FreeBSD Development Status Report

jorhan writes "The FreeBSD Development Status Report covering February to April 2002 came out yesterday (May 18th). Finding it from the FreeBSD home page takes a few clicks, but here is a shortcut. With all of the noise about resigning core members and the upcoming core election, it's nice to see the real work just chugs along."

Comments

I know this will seem trollish, but:

[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 only stable BSD SMP implementation I have found but other than that the total lack of SMP is also VERY, VERY convenient [facetious]! BSD is coherent, it is the father of much good in the world (including real and legible MAN pages), 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 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 (who could not accept the fact that NeXT failed MISERABLY) 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 [I love Fire Wire, but its only now starting to appear on motherboards after USB 1 and even 2.0 have been on for a while], almost ZILCH compared to USB, also, try and find a NuBUS card, let alone a slot - interesting how PCI killed off ALL the Apple busses), 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.

I've tried so many operating systems to date, and I always found most BSD variants completely annoying to install, to deal with. I so like OpenBSD, and, even though it is a rip off, I like BSDI. The rest of the variants to me are lame excuses for Linux. Pain in the ass. Ports are ALWAYS out of date, the "package" system is a laugh, the use-ability of the operating system is FAR less, ESPECIALLY OUT OF THE BOX, than any other OS. That is the truth. Well, except some garbage commercial Unixes, but who expect anything from them. GNU + Linux needs to be improved upon or flat out BEATEN, not annoyed with these horse-fly-like fragmented binary-incompatible bomblets of a dead operating system hatched in the brialliant but CLEARLY DISTURBED foundries at BEZERKELY UNIVERSITY INC (c) . (SAYS Uncle Sam, "I WANT YOU, TO GET REAL")

Remember folks, UNIX vendors are killing 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 dog-pile, 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 Micro$0pht 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 garbage in IRIX is easily 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 it's 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.

Yep thanks to Apple, the de-facto "BSD" (BSD being used LOOSELY) implementation now consists almost entirely of closed source software (at least the useful user stuff, Darwin is UN-USEABLE unto itself - pathetic). 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!

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 won't be BSD dying as a troll, it will be UNIX having serious R

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 [samag.com] 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 [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

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.

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 mostly 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 ago. 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.