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Wind River To Stop Selling BSD/OS
David writes "According to an article on Bsdnewsletter.com, OS company Wind River has said it will be stopping sales of BSD/OS on this December 31st, and product support exactly one year thereafter. Only 15 more weeks to grab the final 5.1 update before this piece of history might be gone forever..."
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Couldn't resist. Much love for FreeBSD btw.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
*BSD is dead. This is just more proof of what we've all already known.
fp.
And no one cares. I have the feeling this may be the last season of Enterprise, especially now that they'll be up against WB's powerhouse, Smallville.
Probably not. Just let it die. It'll be sad to see BSD go. No, actually not. I'm quite sick of the way it's lingering around uselessly.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD 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 surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dead
That's a question Open Source zealots just can't get around.
.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD 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 surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dead
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
BSD in general NO.
Only BSD/OS is dying.
Long life to FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Apple Max OS!!
... move the slash left one character.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Q: What do you call a gathering of BSD enthusiasts?
A: A funeral.
Because it was faster and easier. These days, they could throttle bandwidth for people that don't pay (say to 56k speed), but people that pay get full speed.
So, when's the funeral? I'll bring a cake :)
Space for rent, inquire within
Who would name their product BS-DOS? Guess I'm not surprised it's not selling.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
There's always freebsd.org, and I don't see anything happening to them anytime soon.
And before anyone says "*BSD is dying and is teh suX0rs, Linux forever!" I'd just like to say that BSD isn't going anywhere. There is no x86 based server OS that is as stable, as secure, as highly configurable, as fast, and as powerful as FreeBSD.
or at least, this is consistent with the number of usenet posts.
--
Ikaruga scoreboard (supports netranking)
BSD is obviously dead, there's only 20 comments for this thread. Even BeOS gets more posts than BSD!
*BSD Suxors
In a startling turn of events today, a previously little-known fact
came into the public eye: "*BSD Sux0rs".
This came as a complete surprise to the BUWLA, or BSD Users With
Large Assholes, as they previously thought that *BSD 0wned.
"You see, even though I have never contributed code to any BSD
project, I thought it was my duty to be a big asshole to others
which don't use the OS I do, because it just 0wnz.", said one
FreeBSD user. "Now that I know it sux0rs, though, I have to go
find something else to be an asshole about."
One notorious OpenBSD fanatic known as WideOpen, told reporters,
"I have to kill myself. This isn't how it was supposed to happen.
My BSD has always been the best, and shouting that opinion in other
people's faces at every chance I got has been my only hobby. It
was all I ever did. It was what got me out of bed in the morning.
Now I have to die. I will jam my bedpost up my ass until I hit my
brain. It is the only way to go: BSD style."
In the volatile world of operating systems anything can happen.
"At least we don't sux0r as much as Windows users", BigAzz, a
relatively well-known NetBSD user said. "Screaming things in people's
faces is my calling. Now I need to scream that BSD sux0rs. What
a sad world. At least I won't kill myself like those uber-asshole
OpenBSD guys. They are just way over the top. Or were, at least."
Nobody knows for sure what the future holds for the state of operating
systems, but with Netcraft confirming the sux0r status, *BSD users
all over the world will have to stick something else up their asses
from now on or risk looking even more gay than they used to.
1. You can not play games on it.
2. It cannot be used by my grandma.
3. It lacks a GUI of any note.
4. There is no support available for it.
5. It is an assortment of fragmented OSes.
6. It cannot be run on the x86 platform.
7. You have to compile everything and know C.
8. Support for the latest hardware is always poor.
9. It is incompatiable with GNU/Linux.
10.It is dying.
Before we all go off on the *bsd is dying trip, let's look at the actual statistics, from Netcraft. This survey is current. Thanks.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
I still have an old BSDI box (and CDs) in the closet.
That was back in the day when Solaris/X86 2.5 just wouldn't load on any PC that I had.
The app I needed only ran on BSDI and Solaris PCs (wahh, they now support Linux though).
Ahh, those were the days. I even coded up all the CGIs I needed in C (blech).
M.B.
