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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..."
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.
... 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.
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 dead. This is just more proof of what we've all already known.
Ummmm. FreeBSD? OS X? Come on now, with OS X, we have a flavor of FreeBSD that is now the largest shipping *nix in the world.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, *bsd is dying is a running gag. I don't think anyone actually believes it anymore.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
Yeah, a server os (bsd/os) died and recently, a new os based mostly on bsd was born (darwin).
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
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
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.
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.
That's fairly subtle, considering the events of the last day or so. Bravo, and, I think, a point well made.
There are differences, of course, between publicly consumed intellectual property, like music, and sector-targeted intellectual property, like software: Differences in support requirements, public perception of traditional ownership and rights, the respective industries' take on enforcement and public relations, and the kinds and scope of typical license infringement.
But ... It's still a good point, so I'm a little disappointed that you're not modded up ...
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
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.
Why should I pay for something I can download for free?
(Sorry to respond to this troll but I feel I must)
You shouldn't -- if you want the program you're using to die, that is. Volunteer OSS projects needs funding; after all, people have to eat and pay the bills you know! Everyone who wants OSS to suceed to should, as often as is possible, either buy physical items (like cdrom's manuals and the like) or donate money to keep the project(s) alive. It's in your best interest if you use the software, and it's also fair to the authors. An exception to this would be if a project is already well-funded (quite rare) for instance if IBM was paying every kernel hacker a decent salary to work on the kernel.
Voluntary donations drive so many of our most precious social services, like charities, public television and radio, and Free Software. Hopefully in the future it will drive artists to produce music. I've always wanted a p2p program that would have a button on the side when you're downloading a song that says "click here to give $1 to the artist.".. but that's going a little off-topic.
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
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...
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.
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.
/.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
LOL!
That's going to be fun dealing with after RedHat drops support for 7.3. Suddenly no more updates, and it's either go to RH 10 or run an insecure box. I personally would either opt out for the RH Enterprise products or stick with good ol' Debian and/or FreeBSD.
If keeping your boxes secure is important to you. Remember, even if you decided to roll your own updates, you wouldn't be able to get the cert advisories and what not before the fixes were released by vendors anyways, most of the time.
Just so you know, I started this whole thing out with LOL because you put yourself in such a rediculous spot, by choice. I'm in the exact same spot, but not by choice.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
This is a running joke that has been going on for a very long time. BSD's imminent death has been greatly exaggerated more than once, and this joke is poking fun at that fact.
On Slashdot, this has evolved into a troll, which you can find information about in quite a few places.
Everything2 has some general information on "BSD is dying".
Wikipedia has this to say about BSD is dying:
These sites claim that "BSD is dying" is purely a Slashdot trolling phenomenom.I'm not convinced that this is the case, however, because there are some earlier examples of this joke (not the troll necessarily, but off-color remarks).
The earliest reference I can find was in 1992, and may be one explaniation of the phenomenom: Responses to survey on the death of BSD
There was an article in an online magazine in 1999 that said some disparaging things about BSD's license that may have something to do with phenomenom.
I could not find the article, but it is mentioned here: Debian wants to use FreeBSD kernel
There is also a * is dying page.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
It is strange that Apple would choose to tout that their OS is based on 4.4BSD
Oh! You were trying to be funny! OK, but you really need to post at a higher level in the topic if you want your message to be seen.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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
Who is crazee enough to fill those shoes today? I guess we'll be saying the same about "Darl McBride" in 2007.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Not true. For performance reasons, Apple uses Mach as a monolithic kernel.
It is an absolutely ridiculous claim that the GNU tools are better than the BSD tools. In fact, the paper you link to does NOT include BSD-versions of the tools in their comparison.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Don't forget "IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS!"
Of course, since that's in all caps, I need to put this in to defeat the lameness filter.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
I have to thank you for the link to the Wikipedia page. Far too much of my wasted life over the past 4 or 5 years has been completely captured in that page. How many nights did I set my filter as low as possible after a few too many and giggle like a schoolgirl? Probably more than I ought to have.
