Net/2 and 386BSD...)

Re:Really. Thanks jkh.

[slashtop]

Yes, FreeBSD is the most stable OS I ever used.
Yesterday, our company's mail server ( a Redhat Linux ) sunddenly stopped working and crashed, when we power off it and power on again, we found that the system just can not auto recover from crash, it refused continue to mount other filesystemes, we later found that our five ext2 file systems are all corrupted, we must manually
repair it, when finished the recover, we found mass file were lost.
we also use FreeBSD as our CVS server, in two years, we never found FreeBSD crash, we never lost
data even someone imprudencly power off it without shutdown system.

FreeBSD is rock solid, it's true.

Thanks Jordan and other FreeBSD hackers, you are my hero.

Re:Really. Thanks jkh.

[56ker]

Just send them a [_]o instead!

Re:Really. Thanks jkh.

[sinserve]

does that even make sense?

--

Re:Really. Thanks jkh.

[56ker]

It's IRC for a tankard of beer. [_]p - would be a cup of tea.

Re:Really. Thanks jkh.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called "softupdates" and if you want to make FreeBSD have as unstable an FS as Linux, go right ahead...

Re:Really. Thanks jkh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, we all know that *BSD is a failure, but why? Why did *BSD fail? Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all knw *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities?

The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting glom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.

Re:Really. Thanks jkh.

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD software is mostly hand-me-downs from other projects. The point is that no major software emanates from FreeBSD - none.

Gnome, KDE, Samba, Wine, etc., ll of these were started by the Linux community. They are at their heart Linux software. Hey, even FreeBSD had to switch their object file format because Linux did. BSD object files were dropped by the GCC project. Oh and Red Hat owns GCC now since buying out Cygnus. You know it. I know it. Deal with it.

Re:Really. Thanks jkh.

[Teferi]

You're confusing softupdates with an async mount. SU ensures that the FS metadata is always consistent, leading to a rock-solid FS.

Re:Really. Thanks jkh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome, KDE, Samba, Wine, etc., all of these were started by the Linux community. They are at their heart Linux software.

GNOME is from GNU; GNU is not necessarily Linux.

As for WINE: look at their website. What does it say at the top? "A free implementation of Windows for Unix". It does not say Linux until the end of the first paragraph.

"Started by the Linux community", you say. I don't think you realize that you're talking about the free UNIX community, of which BSD is a part. All of the titles you mention compile on BSD without any modification whatsover. They are at their heart, Unix software.

When you compile your favorite Linux software backage, what do you type? ./configure. If you were familiar with the mechanism behind that, you would know that the purpose of this is to help ensure that it will compile on many Unices, from an ancient SysV to Linux, to yes, BSD. Because of the way GNU was created (piece by piece, gradually replacing a variety of proprietary Unix tools on a number of systems), this was important.

Oh and Red Hat owns GCC now since buying out Cygnus. You know it. I know it. Deal with it.

No one owns GCC. No one ever will, except maybe The Free Software Foundation, for which all the copyrights are in the name of. The GCC Steering Commitee is entirely independent of Red Hat management.

Linux is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

We finally got rid of Jordan. Too bad you guys are still stuck w/o do-nothing Linus.

Re:Linux is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

We're working on it. BSD has a head start, after all...

Re:Hard times for *BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

So your argument is that BSD users don't need Oracle on real server hardware because they are all smalltime trailerpark types. Doesn't sound like a recipie for market success.

Pressure from APPLE?

[andrewski]

I think that perhaps one day Jordan was asked by Apple executive types "Why are you still helping a BSD that is light years ahead of Apple's, which, by the way, we are trying to keep up with, when you could be spending more time helping Darwin play catch-up?"

Seriously, though, FreeBSD 5 rocks and Darwin is stuck in the old 3.? days. Macs would rock even more if they had a more modern BSD.

Re:Pressure from APPLE?

[benedict]

There is some truth to this, but for the most part
it's bogus. There's a lot to the Mac OS X kernel
that's not BSD at all. For example, the SMP stuff
is at the Mach layer, if I understand correctly.

Not to be mean, but please don't shoot your mouth
off like this, it's bad for everybody. It's ok to
speculate, but mark it as speculation.

Re:Pressure from APPLE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which kind of kills the idea that Mac OS X is "just another BSD", which Apple loves to spout on about.

Re:Pressure from APPLE?

[Midnight Thunder]

Other differences include the I/O system being totally reworked and using an OO design, in fact the system is designed to by dynamic and OO. Have you ever seen an OS where a driver could inherit functionality from another driver - with Darwin this is possible.

Re:Pressure from APPLE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes - amiga. 1986. In fact, the Amiga was a whole lot better than Unix and Windoze at many things. Except memory protection. Oops.

Re:Pressure from APPLE?

[Asmodai]

Not to mention there's a lot of synergy between both Apple and us BSD developers.

Robert Watson and his TrustedBSD project has even got commit access on the Darwin tree.

Scott Long and myself have for UDF some contact with some Apple people.

Just because it is not visible to the general public doesn't mean that it is not there.

Re:Pressure from APPLE?

[ErikZ]

Oh dear god, a driver can inherit all the crap of another buggy driver?

Re:Pressure from APPLE?

[usr122122121]

By my calculations, Darwin is using FreeBSD 4.4.

Re:Pressure from APPLE?

