The NetBSD Organization

A reader writes: "Stumbled across a nice article about how the NetBSD Project is organized and some interesting ways users can help out." Good stuff, for those who want to get involved.

Comments

The great divide:

[_Sambo]

Those who hate windows use Linux.

Those who love Unix use BSD.

Re:The great divide:

[DaBj]

Or as my friend whom I introduced to BSD put it
when looking into using Linux on his desktop:
"GNU's not Unix....it's Linux"

(I can hear RMS getting his panties in a twist already)

Re:The great divide:

[rutledjw]

There are other differences as well:

• SMP Support, FreeBSD is the ONLY one who has it
• Commercial vendor support. Oracle, IBM, Sun, etc support Linux. BSD support is IMPROVING, but not near the support Linux recieves.
• Let's face it, Linux IS easier. I use Slackware and so I'm in the configs (as opposed to wizards), but Linux still is easier for me. Do I just need to get off my @ss and learn BSD? Probably
• Better java support in Linux. I know the "j" word is dirty around here. Even so...
• This is going to sound TOTALLY dumb - Commercial vendor support. If my company can't buy support, the world will certianly end due to lack of it. Whatever...

That being said, I'm proposing FreeBSD for our web servers as a replacement for (are you ready for this?) Apache on Windows. The fall back is actually Linux/Apache, but I think from a security standpoint, BSD is probably the way to go.

It DOES mildly annoy me to see the original parent post. BSD folks seem usually mild-mannered towards others. But every now and then some jackass...

Re:The great divide:

[BadlandZ]

Liunx got it's foothold, just look at a Apache

Your kidding right? BSD has done more for me (and every IRIX user) as well as ever OsX user, Motorla user, etc.. than anyone else. I love OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD..

Look at the OpenBSD user base vs. the security contributions they put into Apache vs. the Linux user base vs. what help they gave Apache. Open BSD has done MORE per user that almost ANY OS on ANY project when it comes to security, espically Apache. The web wouldn't have a clue what security was if it were not for the likes of the OpenBSD guys. Don't even try to give me that shit....

BSD guys may not be the popular UNIX, or the gimme commy open source gods of the "Linus Linux" community. But take a history lesson.... GNU has made leaps and bounds into opening software to the general public. But what Open Source (GPL) has don, BSD has managed to keep the people with the money in the ball game. Where would GPL or GNU be without the BSD's of the world? How can you SERIOUSLY find fault with people who want to help and retain SOME profit? Are you such the communist you thing BSD is evil too now?

Organization chart

[Anonymous Coward]

lookie here

netbsd ...

[SuperDuG]

Whoa ... back to the wonders of the open source world where one thing is obviously better than the other, they can't both be ... *gasp* equally great *gasp* ...

Needless to say if anyone ever asks you a question of what runs NetBSD ... you can safely say more things than any other operating system. NetBSD runs on everything from a supercomputer to a dreamcast and everything in between. The most impressive things I've seen from NetBSD is the ability to get the OS running on anything that can process information and NFS ... second to none.

There are ninches for everything ... portability ... netbsd wins hands down.

From the article

[__past__]

For example, if a kernel developer makes a change that affects a utility then they normally just go ahead and make the change to the utility as well.

This innocent little sentence sums up one of the most important reasons to prefer BSD over GNU/Linux (or make that RedHat/GNU/Linux, SuSE/GNU/Linux...). It is really nice to have a coordinated group responsible for a complete, working system, instead of a distributor that merely duct-tapes together unrelated, each on their own incomplete, parts.

Why so many negative comments?

[core plexus]

I help out on some sites, and they all use Apache and freeBSD, and I've never had a problem. I believe it makes it less expensive for people to host on non-Microsoft servers, and having and open mind is important to keeping open software. If a fraction of the users of Microsoft and other commercial software spent a fraction of their time and effort (instead of downloading pr0n) to projects...well, who knows what could happen. A movement, perhaps?

Re:*BSD clusters?

[questionlp]

Nik Clayton of the FreeBSD project has a page with links to resources on clustering FreeBSD. Some of the links are dead, but the ones that work should give you enough information about clustering FreeBSD (and possibly other BSD operating systems).

It's probably not as elegant or as well known as Beowulf clustering, but it has been done :)

NetBSD!

[mackstann]

Damn, got here late, this story was posted while I was at work, and now probably no one will even see this comment :P

Some random thoughts:

I've run Linux for about a year and a few months, I've run Debian *only* for about a year, and recently I started running NetBSD on my desktop machine (yes, my desktop machine, not my server, router, or toaster). I don't see why people denounce the BSD's for desktop use. Mozilla runs, Xterm's run, irc clients run, Gaim runs, XMMS runs, MPlayer runs, damn, everything on my desktop runs :) For those that like KDE or Gnome, they run, in fact NetBSD had KDE 3 way before Debian ever did. So what's the fuss?

I moved from Linux to BSD for many reasons, BSD is much more tightly integrated. You don't get the "oh, that's Jim Bob Developer's fault, email him", etc. You don't get manual pages that state "This manual page is old and incomplete - please read the GNU info manual". Of course opinions differ, but I _like_ man pages. I don't like info manuals.

Another factor is the license and attitude of the community as far as licensing. I don't really like the GPL. Sure, in a perfect world, all software would be free, there would be no evil corporations, and everyone could sit around reading fine literature and hiking out in the mountains - BUT that's not going to happen. If people want to make a product and sell it, let them do it (as long as they're not breaking the law :)). If BSD wasn't around, alot of other operating systems would have gotten crappier TCP/IP stacks, OSX would probably be in much worse shape than it is (if it ever came to light at all), and many other things. So what if a vendor doesn't want to release their changes? They paid their people to write the code, let them have it. The original source will always be around.

BSD init is alot cleaner than Sys V init - no piles of symlinks with funny names - and NetBSD's rc.d system takes care of Sys V init-style init scripts (/etc/rc.d/named restart). In fact, NetBSD's rc.d system is being ported to FreeBSD.

ipf is, IMO, a hell of a lot nicer than IPTables.

The whole base system is consistant, well documented, well thought out, and easy to use as long as you know how to read. The userbase is *much* more intelligent and experienced, on average, however it is quite a bit smaller, than Linux's.

For software - there is pkgsrc, which is like Free/OpenBSD's ports system, or Gentoo's portage. pkgsrc is kept very up to date, I'm running Mozilla 1.2.1 from it right now.

As far as being a server or firewall/router, NetBSD runs any OSS Server stuff great, and I'm sure most Linux-only stuff would run fine under emulation.

Any other NetBSD users out there in the wasteland that is Slashdot? Speak up! :)