+1, Insightful
Slightly less than 10 years ago, I was invited to visit BSDI HQ - a very nice house in Colorado Springs. This was before they moved to the "real" office space a few miles away.
The whole house was wired up for geekiness. They had terminals in various places and plenty of computers. The AV room had massive speakers, a projection screen, and tons of components. Outside, there was a RCA DSS dish, which had been on the market for less than a year as I recall.
In one of the hallways there were a few gold CDs of various releases in picture frames. At the time, they were still working on the 2.0 release (first one called BSD/OS as opposed to BSD/386, if I remember correctly), so there were only a couple up there.
They certainly seemed to have their business affairs in order. Now here it is and their company has been eaten by another, and now the former flagship product is being killed.
I shut down my last BSD/OS system almost 4 years ago and moved to Slackware, so it won't affect me. I just wonder what happened to them when things were obviously quite good at one time.
I have to disagree that BSD itself is dead. Maybe what was once BSDI yes but not BSD in general. Personally I prefer using FreeBSD for serving over Linux. Its stable,consistant and the ports collection rocks! Sure its not for everyone and it maybe dead in the mainstream but its heart still beats for those geeks who want a geeks os.
Can someone please explain to me why every *BSD-related post has to be bombarded by a million "*BSD is dying" AC trolls?
Or is it me failing to see the humor in it? Is it a joke derived from another, kind of like "In soviet russia" or "I, for one, welcome our...!" ?
I don't get it, please, someone enlighten me.
+1, INFORMATIVE! Better make that +4. Thanks in advance. If only there were an "EXTREMELY INFORMATIVE" mod.
BSD/OS had some kick ass SMP support. They were also great live support. Terrible package support, but that was the worst of it.
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
It seems like only a year ago when Wind River took over BSD/OS and made lots of lavish praises and promises but, I think everyone knew that this would be the final result. Frankly I never fully understood why Wind River picked it up in the first place.
In any case, I do not feel that this is a significant loss. The major BSD development is happening in FreeBSD and NetBSD, BSD/OS was never a strong contender.
None the less, this does clearly demonstrate what happens to software that is owned by closed source companies.
BSD is not dead, it's just homeless for the time being.
Please expect this fine OS to be smelling a bit ripe at your nearest highway exit ramp with a sign that says "Will boot for partition space".
Kevin,
I wish you would stop posting this crap and just move on with your life. I'm sorry that things worked out the way they did, but you gave us no choice. As it was, I spent a lot of time convincing Jon and Bill not to have you brought up on criminal charges. I even managed to get you a week's severence.
Instead of being grateful that they gave you a break, you have become obsessed with trying to sabotage their business -- but your *BSD is dying posts are just childish and silly. We move more product now than when you left. No one is cancelling orders because of your anonymous messages on Slashdot.
I think that you could still have a bright future, but if this keeps up, Jon and Bill are going to get pissed off and have you brought up on criminal charges. Is that what you want? How many jobs will you get when potential employers see a criminal record that includes the theft of company computer equipment? Jon still has the laptop that he bought back from the pawn shop along with the company's original purchase records for it. He still has printouts of the ads you put up on ebay for the DLT auto-loader and the RAID array. There are records showing that your badge was used to gain entrance to the building at 2:13AM on the day that the equipment was stolen. On top of the thefts, we also have logs showing your attempts to break into the servers using your ID the evening after you were let go.
Do you want to end up being some guy's bitch in prison? That's what may happen if you keep this up. If you think that your shopping mall karate classes are going to do you any good there, you are in for a shock.
Tim
P.S. Please don't bother with denying this, who you are, and so forth. This started practically the day after you were let go. The writing style and the Kreskin reference leaves no doubt as to who's posting this. (Like someone else is going to go to that much trouble to discredit BSD and then not sign their name! Get real.)
BSD/OS was the commercial version of the BSD world. A few years ago there was a push to bring it up to date with the current FreeBSD at the time. Hopefully this will allow more focus on the *BSDs. I'm a real *BSD fan, but I wasn't even aware that this was still around, or even being actively developed.