[Van Halen]

Actually, that's 4.4BSD, which is most certainly not the same as FreeBSD 4.4. Apple says the FreeBSD part of Darwin is derived from FreeBSD 3.2.

Re:Pressure from APPLE?

[usr122122121]

whoops!
that sure does put a twist on it.
thanks for the correction.

Re:Pressure from APPLE?

[Anonymous Coward]

The reality is that the BSD software landscape is best characterized as a barren wasteland. BSD software is mostly hand-me-downs from other projects, the crumbs off others' tables. The pointis that no major software emanates from FreeBSD - none.

Gnome, KDE, Samba, Wine, etc., all of these were started by the Linux community. They are at their heart Linux software. Hey, even FreeBSD had to switch their object file format because Linux did. BSD object files were dropped by the GCC project. Oh and Red Hat owns GCC now since buying out Cygnus. You know it. I know it. Deal with it.

Re:troll says...

[Anonymous Coward]

Vlukrum beeble boing. Yibbij smoo?

Re:Hard times for *BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Suggest you make the first "Microsoft Linux" distro if running Oracle is what matters to you.

amen...

[Anonymous Coward]

"...why the lack of enthusiasm"

Or rather...

"...If I keep clicking, why doesn't something cool happen?

Repeat after me...
"Nothing gives me more enthusiasm in less time than a locked-down, minimal, X-less BSD server!"

Re:amen...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a *BSD user
and I try hard to be brave
That is a tall order
*BSD's foot is in the grave.

I tap at mytoy keyboard
and whistle a cheerful tune
but keeping happy is so hard,
*BSD will be dead son.

Each day I wake and softly sob
Nightfall finds me crying
Not only am I a zit fced slob
but *BSD is dying.

enthusiasm for...

[Anonymous Coward]

"...why the lack of enthusiasm"

Or rather...

"...If I keep clicking, why doesn't something cool happen?

Repeat after me...
"Nothing gives me more enthusiasm in less time than a locked-down, minimal, X-less BSD server!"

Thank you, Jordan

[benedict]

I don't know if you're reading this, but if you are,
I just want to say: thank you.

Well, NO thanks Jordan

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeps! That's it!

Haiku for Mod Bombing

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Don't you love it, when someone comes along and mod bombs 4 of your comments all at once?

With overrated, no less. Cheap shot. I think I'll write another haiku about it.

Crack smoke wafts through air
Humorless moderator
Why do you hate me?

freebsd has died

[Anonymous Coward]

It is with great sadness that I bring you this news: *BSD is dead.

It was at 4:25am on the morning of April 15th 2002 that, after many failed attempts to resuscitate the dying OS, *BSD finally passed away. While *BSD has been in it's death throes for many months now and it's death has been foreseen for many years, this is still a very sad moment; a great loss for OS dilettante dabblers and *BSD lovers the world over. Though *BSD has passed away, it will surely be fondly remembered for years to come by users, developers, and trolls alike. Even if you didn't enjoy using *BSD, there's no denying it's contributions to popular OS culture. Truly a Berkeley icon. It will be missed :(

Re:BSD + Apple = ANOTHER M$

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't you guys thought about it! Another money driven piece of shit.

Just as I suspected

[ahde]

He's probably gone over to work with those commie satanists

Re:More confirmation: *BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

ac writes:

Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along.

Even if BSD dies it doesn't mean that it wasn't used at one time. Things do change, you know.

BSD + Apple == ANOTHER form of M$

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why it's my great pleasure to inform you that:

It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers.
Coming on the heels of a recent 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 fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] [amdest.com] 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 dilettante 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 dying

See, I told you!

[Anonymous Coward]

ROFL!! See, I told you LAMERS!! *BSD IS DEAD!! HaHa!

BSD+APPLE==another form of M$

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD combined with APPLE=Another form of M$! Makes me wanna puke!!

vmware2 is no longer available

[Anonymous Coward]

vmware2 is no longer available

vmware3 doesn't run on freebsd :(

Re:vmware2 is no longer available

[Anonymous Coward]

It's available, but not from vmware.com. Just make the port, and it's all there. :)

HOMOSEXUALS fancy Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Homosexuals fancy Apple's design shit. Fag Mac.

Is he related to Mother Hubbard?

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh, of course - it's his mom!

HOMOSEXUALS fancy APPLE

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a commonly known fact that HOMOSEXUALS like Apple's design stuff shit.

Good news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good news? Are you fucking out of your mind?

*BSD FUNERALS

[Anonymous Coward]

I will arrange *BSD funerals in near future. You will be informed about the URL address later.

Rats are jumping ship

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've been around the corporate dot com world, you know the wheels are the first to take a powder. When the wheels start leaping, you know the ship is sinking.

No, he's related to one legged prostitute!!

[Anonymous Coward]

YEEPPEE!! JIIHAA!! BSD goes to hell now... let's have funerals!!

I'm an Apple user

[Anonymous Coward]

..and I really couldn't care less about this *BSD shit. As far as I am concerned, *BSD can go to hell as long as I have my beautiful OS X.

Re:I'm an Apple user

[Xiphius]

You do care, else you didn't respond to this...

Leave Linus out of this!

[Anonymous Coward]

Leave Linus out of this, you fucker! He's too nice of a guy...

Leave Linus and Cox out of this!

[Anonymous Coward]

This has nothing to do with Linus of Cox. This is a MAJOR drawback for *BSD development. You can argue, but I know how things are. I have talked with Jordan.

Linux vs FreeBSD...

