FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE

Triumph The Insult C writes "FreeBSD 4.7 is out. Here is the announcement. New items include an option for IPFW2, a number of disk controller updates, security updates, and some changes to userland. Remember, please use a mirror." Among other things, the release announcement says: "FreeBSD 4.7 also incorporates all of the security and bug fixes from 4.6.2 (released in August 2002), including several ATA-related bugfixes, updates for OpenSSL and OpenSSH, and fixes to address several security advisories." And here are the release notes.

Comments

Re:What is the relevance of FreeBSD today?

[bugg]

it spawned the opensource movement

Revisionist history indeed. BSD (in the form of Unix patchkits) were available as "open source" when Linus was still in diapers.

Re:What is the relevance of FreeBSD today?

[mangu]

This prevents the FSF people from calling it "GNU/FreeBSD"

Amen to that, brother! I think this GNU/Linux thing has the highest irritation/benefit ratio in the computer community.

...a single 'make buildworld'...

How does that differ from a single 'make bzImage' in Linux?

linux can not compete with the level of customization that to which FreeBSD administrators have become acustomed

Perhaps, but is customization so necessary? Regardless of how easy or difficult it is, I have found that excessive kernel customization is more of a burden than a benefit. I used to recompile the kernel to my exact specs in the times of the 486DX2-66, but today I prefer to use whatever came with the distro. Much easier when I get one of those $9.99 webcams at the discount store, for instance, the corresponding module has usually been installed from the CD, no need to compile anything.

Like it or not, most corporations do not want to give away all of their work to their competitors if they ever decide to release a product that required modification to the OS.

I'm not a competitor, I'm a client. And I *ABSOLUTELY DEMAND* to get the source code!