BSDCon '03 Nearly Here (OpenBSD 3.4, Too)

robotdreams writes "Once again BSDCon showcases the BSD community's long history of innovative research, open exchange of ideas, and collaborative work. Tutorials this year feature: an intensive code walkthrough of the new FreeBSD 5.x release, debugging kernel problems on live systems, advanced BSD system and network security, and FreeBSD's new GEOM disk I/O subsystem." Since BSDCon runs from September 8th through 12th, you're probably either already going or out of luck ;) On the other hand, you're still early for OpenBSD 3.4, now taking pre-orders -- details below.

An anonymous reader writes "Pre-orders for the OpenBSD project's latest release, 3.4, are now being taken. This release will ship around November 1st. Significant enhancements have been made in this release, including i386 switch to ELF executable format, further W^X improvements for i386, ld.so on ELF platforms now loads libraries in a random order for greater resistance to attacks, inclusion of a static bounds checker to the compiler for basic checks on functions which accept buffers and sizes, strcpy/strcat function audit to replace with safer strlcpy/strlcat, ProPolice stack protection in the kernel, further manual page cleanups, large number of bug fixes and optimizations to the packet filter (PF) including packet tagging, stateful TCP normalization, passive OS detection, SYN proxy, and adaptive state timeouts, and many other improvements to the rest of the system.

Order a CD from the OpenBSD store. Ordering a CD helps support the project, as a bonus you get cool stickers, artwork, and an audio track!"

The same reader sent links to more information on this release, including new features, and the changelog between 3.3 and 3.4.

Comments

Re:removing some utilities

[nyteroot]

. . .their work may be locked down and stolen by a corporation [at] any time.

Ah! Such enlightening insight into the world of open source licensing!
..yeah, right.

My dear sir, you are utterly incorrect. Were some corporation to "lock down" their source code (and I can only assume that by "lock down" you mean to re-release under a proprietary license) they would only be assuring that their version of the software would be utterly disregarded by the entire computer community, because (pay attention here) the free version would not somehow magically cease to exist! So on the one hand you would have the free, latest version. On the other hand, you would have the not-free, catching-up version. Gee, tough choice.

Now what the BSD license does allow is for some company to take some or all of the source and reuse it elsewhere, under a proprietary license if they so wish, without giving anything back to the Free software community. Whether or not this is necessarily a bad thing is a philosophical matter. However, your assertion that a company could "lock down" the OpenBSD code is completely and utterly incorrect.

Re:Soon?

[nyteroot]

I would like to see much more articles on using *BSD for the regular consumers

Why, god. Why is it that an OS must be usable "on the desktop", "by mom", or by "the regular consumers" in order for it to be considered "good"? First we had Linux, and then they mom-ified Linux. Now you want them to mom-ify *BSD too? Fuck that shit!

There are server OSs. There are desktop OSs. Any attempt at combination is bound to fail miserably at one or the other and quite likely both.