[cbr372]

I used to be a big Linux advocate, unfortuantely it seems that Linux has been becoming more and more unstable. The hundreds of different distributions of Linux all have their pros and cons, but there is no centralised package or ports system. Want a package for Linux ? Ok, cool - DEB, RPM? RPM? That's the most popular. But don't try using a Mandrake RPM or a SuSE RPM on RedHat.

Linux has given up its usefulness for graphical installers and Windowesque gimmicks. The code bloat is unbelievable. Unless you roll out your own distribution or use a minimalist distribution like Slackware, the default installs for RedHat, Mandrake, etc are huge, Windows-like monstrosities.

So what?, I hear you say. Linux is stable and secure. Wrong again. The Lion worm proved that Linux is not as secure as one might believe. The fact that VMs get changed in the middle of a stable release branch (2.4.x) shows bad organization.

It took Linux years to overcome its awful filesystem problems, and now journalling filesystems are available. But speedwise, compared to the FreeBSD FFS, they are slow and cumbersome, and have yet to prove as reliable. FFS Softlinks are a few generations ahead of any journalling filesystem on the market.

FreeBSD is far better organized, the ports and packages collections are better synced and more reliable, the system is more stable and easier to understand. The firewall included with FreeBSD has been proven and has a far better track record than ipchains or iptables, the latter having security problems in its first week or release, the former having no stately inspection and being a complete mess due to its shell-script bound layout.

But Linux has more software than FreeBSD!, scream the Linux die-hards. What they fail to realize is that 99% of Linux software runs under FreeBSD. I haven't encountered a Linux program that didn't run under FreeBSD. Sure, I've heard reports by trolls that certain software doesn't work, but all the software I've tried works, in fact, even faster than the native Linux versions in most cases. To the VMWare troll: Yes, VMWare does work under FreeBSD.

FreeBSD vs Linux is a debate that won't ever be settled, but people who have used both generally prefer FreeBSD for mission-critical tasks. Those who claim that FreeBSD performs worse than Linux either haven't used FreeBSD or are trolls.

I won't say that FreeBSD is the best Unix variant on the market, but the best open source Unix variant? Yes. Solaris is still tops, but in terms of Free (Open Source) systems, FreeBSD is probably the best all-rounder. NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux all have their respective places, but overall, FreeBSD will probably take over most of the open source server market, at least in organizations with serious management.

Re:Linux vs FreeBSD...

[Combuchan]

Nugget's Law: 5% of the time when a Linux user says "Linux" they really mean "Unix". The other 5% of the time they're referring to an aspect that only applies to their particular distribution.

Nuff said.

Re:Linux vs FreeBSD...

[Combuchan]

Make that 95% of the time when a Linux user says "Linux" they really mean "Unix". The other 5% of the time they're referring to an aspect that only applies to their particular distribution.

I can't win.

Re:Linux vs FreeBSD...

[Pengo]

Hmm.. I will use our company as an example.

We have 10 load balanced Java based app servers. Each one is a dual processor system. I have tried running our software with BSD's native Java platform and frankly it sucked. I am not trolling, I am not anything.. but the performance was almost 1/3 of what I could get on Linux with IBM's JDK. And if your suggestion to that issue is run in Linux compatibility mode, your smoking crack.

Even compared to Solaris, we get more bang for the buck out of our little linux machines. Especially since IBM's JDK is SOO damn fast.

You make it sound like Linux has no place, and anywhere you might use Linux, you should only use FreeBSD. Thats frankly untrue. We have 10 servers that are running Debian and they have had almost 0 problems (Other than loosing the hard disk on one of them).

We use an OpenBSD box as our firewall. I don't think I would trust FreeBSD for that either ;-).

Cheers

Re:Linux vs FreeBSD...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're using an OS based on a poor design such as UNIX on a firewall, well, you're not much in the know-how.

Re:Linux vs FreeBSD...

[Anonymous Coward]

> That's the most popular. But don't try using a Mandrake RPM or a SuSE RPM on RedHat.

Well, I did. And the app didn't break apart either. Some people like to put things in the place _they_ like. I just stick to one distribution, problem solved.

>the default installs for RedHat, Mandrake, etc are huge, Windows-like monstrosities.

Some of them do, Redhat install is ok if you choose basic install. I choose Debian. Graphical, easy to install did attract people. I didn't like it either, this is another non-issue.

>So what?, I hear you say. Linux is stable and secure. Wrong again. The Lion worm proved that Linux is not as secure as one might believe.

Lion worm exploits __BSD__ BIND. We all know that security and stability of O/S tooks years to achieve. In fact, the first internet worm infect BSD machines mail system. Grow up.

>It took Linux years to overcome its awful filesystem problems

What awful filesystem problems?

>But speedwise, compared to the FreeBSD FFS, they are slow and cumbersome, and have yet to prove as reliable.

http://www.samag.com/documents/s=1147/sam0108q/0 10 8q.htm
They have proved it otherwise, show me yours.

>the former having no stately inspection and being a complete mess due to its shell-script bound layout.

You sounds like MS, afraid of competition.

>in fact, even faster than the native Linux versions in most cases.

In fact you have zero proof whatsoever.

>Those who claim that FreeBSD performs worse than Linux either haven't used FreeBSD or are trolls.

You are a troll, hardly insightful.

Re:Linux vs FreeBSD...

[essdodson]

Power to the cows!
Moo!