-- Charles A. Plater
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you BSD fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a BSD box (a PIII 800 w/512 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this BSD box, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
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 machines 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.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - BSD/OS was found dead in his Wind River home this morning. Apparently, the OS was trying to reach for a pistol to kill himself on the top shelf of his closet when a bowling ball fell on his head. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
BSDi... my first hacked server.
No, I didn't hack it... It was the first server I admin'd that got hacked (circa 1997).
I was a network guy in those days and somehow inherited the admin of that machine (running Livingston Radius!) and managed via unrestricted telnet.
All of my unix experience came from having installed Redhat *once* as a lark, but since in the land of the blind the man with one eye is king, I was it.
I remember seeing all those funny named process in the top display, doing a search on Altavista and then begining to panic.
Eventually we switched over to FreeBSD and Solaris and my interest in unix (and hopefully, my knowledge) grew from there.
No sig
Is Wind River really an "OS company" or are they a "CD pressing and distribution company?"
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
you can find the full announcement here. Alan Clegg -- Formerly abc@bsdi.com
Whatever.
BreakingWind River.
Just a little cubicle humor.
Was BSD/OS popular before the free BSDs? I see on their site that they have some information about embedding BSD/OS -- is there a piece of hardware we might all know about, or is it more for internal hardware projects?
IANAT, I just couldn't resist.
Seriously, though, if I were to decide to install *BSD on a spare partition, why would I buy one? I would be more likely to download one of the many free versions. Maybe I missed something, though.... Is there something special about BSD/OS?
philcrissman.com.
BSDi was NEVER a free (speech or beer) product, and as such really has and had no impact on the free software community. So, while another (some might say 'useless') proprietary software company goes down the shithole, it does not affect the free software movement in any signifigant way.
Free and Net BSD will continue to serve our community alongside of Linux as always, completely unaffected by today's announcement.
that Emacs Lite is a myth. There ain't no such thing. Nowif you wanted to talk about vi well, that would be a whole different thing........
What about F5 BigIP? It used to run on NetBSD but they needed a commerical OS so they moved on. F5's 3DNS version 3.x ran on FreeBSD, but they migrated it to BSDi in version 4.0.
I wonder if they will try to maintain BSD/OS themselves or migrate back?
So anyone know what will happen to the source? Any chance of it being released into the Open Source community? I'm sure some of it would benefit other *NIXes out there.
Disclaimer: The above comment was made while under the influence of too much coding and not enough sleep.
It was published by Walnut Creek.
Based on RedHat 5.2. Old, but at least the print server didn't fucking die every 10 minutes. It was the peak expression of Linux. RH9? Bleaaagh!!
Judging from the number of trolls already, I'd say this story is better left unreported.
Yet another cunting bombshell hit the "community" of *BSD asswipes when IDC recently confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of one single puny fucking percent of all servers. Coming hot on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more fucking market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is ingesting itself backwards, disappearing up its very own shitter, as fittingly exemplified by coming a piss poor dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a cock-sucking Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any fucking future at all for *BSD because that sorded, shit-filled, mutated testicle of an operating system is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink splashes across the accounting documents like a series of exploding bloodfarts. FreeBSD munches the most ass of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD cuntwipes Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying and its rotting corpse smells worse than a maggot, vomit, shit and piss cocktail.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the fucking numbers, shall we? OK!
OpenBSD wanker Theo states that there are a pathetic 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Oh, God, let's fucking see... The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore it's turd-suckingly obvious that 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, by simple fucking arithmetic, there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. Surprise fucking surprise, this is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of those arseholes at Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD showed themselves to be a bunch of retarded tossers, went out of business and were taken over by BSDI who sell another special needs OS. Now BSDI is also a miserable failure, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house... pathetic.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily fucking declined in market share. *BSD is where it belongs, at death's door and its long term survival prospects are almost non-fucking-existant. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among moronic, dilettante shitheads. *BSD continues to Chew Satan's Dick And Fuck The Baby Jesus Up The Pooper. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD IS A FUCKING USELESS WASTE OF BITS AND IS DYING LIKE THE DOG THAT IT IS. IT MAKES ME SICK JUST THINKING ABOUT IT.
