MicroBSD Is No More

ok, I'll bite... by Horny+Smurf · 2003-02-21 04:19 · Score: 1, Interesting

Given the nature of the BSD license (w/o the advertising clause), I fail to see how modifying the copyright notices is copyright infringement. The same for GPL, as long as the new code is still GPL.

Could someone enlighten me?

Disputes by RazzleDazzle · 2003-02-21 04:20 · Score: 2, Interesting

There are many disputes over this topic on the openbsd misc mailing list. The lead developer of MBSD, Outback Dingo, claims all modifications which violate the copyright were unintentionally done. There is fairly good circumstantial proof that it was intentional because of examples like:

where they state they are the developers of OpenSSH
where their sendbug command e-mails gnats@openbsd.org
man release..... "See http://www.openbsd.org/anoncvs.html for instructions on fetching the sources for the first time...."
I enabled Apache and much to my surprise the page had OpenBSD logo's with "MicroBSD" alt tags!

You get the idea. If you have the OS (I am sure it will be available somewhere, check the mirrors still) read '$man 1 banner' for a good laugh, from Miod Vallat

--
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)

Re:Disputes by c13v3rm0nk3y · 2003-02-21 06:47 · Score: 2, Interesting

I hate to split hairs, but running a global search and replace (which appears to not have been done, or done on a regular basis as they sucked more OBSD code in) is an intentional action. You have to know you are going to clobber some copyright strings that must remain untouched (to comply with the very terms of the copyright).
Even the OBSD folks keep the old NetBSD CVS tags in the code, and often keep the old comments in the header files, adding their own after them.
The reason for all the furor seems to be that there appears to be some amount of disingenuousness with the changes that were made.
OpenBSD has a very clear copyright policy and do regular license audits. I don't know if the MicroBSD people should be held up to the same standards or not, but the point many people are making is that the OpenBSD source is not in the public domain. Certainly some of it is, but not all.
I get the feeling that perhaps some of the MicroBSD people knew what they were doing all too well, while others didn't really consider the implications.
I mean, there were changes to source that were nothing but changes to the copyright string (the Pentium MTRR code, for example). Perhaps this can be attributed to a mindless global sed command. It's still pretty irresponsible.
Well, what would the OpenBSD project be without regular kerfuffles like this...

--
-- clvrmnky
Re:Disputes by Anonymous Coward · 2003-02-21 07:50 · Score: 1, Interesting

I worked with "Outback Dingo" in the past, and his best skills are at self-promotion and marketing--and his worst skills are undoubtedly technical. In two years as a "software architect," he made exactly zero changes to our company's code base, showed fundamental lack of understanding between BSD and GPL licenses, and constantly urged us to write "flamboyant code" and to give our product better "authentification" ability.
I don't doubt MicroBSD was well-intentioned, but he is simply not capable of pulling off a true new distribution, and it doesn't surprise me at all that he stepped on toes. It also bluntly wouldn't surprise me if his original hope had been to be able to sell MicroBSD without giving any direct credit to the work he used--something that the company we were both at was unfortunately very good at. (They still don't admit that their "internet gateway appliance" is a rackmount PC running FreeBSD unless they're forced to, and for a long time pretended that it was running its own OS entirely. IIRC, Outback Dingo said he was going to write an OS on his own to replace it, but that was one of those many projects he seemed to suffer mysterious hard drive failures on.)

Re:go to microbsd.net instead by photonrider · 2003-02-21 04:20 · Score: 5, Interesting

Rather than bail out completely I'd like to see them become part of the OpenBSD project and provide a slimmed down OpenBSD option. It was extremely promising to have OpenBSD features on a device with only a minimal RAM disk. It was poor judgement to replace the copyright info. It's good they've fessed up. The idea of a microbsd is still a good one.

a good start by Anonymous Coward · 2003-02-21 04:26 · Score: 3, Interesting

it's nice to see a failed project that is going nowhere admit it and give up. Unfortunately, sourceforge.net and savannah.gnu.org are full of many such projects that don't have teh good sense to throw in the towel.

Hat's off to you. Winners never quit, and quitters never lose, but if you never win and never quit, you're just stupid

Sad to see it go, really by Anonymous Coward · 2003-02-21 04:28 · Score: 5, Interesting

MicroBSD was an interesting project, and if we Slashdotters don't kill the server completely, it's interesting to look around. However, looking at the infighting and piss-taking on the mailing lists, it's still apparent that there BSD crowd makes problems for itselves.