Re:Linux vs FreeBSD...

[essdodson]

FreeBSD is still lacking a native Sun JDK platform licensed from Sun. Which Java platform are you talking about? There are other VMs available btw.

Java is one of very few points where FreeBSD is lacking, if your company is based around Java then use whichever tool you find to be best, more than likely it won't be FreeBSD. For most tasks FreeBSD performs near the top of open source operating systems.

Re:Linux vs FreeBSD...

[mvw]

We have 10 load balanced Java based app servers. Each one is a dual processor system. I have tried running our software with BSD's native Java platform and frankly it sucked. Which native JDK version did you compare to what Linux native JDK version?

Of course it makes only sense to compare 1.3.x with 1.3.x, 1.4.x with 1.4.x and so on. This is because Java VM implementation evolved greatly.

I built a dual P4-2,2 GHz FreeBSD 4.5-STABLE system last week, and it performed very good (it even made use of the hyperthreading, there were 4 virtual CPUs).

I am not trolling, I am not anything.. but the performance was almost 1/3 of what I could get on Linux with IBM's JDK.

I'm pretty sure you are not comparing the same Java JDK version.

And if your suggestion to that issue is run in Linux compatibility mode, your smoking crack. Why? Linux compatibility mode is just a different instructuion decode/execution mode of the kernel, each system call is translated into a FreeBSD kernel system call, the libs that are used are original Red Hat libs. That is why I was able to run the Linux 1.3.1 JDK on the dual box.

However the Linux ABI support is not 100%, I had a problem running the Versant OODB. Acting as client to other OODB nodes was no problem, but acting as server failed not because the database service daemon didn't run (it seemed to work fine) but because on administration tool which is used to create new database files barfed on a file locking issue (the call complained about a wrong argument). I had no time to resolve it, but with a bit of help, this should have been solved with a few mail exchanges with the Linux emulation port maintainer. Linux Java SDK 1.4 didn't work too. I guess will not be fixed until someone with a need for it and debugging capabilities will hunt the issue down.

In general it is more useful to built a native Java SDK. You should be able to built the 1.3.1 SDK, after you got the sources from Sun and the diffs from the FreeBSD Java project. This hassle is due to Sun's prohibition of self rolled binary releases. The legal problem was reported to have been resolved, but it has not led to a binary release yet.

Even compared to Solaris, we get more bang for the buck out of our little linux machines. Especially since IBM's JDK is SOO damn fast.

The fastest one should be Sun's 1.4.0 release. Especially for Swing clients under X11, where they stopped moving bitmaps around instead of drawing commands.

Note that I answered this despite I think that you are a troll. :)

Re:Linux vs FreeBSD...

[Anonymous Coward]

Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying

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

Re:Linux vs FreeBSD...

[Pengo]

The fastest one should be Sun's 1.4.0 release. Especially for Swing clients under X11, where they stopped moving bitmaps around instead of drawing commands.

Note that I answered this despite I think that you are a troll. :)

Hehe, on Linux w/IBM JDK 1.3.1 it still performed (our application, servlets) almost 25% faster than the latest Sun version 1.4.

I am not trolling, just reporting our usage. Take it for what it is. As for performance on a 2x2.2ghz machine, no doubt anything you run it will seem quick :)

Cheers

Re:Linux vs FreeBSD...

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, i'm stashing this blurb to my local disk.

thanks for the text, seriously.

BSD emulates Linux

[AHumbleOpinion]

I see very little projects from the FreeBSD community

BSD emulates linux. A common suggestion from experienced BSD tool developers is to create a linux binary so you can target both BSD and Linux. If performance becomes an issue then consider adding a native BSD binary.

Re:BSD emulates Linux

[AntiBasic]

It doesn't EMULATE anything:
1) Most "Linux software" isn't "Linux software" but "Unix software" and compiles and runs on FreeBSD just fine.
2) FreeBSD has Linux BINARY support, so if the source isn't available (StarOffice, VMWare, etc) you can still run your choice of programs. It doesn't do this via "emulation" but by translating Linux syscalls into FreeBSD syscalls where everything is executed natively.
3) It would be _more_ accurate to say that FreeBSD emulates Linux as opposed to "emulating Linux software", but it's still wrong (See #2.)

I don't belive all this trolling!

[theolein]

I've come to respect the /. system of open moderation and I ask myself why these trolls are still at 0?

As for *BSD, from what I gather OpenBSD is still the only OS that can claim no remote vulnerabilities with the standard distro over four years. If there was ever a reason to use it as a firewall/gateway/router this should be it. I don't know much about FreeBSD and NetBSD except for Theo de Raadt's rant's about IP, but I like the OpenBSD attitude: They don't seem to see themselves in competition with any OS, they take their time to review the code and release a solid OS. On top of this they have a definite plus in terms of not being developed in the US and therefore not being subject to US export restrictions.

Trolls don't die

[Ilan Volow]

They turn into stone. Didn't you read the hobbit?

Could it be.....SATAN?

[Ilan Volow]

Jordan hubbard resigns. Sounds like the work of the devil to me.

Linux has better ports system than FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeap, you read it right. Gentoo Linux has got more advanced ports system (called Portage) than FreeBSD. Many *BSD users are switching to Gentoo.

He's resigning - or is he?

[Ed Avis]

Obviously what will happen now is that Jordan Hubbard will purchase a fleet of ships, give himself the rank of commodore and set up a mysterious 'BSD Organization' sailing around the globe.