Wil
wiki
Linux was not even mentioned! Maybe you are the one with the inferiority complex? A case of the, um, blackboard calling the chalk black? :-D
Cheers,
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD and Darwin are all open source. They are so open that anyone can use their sourcecode for absolutely anything.
:)
BSD/OS is (was) the closed source BSD.
Hopefully it will mean a few more people to help with the opensource projects
Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
You make it sound like market economy is a part of nature, which i can assure you it's not.
I think you forget all the gov aid most large corps have had, either in tax cuts or direct money like the farmers.
Heck some companies, like united fruit, even get military aid.
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 has a much better license than GNU, stupidity aside. While the GPL allows for companies to use code if they release code, BSD allows free (as in beer) use of source code for any purpose, is YOUR company going to use GPL'd code if it means they have to release their code? Heavens no' unless your an OSS company.
I license my source under the BSD license becuase as long as I'm still credited, people can use it for whatever they like. I dont mind, commercial or not. I'm happy to see code I have written going to good use.
-Adam
#!/bin/csh cat $0
That's overblowing things; there's a differenece between program "death" and program "stagnation". One of them, in theory, doesn't happen to Free Software.
it's also fair to the authors
Some authors don't care what you do. Some work for pizza and beer. Others run (in effect) a charity. Some actively maintain and improve their programs, and some don't/won't. Point is.. what and if you should contribute varies widely from author to author.
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
Dunno. But I have just spent 60 of your US dollars on a T-shirt and FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE CD set from http://www.freebsdmall.com/.
Heck. These guys have kept me in a job for 6 years and its been all the more bearable owing to the technology they've put in my hands.
Cheers,
Si
ps. *all* proceeds from sales at freebsdmall.com until September 13th go to freebsd. so now's an even better time to cough up 8-)
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
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,
hate to metamod the mod to my own post (I usually say anyone who complains about mods is a whiner, deal with the fact that imperfect, sometimes stupid humans are in charge of moderation) but it's kind of strange that it was marked offtopic. I'd have taken an "overrated" better.
OOG, Hot Grits Guy, Haiku guy, and yes, even goatse.cx and Penis Bird guy are part of this entity we call slashdot. The germ of the idea was created by Taco et. al., but what made it work, what made it fun to read and post were the people commenting. It brought in people like me, and others, to this board. Slashdot is built by people who are willing to put forth effort to post comments. Sometimes the reward for that effort was a laugh or two. In some ways, all funny comments could be marked offtopic, since they don't advance the technical discussion, but they do advance the community that is slashdot. Hmm, don't lose any sleep; it's likely that the people who modded me has no idea who I'm even talking about.
OK, soapbox mode off, time to have Natalie Portman pour hot grits down OOGs caveman fur-skins pants,.
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.
Who's buying? It's already ours, and we're having words, believe you me. We're taking our IP, as well as all leftover office supplies and toiletries from the husk of a once-great IP thief.
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."
Yeah, if you want to run a beowulf of Dreamcast, but for any real work it's gotta be Linux, FreeBSD, or OpenBSD.
FreeBSD has it's optimization, OpenBSD has it's security, and Linux has the commercial support and fast evolution cycle. What's NetBSD got? It runs on my wristwatch. Well cool beans.....will a database and web farm made from wristwatches run on our enterprise network? No. Well then who gives a shit!
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
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.
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
Sure, if you consider 'native support' as running about 1/5 of actual java code...
You're actually implying that these shady umbrella corporations actually contribute significantly to FreeBSD. They really don't.
Volunteer donations, maybe they help (although, being a relatively new concept in open source, I doubt it). Wind River or BSD mall don't help a whole lot.
Maybe you are the one with the superiority complex? Go look at his handle son.
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.
... long live BSD Lite.