Unfortunately there's too much of a "holier than thou" feeling amongst many BSD coders, but then again, getting rid of Matt Dillon (see earlier /. BSD story) won't help either. I want the BSDs to do well, but the community can be v. problematic...

Here's an example. After using Linux for several years, I gave FreeBSD a try and was very impressed by the solid kernel and coherent userland. There were a few things I couldn't fathom out though, like getting USB joysticks working, and asking on the mailing lists or similar forums always got the same kind of responses: "Go back to Linux if you want that", "FreeBSD is brill and doesn't need to support it" etc.

It's this zealotry, patronising attitude and belief that FreeBSD is the "one true OS" that is really damaging its acceptance. All OSes have their loudmouth advocates, but I've never seen anything like the hideous attitude that seems so common among FreeBSDers. And as said, it's all the more a shame because I was genuinely interested in the system and respected its good points.

And note that I specifically say FreeBSD - I've found that OpenBSD and NetBSD users realise that their OS isn't going to be ideal for all situations, and don't feel threatened by alternatives. It's the stuck-up FreeBSD zealots who think their OS is better than *everything* that are the real problem.

Re:Sad to see it go, really by TheRaven64 · 2003-02-21 05:17 · Score: 2, Interesting

belief that FreeBSD is the "one true OS"
But it is :)
"Go back to Linux if you want that"
Really, I haven't found this. I've encountered more of a 'Yeah, sorry, that's a bit of a bitch at the moment. There's some code in -CURRENT that does that, and it should be in -STABLE by the next release.' attitude on FreeBSD users. One question relating to a NIC was answered with a diff to patch an existing driver to work. I've never seen the likes of that in the Linux community. On the other hand I have seen 'Linux users shouldn't use crappy win-modems. We won't support them, and you shouldn't use them. Go back to Windows if you want to use hardware you actually own, or buy a new modem for 3-4x the price you paid for your current one to get Linux support'. My home machine dual boots FreeBSD and Win2k (should that be GNU/Windows, since I have cygwin + The Gimp installed?) and I can often stay in FBSD for days without having to boot back to windows. On the other hand I can only handle Linux in small doses (I admin a Linux network, and it is often a joy to leave it and go home).
I have found a lot more zealots and bigots in the Linux community, especially the GNU/Debian crowd. So many that I now make a point of actively not using Debian because I have no desire to be associated with (what I hope is) the vocal minority of 'One OS to Bring them all, and in the darkenss bind them' evangelists.

--
I am TheRaven on Soylent News

best sample of search and replace... by vectrex · 2003-02-21 04:45 · Score: 5, Interesting

% man 1 banner
gives out: banner(1)
(can't paste it here, I get that lameness junk filter because of all those # characters).

Re:after reading the various links... by MisterFancypants · 2003-02-21 05:01 · Score: 4, Interesting

Agreed. It seems pretty clear that they weren't trying to pull something over on people -- I mean they made the code available and had to know that people 'in the know' would see their code. Seems like it was just a cut & paste screwup on the part of one developer.

I don't entirely blame them for closing down shop in this case. As a long-time proponent of Open Source I must admit it sometimes sickens me how annoyingly 'victimized' OSS authors can act when they sense a license violation.

I mean, sure, you *should* bring attention to license violations when you see them, but the OSS response tends to be way overboard, calling for boycotts, fatwahs, and whatever else before all the facts are known and before it is clear if the violation was really underhanded or just an oversight. It is this kind of religious zealot behavior that is holding OSS back from wider commercial adoption, IMO.

Note this is not PicoBSD by GlobalEcho · 2003-02-21 05:28 · Score: 3, Interesting

Whew -- for a minute I thought this was an article referring to a bizarre fallout with PicoBSD. PicoBSD is a neat little FreeBSD-on-a-single-floppy distro. Kind of an equivalent to Linux's admirable Leaf Project.

Re:Note this is not PicoBSD by Anonymous Coward · 2003-02-21 05:45 · Score: 1, Interesting

Unfortunately, the development of PicoBSD (which I like) doesn't seem to be going anywhere. The old page was last updated sometime in 1998 and now they got this new one up and running 6 months ago, with no changes at all. A shame really.