I'm not a troll, not yet a linuxuser!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sad thing for FreeBSD. Seems it's getting worse...

BSD can prove now how well it is organized

[Baki]

And I'm confident that FreeBSD shall prove this.

We FreeBSD users have always claimed that one of the big edges FreeBSD has over Linux, is that it is not a one man show. Linux will have a hard time and is in risk of fragmentation when Linus leaves Linux development. FreeBSD, much better organized, is not in such danger.

The first test when JKH stepped down as president and became a mere core member has been very succesful. Now is the next stage where the original 'leader' kind of leaves the project. Now FreeBSD can show that it is indestructible and not in any way dependant on a single person.

no!

[hawk]

>Most of what you think of as linux, is GNU software.

People keep repeating this, but it just isn't true.

When people say or refer to "linux," they sometimes mean the kernel, and they sometimes mean the entire usable distribution. This includes the gnu utilities in all of the "working" distributions I know about save tomsrtbt (which, oddly, has started calling itself GNU/Linux). Important as those tools are, they're still a minority of what is thought of as "linux". X, sendmail, Perl, and others are larger than the GNU portion. A machine with just the Linux kernel and GNU software would be pretty close to useless for most purposes.

GNU software is significant--but it's hardly the bulk of what people mean by "linux"

>Will the next version claim that BSD has no keyboard support or shell prompt?

sure; it's supported keyboardless systems for years :)

hawk

Because it's easy.

[br0ken by design]

What gives?

BSD is prime troll material simply because you can write something like
"BSD is dying! Linux is technically superior because of [...make something up...]"
and you'll actually get replies and up mods!

The reason is simple, BSD users reply because they can't ignore the troll, and linux users mod up the troll because they are basically clueless about BSD and they know in their heart that nothing is , or will ever be, as good as linux, the One True OS.
All this adds up to a lot of BSD trolls.

Trolling linux users used to be that easy (see MEEPT!!), but they slowly (very slowly) they picked up on it and now it's a lot harder, and requires a well crafted and complex troll.

Hope this clarifies things.

Re:Because it's easy.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny, if only Linux were an OS. Linux == a Kernel, and nothing more! Less work to be done on just a kernel, than a whole OS.

FreeBSD over Linux, yeah baby!

[Anonymous Coward]

For about the past year I've been running my two Internet servers, one as FreeBSD and the other as Linux, on identical hardware - old Compaq Proliant 5000 rackmounts with hardware raid. I've had occasional troubles from the Linux box, memory leaks and having to do periodic reboots just to clear out the swap space.... nothing like the instability of a Microsloth system, but my FreeBSD box is now reporting an uptime of 337 days!!! This weekend, I'm bringing down the Linux box to migrate to FreeBSD. Nuff said.

Re:FreeBSD over Linux, yeah baby!

[deep13]

Right on!... We went through the same operation at a previous employer. We were running RedHat but for some reason the netkit rpm changed the syntax for ping (WTF?). I got pissed because this broke BigBrother (monitoring software http://bb4.com) Around this same time we had to do 2 kernel patches in one week on all of our RedHat servers (I forget the details but they were both security related). At one point three of the four sysadmins said "FUCK IT... this crap would never happen with BSD". We upgraded and all was, frankly, great from then on.

Re:FreeBSD over Linux, yeah baby!

[satanami69]

I got pissed because this broke BigBrother
You should use netsaint:
Category net
netsaint-0.0.7,1
Extremely powerful network monitoring system
Maintained by: blaz@si.FreeBSD.org
Requires: freetype2-2.0.9, gd-1.8.4_6, jpeg-6b_1, libgnugetopt-1.1, netsaint-plugins-1.2.9.4, png-1.2.2
Description : Sources : Changes : Download

Linux has been becoming more and more unstable

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to be a big Linux advocate, unfortuantely it seems that Linux has been becoming more and more unstable. The hundreds of different distributions of Linux all have their pros and cons, but there is no centralised package or ports system. Want a package for Linux ? Ok, cool - DEB, RPM? RPM? That's the most popular. But don't try using a Mandrake RPM or a SuSE RPM on RedHat.

Linux has given up its usefulness for graphical installers and Windowesque gimmicks. The code bloat is unbelievable. Unless you roll out your own distribution or use a minimalist distribution like Slackware, the default installs for RedHat, Mandrake, etc are huge, Windows-like monstrosities.

So what?, I hear you say. Linux is stable and secure. Wrong again. The Lion worm proved that Linux is not as secure as one might believe. The fact that VMs get changed in the middle of a stable release branch (2.4.x) shows bad organization.

It took Linux years to overcome its awful filesystem problems, and now journalling filesystems are available. But speedwise, compared to the FreeBSD FFS, they are slow and cumbersome, and have yet to prove as reliable. FFS Softlinks are a few generations ahead of any journalling filesystem on the market.

FreeBSD is far better organized, the ports and packages collections are better synced and more reliable, the system is more stable and easier to understand. The firewall included with FreeBSD has been proven and has a far better track record than ipchains or iptables, the latter having security problems in its first week or release, the former having no stately inspection and being a complete mess due to its shell-script bound layout.

But Linux has more software than FreeBSD!, scream the Linux die-hards. What they fail to realize is that 99% of Linux software runs under FreeBSD. I haven't encountered a Linux program that didn't run under FreeBSD. Sure, I've heard reports by trolls that certain software doesn't work, but all the software I've tried works, in fact, even faster than the native Linux versions in most cases. To the VMWare troll: Yes, VMWare does work under FreeBSD.

