DragonFly BSD Announced

JoshRendlesham writes "Matt Dillon announced today on the freebsd-hackers mailing list the creation of the DragonFly BSD project. It seeks to build on the work of FreeBSD 4.x, including a rewrite of the packaging and distribution system, among other goals."

Comments

Re:Another one?

[Kiriwas]

That doesn't make sense to me. Thats like deciding there are too many car manufacturers and complaining to Ford that there should be fewer and better car manufacturers. In fact, it would be EASIER to do this in the car industry because you can probably get the major car manufacturers together. No one ever said this new BSD was going to be good, just that it was here. No one said you should support it, but then again maybe you should. Each distro of anything is subject to the people that make it. If you want one final all encompassing sent-from-God BSD then go and make it!

BSD and Smart People

[mslinux]

The problem with BSD is that there are too many Albert Einstein-like people involved with its development... and Matt Dillion is one of them. I don't mean that in a bad way. These guy are *smart* probably one in a billion kind of smart. The problem with that is they can't work together very well. Theo (Open BSD), Matt (FreeBSD) Both these guys forked over differences of opinion with other developers.

Imagine what these guys could actually *do* if they put aside their differences and worked together!! No unsolved CS problem would be safe.

Re:Messaging layer

[Chexum]

The proposed new messaging layer sounds really interesting and powerful. A little like Mach or QNX, perhaps?

No (or perhaps yes), from the superficial look, it seems very similar to the AmigaOS exec.library's functions. No surprise here, given Matt's background as an arch-developer for Amiga :) See also DICE: Dillon's C Compiler... It's very weird to see the Amiga resurrected inside BSD..

Re:Matt Dillon, eh?

[m.dillon]

You are welcome, and ditto to the other followup poster! Now for the scary part: Despite the demise of the Amiga there are still people who use DICE, and DASM (65xx/687xx assembler). Apparently DASM has become a favorite in the classic Atari world. There are also still many old hardware installations based on the 68K and DICE is one of the few (complete) compiler toolsets for the 68K that can be run on a modern platform. Yow!

-Matt

Well, good luck to him!

[DarkHelmet433]

Having NetBSD/FreeBSD seperate was good in many ways because it kept mutually incompatable folks away from each others throats. Once things cooled down, technology began to flow in both directions between NetBSD and FreeBSD. Later on, OpenBSD came along. All sorts of good things came from that. Can you say OpenSSH?

It would be nice if DragonFlyBSD (gah, ENAMETOOLONG) was a similar deal. As a FreeBSD developer, I hope that there will be plenty of opportunities to take good stuff in both directions. If we can keep people away from each others throats and work on making the code better, then everybody wins.

Diversity is good. Developers fighting each other is bad. Forks can be a good way to relieve the stress. There is no need to make a Big Deal(TM) about it.

Re:Messaging layer

[Billly Gates]

Matt Dilion was fired from the FreeBSD team.

Technically its not a job but they refuse all his patches and he lost write access. The chances now of it being merged into FreeBSD are remote.

He had no choice but to fork if he wanted to continue developing. That or join the Openbsd team or Linux.

Infact Dillion help fixed the vm bug in Linux 2.4. He actually has already developed Linux code.

Re:Good luck to you Matt.

[m.dillon]

You know, I hear this junk all the time and I can only conclude that the people who spout it off have no real understanding of what the BSD or GPL licenses actually are, let alone their respective effects on the environment around them. The hype has far outstripped the reality and the result are hoards of young programmers slapping the GPL on trivia and minutia that has no other effect then that of relegating their bits to the dustbin of history. And the really sad thing is that it can take years sometimes to realize you've screwed yourself when, say, ten years down the line you want to use work you did on a collaborative project for something that doesn't quite fit the license and find you can't because you have no idea who else to contact to unwind the GPL'd mess. Oops! I find the GPL useful only if I intend to potentially relicense to commercial entities under separate cover and that is pretty much it. The BSD does a better job, statistically, in polluting commercial source bases with open standards and always will. Even microsoft's attempts to proprietize BSD licensed code has resulted in a far greater adoption of open standards, such as with kerberos, then if they had written their own from scratch which would have been 100% proprietary instead of only 5% proprietary. TCP and DNS also come to mind. Those were big wins for our side folks, mostly looked over because you idiots focused in on what microsoft tried to do rather then the actual big picture effect of what they wound up doing.

The problem with the GPL is that it doesn't trust its fate to human nature but instead tries to force an effect that tends to be against human nature. GPL is a license based on fear and uncertainty, at least from an idealogical standpoing. The BSD license recognizes human nature and works with it to far greater effect for the society as a whole. I prefer trust to fear. I'm just not the paranoid type and if one doesn't have commercial motives for using the GPL one really has to have a high level of paranoia to justify it. That is the reality of the GPL. I use it occassionally, but for commercial reasons only. Everything else I do under the BSD.

-Matt