Why bother with the small fish? by iamacat · 2003-02-21 05:40 · Score: 3, Interesting

Lindows charges lots of money for a dervitive or Linux and Wine might well be in violation of GPL because they make it so difficult to get the source. If you follow links they suggest, it asks you to buy their stuff before getting source code of the GPLed components. No word on what to do if I got a Walmart PC. There are links on their website that could mislead users to think that Lindows is just a regular commercial product with no extra obligations to customers.

I hope GPL will be modified to require the source to be as easily available and featured as binaries and to be usable on it's own without any commercial software added on. Like Darwin distributions from Apple, not obscure changes that do not compile and do not explain what was done.

Re:Ego vs. good of the community by Anonymous Coward · 2003-02-21 06:39 · Score: 1, Interesting

I agree to a point, but the entire thing about Open Source software is that you do it for the love of the coding and to solve problems. You get paid in kudos and peer respect not by $$$. Peer respect is something that all hackers strive for and something that does not come easy in the coding communities.
Solving problems is fine and dandy, but expecting credit for solving those problems is more than reasonable.

It was a stupid idea, anyway by SecretAsianMan · 2003-02-21 08:03 · Score: 3, Interesting

MicroBSD was an embedded-Linux-like approach at making a smaller BSD. Now I'm not trying to sound high and mighty here; I'm merely trying to point out factual differences between the Linux way and the BSD way. Linux and BSD are both great, but they are different from each other.

One of the distinctive things to note about Linux is that its code base is rather distributed. The kernel comes from here, cc comes from there, and the $other_thing comes from somewhere else. The boundary between the base Linux OS and additionally-installed software is sometimes not very defined. The BSDs' code bases are organized differently, each BSD having its own (mostly) centralized, integrated code repository and build system. BSDs do include some "contrib" software (e.g. Less or OpenSSH) that comes from other sources, but contrib releases are still merged and adapted into the main repository. BSDs have a very definite boundary between what is the base OS and what is a third-party package, or "port".

Either way is a great way to structure an OS code base. However, the organizational differences do have some effect upon what is the best way to make a small or embedded version of the OS. With Linux, it's good to fork off a separate distribution, so that packages and a build system can be most effectively engineered. Granted, I never looked at MicroBSD closely (so I could be totally wrong), but that seems to be the approach they took. With BSD, however, it just doesn't make sense to do it that way. If I just wanted to recompile the entire FreeBSD OS, I would do this:

# cd /usr/src # make world

Yadda yadda yadda, similarly in the other BSDs. To expand from this, I could build a fully functional embedded system with a measly few hundred lines of sh(1) script. Note how this did not require me to create another, entirely separate open-source OS project. I just piggybacked on BSD's existing, highly-integrated code base and build system.

To conclude: making it easy to make a small BSD is at most a minor job, easily (and best) doable within the fold of one of the existing BSDs. Forking BSD doesn't make sense for this.

And before someone flames me, let me say this: I prefer BSD, but both Linux and BSD make great small or embedded OSes. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. I don't wish to knock Linux; my only argument concerns the lack of necessity to fork BSD.

BTW, no puns intended by "forking BSD". :-)

--

Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.

For the memory of MicroBSD by Pervertus · 2003-02-21 09:32 · Score: 2, Interesting

I am fathomly shocked from this story. MicroBSD used to be an important part of my life. I did anything with it, from opening doors, through driving my car, to having sex with girls. I drew all my courage from MicroBSD, and their antics were good, yes they were.

After a while I switched to another OS whose name won't be mentioned due to chastity (hint: it begins with W), but from time to time I moved to my old 486 box just to see how my old childhood friend, MicroBSD, was doing. And tonight I've found out that it's dead!!!

This is simply awful. Words can not describe the depression I feel.
MicroBSD, you may be dead, but there will be always a place for you in my ass.

Re:Who uses *BSD, he asks... by WickedLittleSlaveBoy · 2003-02-21 10:10 · Score: 2, Interesting

hmmmm...

install freebsd... cvsup, make buildworld, make buildkernel, shutdown now, make installkernel, make installworld, reboot, cd /usr/ports/x11/XFree86-4, make install clean distclean, cd ../kde3, make install clean distclean, xf86cfg, tweak your XF86Config to add "drm", install mozilla, download OpenOffice(cause the port sucks)... kill a few getty's, a few unnecessary daemons, etc...

after all that, the responsiveness of FreeBSD will easily blow the doors off of any Linux distro... hell, even before all that, IMO.

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