FreeBSD vs Linux is a debate that won't ever be settled, but people who have used both generally prefer FreeBSD for mission-critical tasks. Those who claim that FreeBSD performs worse than Linux either haven't used FreeBSD or are trolls.

I won't say that FreeBSD is the best Unix variant on the market, but the best open source Unix variant? Yes. Solaris is still tops, but in terms of Free (Open Source) systems, FreeBSD is probably the best all-rounder. NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux all have their respective places, but overall, FreeBSD will probably take over most of the open source server market, at least in organizations with serious management.

Linux has been becoming more and more unstable

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to be a big Linux advocate, unfortuantely it seems that Linux has been becoming more and more unstable. The hundreds of different distributions of Linux all have their pros and cons, but there is no centralised package or ports system. Want a package for Linux ? Ok, cool - DEB, RPM? RPM? That's the most popular. But don't try using a Mandrake RPM or a SuSE RPM on RedHat.

Linux has given up its usefulness for graphical installers and Windowesque gimmicks. The code bloat is unbelievable. Unless you roll out your own distribution or use a minimalist distribution like Slackware, the default installs for RedHat, Mandrake, etc are huge, Windows-like monstrosities.

So what?, I hear you say. Linux is stable and secure. Wrong again. The Lion worm proved that Linux is not as secure as one might believe. The fact that VMs get changed in the middle of a stable release branch (2.4.x) shows bad organization.

It took Linux years to overcome its awful filesystem problems, and now journalling filesystems are available. But speedwise, compared to the FreeBSD FFS, they are slow and cumbersome, and have yet to prove as reliable. FFS Softlinks are a few generations ahead of any journalling filesystem on the market.

FreeBSD is far better organized, the ports and packages collections are better synced and more reliable, the system is more stable and easier to understand. The firewall included with FreeBSD has been proven and has a far better track record than ipchains or iptables, the latter having security problems in its first week or release, the former having no stately inspection and being a complete mess due to its shell-script bound layout.

But Linux has more software than FreeBSD!, scream the Linux die-hards. What they fail to realize is that 99% of Linux software runs under FreeBSD. I haven't encountered a Linux program that didn't run under FreeBSD. Sure, I've heard reports by trolls that certain software doesn't work, but all the software I've tried works, in fact, even faster than the native Linux versions in most cases. To the VMWare troll: Yes, VMWare does work under FreeBSD.

FreeBSD vs Linux is a debate that won't ever be settled, but people who have used both generally prefer FreeBSD for mission-critical tasks. Those who claim that FreeBSD performs worse than Linux either haven't used FreeBSD or are trolls.

I won't say that FreeBSD is the best Unix variant on the market, but the best open source Unix variant? Yes. Solaris is still tops, but in terms of Free (Open Source) systems, FreeBSD is probably the best all-rounder. NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux all have their respective places, but overall, FreeBSD will probably take over most of the open source server market, at least in organizations with serious management.

Linux is becoming *more* and *more* unstable

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to be a big Linux advocate, unfortuantely it seems that Linux has been becoming more and more unstable.

The hundreds of different distributions of Linux all have their pros and cons, but there is no centralised package or ports system. Want a package for Linux ? Ok, cool - DEB, RPM? RPM? That's the most popular. But don't try using a Mandrake RPM or a SuSE RPM on RedHat.

Linux has given up its usefulness for graphical installers and Windowesque gimmicks. The code bloat is unbelievable. Unless you roll out your own distribution or use a minimalist distribution like Slackware, the default installs for RedHat, Mandrake, etc are huge, Windows-like monstrosities.

So what?, I hear you say. Linux is stable and secure. Wrong again. The Lion worm proved that Linux is not as secure as one might believe. The fact that VMs get changed in the middle of a stable release branch (2.4.x) shows bad organization.

It took Linux years to overcome its awful filesystem problems, and now journalling filesystems are available. But speedwise, compared to the FreeBSD FFS, they are slow and cumbersome, and have yet to prove as reliable. FFS Softlinks are a few generations ahead of any journalling filesystem on the market.

FreeBSD is far better organized, the ports and packages collections are better synced and more reliable, the system is more stable and easier to understand. The firewall included with FreeBSD has been proven and has a far better track record than ipchains or iptables, the latter having security problems in its first week or release, the former having no stately inspection and being a complete mess due to its shell-script bound layout.

But Linux has more software than FreeBSD!, scream the Linux die-hards. What they fail to realize is that 99% of Linux software runs under FreeBSD. I haven't encountered a Linux program that didn't run under FreeBSD. Sure, I've heard reports by trolls that certain software doesn't work, but all the software I've tried works, in fact, even faster than the native Linux versions in most cases. To the VMWare troll: Yes, VMWare does work under FreeBSD.

FreeBSD vs Linux is a debate that won't ever be settled, but people who have used both generally prefer FreeBSD for mission-critical tasks. Those who claim that FreeBSD performs worse than Linux either haven't used FreeBSD or are trolls.

I won't say that FreeBSD is the best Unix variant on the market, but the best open source Unix variant? Yes. Solaris is still tops, but in terms of Free (Open Source) systems, FreeBSD is probably the best all-rounder. NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux all have their respective places, but overall, FreeBSD will probably take over most of the open source server market, at least in organizations with serious management.