Here at work we still have 20+ BSDi machines. We started back in the 1.x days (still have the manuals somewhere.....) and have kept with it ever since. Over the years, we've had to do some custom hacks to fix some OSS software (Cyrus IMAP, just to mention one) but for the most part it is still a rock solid OS with the only downtime being when BSDi released a kernel mod that needed a reboot.
Of couse now we are moving to FreeBSD and Linux, but it's sad to see an old friend reach the end of it's life. There were a lot of great things in BSDi (like the IPFW firewall syntax - it rocks) but I guess all good things must come to an end.
Fiarwell, my old friend.
Driven by 100% sarcasm - fueled by the need to be heard.
I received the email first thing in the morning from the IT department. Our network would be undergoing a major overhaul to correct the ad hoc growth it had experienced in the last year, and starting next week Internet access would be sporadic. There would also be a new firewall and security measures, replacing the old OpenBSD system I'd managed to get installed last Spring. Happy for the heads-up, I went to work right away to make sure Linux had no place on our network.
Since the Open Source Mullet had been canned, a new threat had arisen at my workplace: the Fat Perl Hacker had assumed most of the Open Source Mullet's system and network administration duties, and it was no mystery to anyone at my workplace that he had a hard-on for Linux tucked away under his enormous, cascading gut. Since he was a major suck-up and workaholic, he had a lot more credibility than the Open Source Mullet-- this would be a real challenge for once.
That night, I went to work on my strategy. First, I would document the changes in Linux and OpenBSD since a year ago when we last went with a security plan. Linux was still at version 2.4, while OpenBSD had raced from version 2.8 to 3.1-- a major revision! This was good so far, and I included the relevant diffs for each. I wondered what the Fat Perl Hacker was up to and pushed ahead with my preparations.
Tuesday morning, I went to talk with the VP of Operations, who had final say on the network project. I wouldn't leave anything to chance. But after chatting with him for a few minutes, I learned of a major monkey-wrench I hadn't expected: instead of a Unix firewall system, he was planning on installing a dedicated firewall box-- running Windows XP Server. Thankful for my fortuitous social engineering, I went back to my desk and began making over my strategy to deal with this new threat. Not only would I have to deal with Linux, I'd have to eschew the Windows option now.
Sitting in front of my iBook after work, I realized that taking on Windows XP in the same manner I was going to deal with Linux would be foolish if not wasteful. Obviously the Windows option was not about numbers, anecdotes, or experience. It was a bean-counting decision and all of the security statistics in the world wouldn't matter. Since I hadn't the foggiest about how our accountants viewed the whole operation and didn't have time to learn, I'd have implement a rapid-fire real-life assault on the Windows box, which was sitting on the VP's desk awaiting its place on the network. It was time to put on my Black Hat, and that night I stayed up until 02:00 researching Windows XP vulnerabilities. Linux would have to wait.
With just two days before the network changeover was to take place, I marched into work Wednesday morning knowing that what I did in the next few hours would decide the fate of our network security. To my surprise, just moments after I had sat down, the Fat Perl Hacker asked me to join him for a cigarette outside-- away from the ears and eyes of the office. 15 minutes later, I was fully aware of the precarious situation I was in.
Joining forces with the Fat Perl Hacker was something I had thought about but hadn't wanted to consider. It was a double-edged sword, and I wasn't about to kid myself. Although I am damn good, he had another full decade of experience over me and that included office politics. If we aided each other I ran the risk of pushing for Linux, even if inadvertently. And I certainly wasn't about to reveal my anti-Linux research to him. After doing some quick scheming, I agreed to help the Fat Perl Hacker dissuade the VP from using Windows XP-- but I had my own twist to what would follow after. Knowing my shortcomings, I decided to do the only thing that would give me an edge. And that was doing something that I knew better than anyone else at my office: playing dirty.
After a power-lunch of strategizing, the Fat Perl Hacker and I went to work on cracking the Windows XP box into oblivion. We then called back
Remember the Gauntlet firewall? One of the first firewalls commercial firewalls, and one that you got the source for (it was not open source in the sense that you couldn't distribute source).
Anyway, make a long story short. Gauntlet ran Solaris, HP-UX, and BSDI, because it actually modified the kernal and several peripheral systems to make it more secure.
