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Support FreeBSD
welloy writes "In a mail to freebsd-announce Robert Bruce writes that "during the week of September 7th to September 13th, all revenue from purchases at the FreeBSD Mall will be donated to the FreeBSD Foundation to support work being done to improve the fine grained threading in the FreeBSD Kernel, and other improvements needed to make the upcoming 5.2 release a success." The offer also applies to their table at BSDCon. This is a great way to support the FreeBSD project and ensure they have funding to keep up their great work."
In Soviet Russia, BSD deads YOU!
Sadly, this dying volume is why new versions of the Toolkits and the boxed sets can only be updated every 18 months instead of quarterly as before. The jewel box sets are produced in house on regular old CD-Rs and the labels are printed on an inkjet, so these can always be kept up to date however. If you order a boxed set, please be sure to order a jewel case version as well unless the June 2002 version is sufficient for your needs, unless you have a very high end machine (Pentium 90 or newer.)
Questions, please feel free to write:
Bruce, Robert - rab@FREEBSDMALL.COM
FreeBSD Mall, Inc.
3623 Sanford Street
Concord, CA 94520-1405
BSD is gasping for breath. Good. Anything with the BSD license should die off. BSD is a license to steal, and is unworthy of the free software community's support.That goes for you Mac traitors too. I'm glad to see them desperate for cash like this.
If you're using anything but GPL'd software, you're a slave. Free Code is the mantra for the 21st century; it is the only path to true freedom.
Linux is the one true OS.
GPL is the one true license.
Everything else is shit.
The goal was for 5.0 to be the first GPL release, however nobody anticipated the amount of effort it would take to track down all of the old developers to get them to sign the new license agreement. Some have been completely unreachable, and this has resulted in many userland utilities being rewritten or replaced, as well as the entire network stack. These efforts are well under way, and if the last release critical port authors can be reached in the next three months, you can expect FreeBSD 6.0 by Christmas, along with your treasured bash shell.
I know I'm replying to a troll, but the fact is that this is being fixed. Hopefully that was your last reason not to join us as a contributing FreeBSD user. Troll amnesty: we welcome you anyway! :)
Much was decided. The direction for KDE3.2 is clear, and hopefully it will be available in ports as soon as X11 is able to run as well!
Thanks to all who attended! I never thought I'd get my PGP Key Signed, if you know what I mean ;0
~Karl
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.
Please stop spreading FUD. Thanks to FreeBSD Mall, BSD will enjoy a long and fruitful life. The recovery effort is fantastic, and it may even soon outgrow it's current corner of our kitchen. Once in a while, we can't even fit a whole day's orders in the oven to activate the shrink wrap and we have to ship in zip-lock bags!
BSD's dead, Jim.
Parent is a GOATSE.CX link using FreeBSDMall's CGI URL forwarding system. Look at the URL yourself before visiting!
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Emacs Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various BSD machines, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a BSD box that has run faster than its Windows counterpart, despite the BSD machine's faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 800 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that BSD is a "superior" machine.
BSD addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a BSD over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
It is common knowledge that *BSD is dying. You, I, everyone knows that ever hapless *BSD is mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The erosion of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of BSD 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 marketing surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is extremely sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes *BSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
Fact: *BSD is dying
[Ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It