Hard Times for *BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, we all know that *BSD is a failure, but why? Why did *BSD fail? Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all knw *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities?

The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting glom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the endtime for *BSD.

Linux is becoming more and *more* unstable

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to be a big Linux advocate, unfortunately it seems that Linux has been becoming more and more unstable. The hundreds of different distributions of Linux all have their pros and cons, but there is no centralised package or ports system. Want a package for Linux ? Ok, cool - DEB, RPM? RPM? That's the most popular. But don't try using a Mandrake RPM or a SuSE RPM on RedHat.

Linux has given up its usefulness for graphical installers and Windowesque gimmicks. The code bloat is unbelievable. Unless you roll out your own distribution or use a minimalist distribution like Slackware, the default installs for RedHat, Mandrake, etc are huge, Windows-like monstrosities.

So what?, I hear you say. Linux is stable and secure. Wrong again. The Lion worm proved that Linux is not as secure as one might believe. The fact that VMs get changed in the middle of a stable release branch (2.4.x) shows bad organization.

It took Linux years to overcome its awful filesystem problems, and now journalling filesystems are available. But speedwise, compared to the FreeBSD FFS, they are slow and cumbersome, and have yet to prove as reliable. FFS Softlinks are a few generations ahead of any journalling filesystem on the market.

FreeBSD is far better organized, the ports and packages collections are better synced and more reliable, the system is more stable and easier to understand.

The firewall included with FreeBSD has been proven and has a far better track record than ipchains or iptables, the latter having security problems in its first week or release, the former having no stately inspection and being a complete mess due to its shell-script bound layout.

But Linux has more software than FreeBSD!, scream the Linux die-hards. What they fail to realize is that 99% of Linux software runs under FreeBSD. I haven't encountered a Linux program that didn't run under FreeBSD. Sure, I've heard reports by trolls that certain software doesn't work, but all the software I've tried works, in fact, even faster than the native Linux versions in most cases. To the VMWare troll: Yes, VMWare does work under FreeBSD.

FreeBSD vs Linux is a debate that won't ever be settled, but people who have used both generally prefer FreeBSD for mission-critical tasks. Those who claim that FreeBSD performs worse than Linux either haven't used FreeBSD or are trolls.

I won't say that FreeBSD is the best Unix variant on the market, but the best open source Unix variant? Yes. Solaris is still tops, but in terms of Free (Open Source) systems, FreeBSD is probably the best all-rounder. NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux all have their respective places, but overall, FreeBSD will probably take over most of the open source server market, at least in organizations with serious management.

Linux is becoming more and more unstable

[Anonymous Coward]

Muthafucka, I used to be a big Linux advocate, unfortuantely it seems that Linux has been becoming more and more unstable. The hundreds of different distributions of Linux all have their pros and cons, but there is no centralised package or ports system. Want a package for Linux ? Ok, cool - DEB, RPM? RPM? That's the most popular. But don't try using a Mandrake RPM or a SuSE RPM on RedHat.

Linux has given up its usefulness for graphical installers and Windowesque gimmicks. The code bloat is unbelievable. Unless you roll out your own distribution or use a minimalist distribution like Slackware, the default installs for RedHat, Mandrake, etc are huge, Windows-like monstrosities.

So what?, I hear you say. Linux is stable and secure. Wrong again. The Lion worm proved that Linux is not as secure as one might believe. The fact that VMs get changed in the middle of a stable release branch (2.4.x) shows bad organization.

It took Linux years to overcome its awful filesystem problems, and now journalling filesystems are available. But speedwise, compared to the FreeBSD FFS, they are slow and cumbersome, and have yet to prove as reliable. FFS Softlinks are a few generations ahead of any journalling filesystem on the market.

FreeBSD is far better organized, the ports and packages collections are better synced and more reliable, the system is more stable and easier to understand.

The firewall included with FreeBSD has been proven and has a far better track record than ipchains or iptables, the latter having security problems in its first week or release, the former having no stately inspection and being a complete mess due to its shell-script bound layout.

But Linux has more software than FreeBSD!, scream the Linux die-hards. What they fail to realize is that 99% of Linux software runs under FreeBSD. I haven't encountered a Linux program that didn't run under FreeBSD. Sure, I've heard reports by trolls that certain software doesn't work, but all the software I've tried works, in fact, even faster than the native Linux versions in most cases. To the VMWare troll: Yes, VMWare does work under FreeBSD.

FreeBSD vs Linux is a debate that won't ever be settled, but people who have used both generally prefer FreeBSD for mission-critical tasks. Those who claim that FreeBSD performs worse than Linux either haven't used FreeBSD or are trolls.

I won't say that FreeBSD is the best Unix variant on the market, but the best open source Unix variant? Yes. Solaris is still tops, but in terms of Free (Open Source) systems, FreeBSD is probably the best all-rounder. NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux all have their respective places, but overall, FreeBSD will probably take over most of the open source server market, at least in organizations with serious management.

Re:More confirmation: *BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not forget that BSD software is mostly hand-me-downs from other projects. The pointis that no major software emanates from FreeBSD - none.

Gnome, KDE, Samba, Wine, etc., all of these were started by the Linux community. They are at their heart Linux software. Hey, even FreeBSD had tswitch their object file format because Linux did. BSD object files were dropped by the GCC project. Oh and Red Hat owns GCC now since buying out Cygnus. You know it. I know it. Deal with it.