Well, it was geared to a specific release of BSDI. I suspect this was one of the big sellers, and when Gauntlet essentially died of old age (and a company that had no interest in keeping its customers), BSDI lost a big chunk of the market.
Then you add the rise of the really "Free" BSD's and Linux, and that pretty much ended it.
But I'll say that BSDI was one of the most robust, forgiving, stable platforms I ran; a fortune 1000 company ran its entire email gateway systems on a pair of BSDI 4.x boxes running a customized FWTK proxy. They only reason it was retired was because the new guys were only Windows literate and BSDI scared them.
Anyway, I can't say enough good things about BSDI.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
BSD you grow in the ghetto, living second rate
And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate.
The places you play and where you stay
Looks like one great big alley way.
You'll admire all the numberbook takers,
Thugs, BSD pimps and pushers, and the big money makers.
Oh this is funny.
I've worked right next door to them for the last 15 months and I had no idea what they did...Maybe I should pop over tomorow and see if they've got any free CDs...
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
or is kuro5hin.org really gay?
yuo are teh genius!!!
It was obvious from the beginning that Wind River bought BSD, just like it bought pSOS, not to obtain new technology, but rather to eliminate another competitor to VxWorks. (What other technologies has Wind River done this to?) Unfortunately, embedded Linux seems to be ruining Wind River's plans to become the Microsoft of the embedded world.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I paid them $1000 for a source distribution of their beta version when it first came out. I stuck with them through the lawsuit but their support vanished when 1.0 came out. I dumped them for Slackware and never looked back.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Vlad Farted(34)
They are really just shutting down in the face of threats from SCO.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Today, I took a crap at work... the turd was so large it wouldn't flush! I had to sneak out of the bathroom and leave it there.
You know the cleaning folks love me!
That is a masterpeice. You have done well to insulate yourself against $699 licensing fees. Good Day to you, you are certainly not the typical teabagger that hangs around here.
/.
They sell the egregiously overhyped real-time operating system VXWORKS, which has reasonable performance (why, it rivals the RT-11 OpSystem DEC built in the 70s!) and a user interface so horrible it makes *nix and IBM mainframes seem positively warm and fuzzy.
One assumes they bought BSD to plunder some techniques and standard API routines... or so that nobody could sue them for any *nix code that might be found in vxworks. What with SCO's recent antics, they are probably feeling pretty clever over at Wind River these days.
--Charlie
Who cares. FreeBSD kicks its ass anyway.
Great story dude!
So anyone know what will happen to the source?
Would donating BSD/OS source code to the FreeBSD Foundation let Wind River write it off as a tax deduction?
Will I retire or break 10K?
FreeBSD is [b]NOT[/b] open source correct? If so is OpenBSD to FreeBSD what Linux is to Unix?
I thought to myself, the *BSD is dying trolls are going to have a field day.
Most projects only see a small fraction of the purchase cost of items, but see all of a donation. So a $10 donation does $PROJECT more good than an $18 tshirt.
What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents [theos.com] on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
*BSD is dying
.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
[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 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's when you get distracted by the politickers that they sideline you. The tireless work that
I will search out whichever fool moderated the parent post -1 (Offtopic). He will watch as I jam a pitchfork and a pufferfish up his youngest daughter's anal cavity until they emerge from her mouth. Then this will be repeated on, in order, his other daughters, his sons, his nieces, his nephews, his sisters, his brothers, his in-laws, his parents, his secretary, his doctor, his insurance agent, his stockbroker, and his wife.
However, this fate is too kind for him. Instead of a pitchfork and a pufferfish, I will rupture his rectum with my sexist streak and Theo de Raadt's massive ego.
What is wrong with you? Can't you see the evidence in plain view. BSD is dead.
dear *rolls,
dancing on this like it is the grave of all that is BSD is silly.... How many obscure linux distros die every day? Do you see them posted as major defeats to linux?
I am not a BSD user, but netcraft stats and Mac OSX are proof of it's technical sucess. The simple fact is if we want free software to succeed then there have to be choices, one of those choices is the BSD license that allows for projects like Mac OSX.
Recently I have been considering a move into some high end DV editing. There is nothing, nothing in the linux world that compares to Final Cut Pro 4 or Adobe Premier on the mac.... it would not be possible to use these technologies in a *nix environment if it were not for BSD-style licensing.
The simple fact is, most of us live in a capitalist economies - and one can only act within the environment one is given. In the future I would like to use GNU everything, but you can't leap to the end-point so quickly, there are steps inbetween that you can't skip (something to be said for communist experiments of the USSR and China here).
I just came back from a two month business trip in Japan. From what I saw in their bookstore was that there were several BSD magazines with 5.1 that comes with the magazines. I didn't see too many linux magazines though. Maybe the Japanese prefer BSD. Any Japanese slashdot readers out there?
What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents [theos.com] on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as most fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
[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 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's when you get distracted by the politickers that they sideline you. The tireless work that y
I think I shall never see
a tree as dead as BSD
It never ceases to amaze me that as soon as one puts BS and D together on slashdot, you get the run of idiots. Why does this happen? Are there people who truly believe that it makes any importance to anyone other than themselves what OS they use? In REAL LIFE, people who are able to see things from only one point of view are called SMALL MINDED. I'd say the ability to use only one OS is a limiting factor, not an advantage. As per the BSD is dead idiots, well at least get the right OS worked out. You're only showing your ignorance if you don't know which OS you're trying to talk down.
Why would you stop selling something that's already dead anyhow?
Trolls dont like to be Flamebait, because they burn so well. Protect our Troll heritage!
Thanks. This issue has been irritating me, and you expressed it well. The idea that OS X is "based on" BSD seems deeply appealing to both Mac zealots and BSD zealots. Definitely a marketing coup.
This topic came up today, and a Unix guy who is programming a MacOS application was there. I asked him, "How much of BSD is used when a normal user uses MacOS X?" (Meaning no terminals). After thinking a moment, he answered "None."
Now he may have missed some odds and ends, but given his background and the fact that he's spending hours a day neck-deep in a MacOS X application, I think he's substantially right.
The provided proxies were not well done, and from my viewpoint, the 5.0 release of Gauntlet was poor for proxying streams for video and audio.
The support from NA was at its best poor. At worst, it was a rip-off.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Completely wrong. It was more than a year ago when WindRiver took over BSDi. And BSD/OS was a pretty bigtime product many, many years ago. Microsoft used it extensively before it ate its own dogfood with NT. Initially, BSDI's product was called BSD/386; not to be confused with 386/BSD. I have no idea why this was moderated-up. Oh wait, its simple-minded, infantile, liberal Linux zealots with no concern for accuracy.
See how stupid trolling makes you sound?
You BSD trolls are worse.
What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents [theos.com] on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become ever more bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
Now, Apache uses a BSD style license but they have an open development model which allows them to take advantage of a very large developer pool in order to stay ahead of their competition. In fact although proprietary versions of Apache exist which perform better than the official releases, SGI has put out some open source patches which generate even larger performance boosts. This is the reason why they have such a strong showing in terms of market share.
BSD once had potential but the procedural problems they are experiencing hurt it when it comes to the market. I suspect that this is probably in part because the BSD teams are not interested in such things, and that is a shame... In fact, although I labeled it as an inferior OS, this is not due to lack of progress within BSD -- it has been progressing somewhat, but rather because all the improvements they make tend to be quickly copied by their competitors AND they lack the developer pool to stay ahead of this game (a problem which does not exist in the Linux or Apache communities, though for somewhat different reasons).
I don't think that there is enough widespread support for BSD to save the operating system. What must be done is an opening up of the development process OR a GPL-style restriction on redistribution. In many ways I favor the former.
Even in a worst case scenario, I don't see BSD completely dying. I think the developers are less into competition and more into a sort of idealized cooperation. As a result, even if BSD becomes more marginalized, I don't think that it will die outright. It will most likely outlive Netware, for example.
Would it be possible to have some intelligent writing on this website once in a while rather than the typical: "[insert company] announced today that [insert mundane or otherwise uninteresting tidbit of news or quote a portion of a news article or press release out of context] [insert artificially self-important rhetorical question that will likely create debate on a topic completely seperate from the article quoted above.]"