Linux is becoming more and more unstable

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to be a big Linux advocate, unfortunately it seems that Linux has been becoming more and more unstable. The hundreds of different distributions of Linux all have their pros and cons, but there is no centralised package or ports system. Want a package for Linux ? Ok, cool - DEB, RPM? RPM? That's the most popular. But don't try using a Mandrake RPM or a SuSE RPM on RedHat.

Linux has given up its usefulness for graphical installers and Windowesque gimmicks. The code bloat is unbelievable. Unless you roll out your own distribution or use a minimalist distribution like Slackware, the default installs for RedHat, Mandrake, etc are huge, Windows-like monstrosities.

So what?, I hear you say. Linux is stable and secure. Wrong again. The Lion worm proved that Linux is not as secure as one might believe. The fact that VMs get changed in the middle of a stable release branch (2.4.x) shows bad organization.

It took Linux years to overcome its awful filesystem problems, and now journalling filesystems are available. But speedwise, compared to the FreeBSD FFS, they are slow and cumbersome, and have yet to prove as reliable. FFS Softlinks are a few generations ahead of any journalling filesystem on the market.

FreeBSD is far better organized, the ports and packages collections are better synced and more reliable, the system is more stable and easier to understand.

The firewall included with FreeBSD has been proven and has a far better track record than ipchains or iptables, the latter having security problems in its first week or release, the former having no stately inspection and being a complete mess due to its shell-script bound layout.

But Linux has more software than FreeBSD!, scream the Linux die-hards. What they fail to realize is that 99% of Linux software runs under FreeBSD. I haven't encountered a Linux program that didn't run under FreeBSD. Sure, I've heard reports by trolls that certain software doesn't work, but all the software I've tried works, in fact, even faster than the native Linux versions in most cases. To the VMWare troll: Yes, VMWare does work under FreeBSD.

FreeBSD vs Linux is a debate that won't ever be settled, but people who have used both generally prefer FreeBSD for mission-critical tasks. Those who claim that FreeBSD performs worse than Linux either haven't used FreeBSD or are trolls.

I won't say that FreeBSD is the best Unix variant on the market, but the best open source Unix variant? Yes. Solaris is still tops, but in terms of Free (Open Source) systems, FreeBSD is probably the best all-rounder. NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux all have their respective places, but overall, FreeBSD will probably take over most of the open source server market, at least in organizations with serious management.

Thanks for your efforts!

[freebsddude]

Jordan: This is a sad day for the FreeBSD community. Nonetheless, thanks for your help, committment, and dedication for the FreeBSD cause. FreeBSD has come a long way, with your help, and is one of the best free, open-source, all around BSD! Good luck and best wishes with all your future endeavors.

Having said that, I personally believe that the responsibility to move forward, in general, lies not just on the FreeBSD core team, FreeBSD committers, contributers but also on the entire FreeBSD user community/base! We need to be a team rather than a consumer since the product is open source. We all need to figure out how we can help it develop as our own asset!

Elegy for Jordan Hubbard

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a *BSD user
and Itry hard to be brave
That is a tall order
*BSD's foot is in the grave.

Itap at my toy keyboard
and whistle a cheerful tune
but keeping happy is so hard,
*BSD will be dead soon.

Each day I wake and softly sob
Nightfall finds me crying
Not only am I a zit faced slob
but *BSD is dying.

Re:Elegy for *BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a *BSD user
and I try hard to be brave
That is a tall order
*BSD's foot is in the grave.

I tap at my toy keyboard
and whistle a cheerful tune
but keeping happy is so hard,
*BSD will be dead soon.

Each day I wake and softly sob
Nightfall finds me crying
Not only am I a zit faced slob
but *BSD is dying.

Re:see .. BSD REALLY is DEAD

[Anonymous Coward]

News flash: *BSD is dead

Re:Hard times for *BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a *S user
and I try hard to be brave
That is a tall order
*BSD's foot is in the grave.

I tap at my toy keyboard
and whistle a cheerful tune
but keeping happy is so hard,
*BSD will be dead soon.

Each day I wake and softly sob
Nightfall finds me crying
Not only am I a zit faced slob
but *BSD is dying.

Re:Hard Times for *BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you want to post an article like that, you are responding to something you dont have a clue about. The article was about a team member resigning. READ IT, AND THINK BEFORE YOU TYPE

Too bad all that work was for nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying

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

My bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I meant to say GAY/Lunix.

:wq

please excuse my lack of knowledge on this...

[Anonymous Coward]

but, what exactly is the difference between FreeBSD 3.2 and 4.4?

Also, what is the difference between BSD4.4 and FreeBSD 4.4?

Thanks...

Re:please excuse my lack of knowledge on this...

[Anonymous Coward]

but, what exactly is the difference between FreeBSD 3.2 and 4.4?

2 years.

Also, what is the difference between BSD4.4 and FreeBSD 4.4?

8 years
Two different organisations (pretty half-assed troll there bud. no hall-of-fame for you).

FreeBSD Java performance is very poor

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.
Unfortunately it is true.
FreeBSD Java performance is very poor, and the quote that says that Linux is 3 times faster is a bit over the top but yes 2 times faster is what I found too.

Linux smokes FreeBSD for now, unfortunately for Java usage.
When do we see a decent native JDK port on FreeBSD ?
I hope soon !!

Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine if Linux fragmented like the *BSDs...