F******* LOUDER! I CAN'T HEAR YOU! --Ozzy Osbourne
I spoke to someone at Wind River and they told me that they are killing OSEKworks, and that it'll be like BSD/OS where they'll support it for 1 more year. I don't know if they have made that announcement public however. This was serveral weeks before this announcement. It looks like they are putting all their efforts into VxWorks.
Subject says it all.
As you all may know, BSD has been part of the "B" team for quite some time.
The Year of Our Lord 2003 has been a particularly bad year for the "B"s,
- Bob Hope
- Buddy Ebsen
- Buddy Hackett
- Barry White
- Bobby Bonds
- Bronson
- BSD
This honored list of dead is but a small token of adieu from the many fans of the deceased.These dead were truly some American Icons. They will be missed.
Darwin is Apples own licence but they are kind of nice and give out the source. Darwin is built from freeBSD and Mach 3.0. But it is still not BSD. The problem is that BSD is a able to be over licenced.
So something that was BSD once might not be BSD usable now. GPL fixs this problem.
nt
I guess it's time to say a few words as a past member of the BSD/OS development team.
Wind River had trouble dealing with the BSD thing for a long time. Keep in mind that their aim was *embedded* stuff, not the UNIX we all know and love.
In that regard, their announcement is just a move back to a market Wind has been more successful in.
I, too, knew the end was coming when I was one of the five people that received a pink slip in January, and I was (and I still am) worried about what happens to the people left behind. I hope they do well; some have troube dealing with the loss of something they've worked on for a decade or more.
Of the five that have left, many have found a new place, but some are still looking. If you're looking for some *real* good folk, ping them. (I work at a leading Dutch security company now).
I've had a *wonderful* 6 years at BSDI/Wind, and would like to thank the people I've worked with (including customers) for making it happen.
BSD development will continue, it will just happen elsewhere. May the source be with you.
Geert Jan
BSD/OS has actually been in a coma for quite some time. Shutting down life support is the only fair thing to do.
We used to run BSD/386 back in 1992 and used BSD/OS upto about 4.1. Around that point BSD/OS started to lag behind in the fast pace of development, but most importantly, in support. When you pay tens of thousands of dollars for licenses with no visible return you tend to start looking for alternatives.
We switched our whole ISP (now around 600 servers) to FreeBSD with little hassle.
It's a shame though, BSD/OS had some cool people behind it.
Cor
Maybe SCO will be the next to sell BSD....
If not; go get them SCO!!! (I'm sure SCO owns some of the code in BSD, must be, I tell ya!)
- "They misunderestimated me."
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: BSD* is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered BSD* community when IDC confirmed that BSD* market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that BSD* has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. BSD* is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict BSD*'s future. The hand writing is on the wall: BSD* faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for BSD* because BSD* is dying. Things are looking very bad for BSD*. As many of us are already aware, BSD* continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD 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 surveys show that BSD* has steadily declined in market share. BSD* is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. BSD* continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save *BSD from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, BSD* is dead.
Fact: BSD* is dying
Don't be silly. This website would just be a blank page if they did that. Hey ... maybe thats not such a bad idea...
In Japan, *BSD (especially FreeBSD) is very popular.
You can see BSD Magazine and much more
Sure, we all know that *BSD is a failure, but why? Why did *BSD fail? Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities?
The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.
And when it reached roughly v3.0, FreeBSD had caught up for the uses I needed (DNS/Apache/mail). So I migrated to FreeBSD and didn't look back. About 2 years later, I did the same thing, except this time I switched from FreeBSD to Linux. And I haven't looked back.
The BSDs are/were nice to use and are robust. For people that like *BSD, there's certainly no danger of them dying so there's no need to switch. Personally, I enjoy the greater support structure and commercial support behind Linux. I wonder if some other entity is going to step up and offer commercial support for BSD/OS?
Cheers,
What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents [theos.com] on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
You smell something?
... buy up the smoking carcass of that which was formerly known as BSDI and declare all *BSD to be their IP too.
Right, Darl?
You are all pathetic.
Linux and *BSD are all UNIX dervatives in some form or other. They are all open, transparent, unencumbered by upper management and their MBAs who understand nothing of why *N?X can run Marathons faster individually than Windows can as a relay team. They all have the same basic design philosophy (lots of little tools chained together) that has given Windows the MegaKernel from Hell and the rest of MS' bloatware.
(Windows 2003! Whole months of Uptime!. Blah)
Its like Peoples Front of Judea hating the the Judean Peoples Front who hate the Judean Popular Front and leaving the Romans to get on with ruling.
Bill Gates is the Antichrist... or have we all forgotten that?
It's a TROLL, you idiot JERKOFFS! It's NOTHING but FLAMEBAIT! Jesus FUCKING Christ. All you SCRIPT KIDDIES masturbating too fucking HARD to NOTICE??? Holy fucking SHIT. FLAMEBAIT. TROLL. Funny? Not really!
What to buy...what to buy...hmmm...hmmm...just can't decide how much I'd like to spend! I need to get my hands on a copy of BSD to host my site! Stat!
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
Yours might be.
except, of course, OpenBSD.
NetBSD being damn close in all those areas except security.
openbsd. gentoo. blfs. public key: 0x7EA13687 http://npt.ath.cx "All unix, all the time."
A circle jerk! Hey, remember not to eat the soggy cracker...
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
A web farm made from wristwatches might not be useful on your enterprise network, but NetBSD can make old machines usable again. I recently bought a few SGI workstations (Indigo2's) from Boeing that were being surplused. Think I'm going to buy a $600 IRIX license (for each of 3 machines) for a computer that cost me $75? No. But I can download NetBSD and make the machines still useful. NetBSD running on an Indigo2 makes a fine small web or mail server. The parent said NetBSD rocks your bones. Bones... as in old computers (I'm just guessing)... Just because you don't give a shit doesn't mean the rest of us don't still see something as a useful product.
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 very 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
I would upload the source to 1.1, but it is 56 mb's and I am on 56k1 Bytes,58028KBw =
I will share it on kazaa:
File:bsdi-1.1-src.tar.bz2
Length:5942043
UUHash:=9tbeO7iT7MuoAkhV/Zfi3YJgQQ
use sig2dat 3.11 and kazaalite ++
It's the almost reflexive reaction of immediately moderating anything to do with the goatse.cx site a troll. Originally it was a protective reaction (not wanting to get a flurry of complaints), then everybody knew what it was, so it became an inside joke. Now a quarter of the Slashdot audience doesn't know what the site is (since it's died out for more than a year because of the automatic domain tags).
In any case, even with these two mods down to -1 I think I'm still net positive for the day.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I don't know about you, but making a $75 machine into a web/mail server is not bone rocking in my book. I've been doing this for years now with Linux on older alpha's and older sparcs.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
OpenBSD is a walking corpse, they have almost no
market penetration. And increasingly as things
go hyperthreaded and SMP based even on the desktop OpenBSD will be increasinly out in the cold as they have no MP support to speak of.
Talk all you want, but this isn't about teenage
fan kid zeal, its about the direction the market
is moving in. Their is huge industry support behind Linux that continues to build, while with the exception of apple, industry support for BSD (and virtually all other Unices) continues to ebb.
Look at where the dollar are going, and what CIO's and analysts are saying. I think the writing is
on the wall is massive red letters.
B-s-d-e-a-d! Yippeeeeeeaaaaayeeeah!!! elegy to BSD -Tapping my toy keyboard with my toes... BSD is DEAD!!!
Perhaps that's the reason why Japan does not have a good IT reputation. I mean, come on, name one Japanese computer guru! THERE JUST AIN'T NONE!
Tupac ain't comin back CAUSE I SHOT HIM!
Not only was original Gauntlet built upon BSD/OS, but Secure Computing Corporation's Sidewinder ran a version of BSD/OS into which Domain Type Enforcement had been integrated.
It was the preferred choice for commercial secure UNIX on Intel platforms in the 90s.
The network performance (amongst other things) was exceptional.
All major marketing surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very 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.
... long live BSD Lite.
Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personas?
The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.