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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.
or at least, this is consistent with the number of usenet posts.
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Ikaruga scoreboard (supports netranking)
They should rename it to BSD/OA.
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?
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.
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"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".
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?
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.
hehe I thought their name was WIN DRIVER when I saw the website windriver aka wind river. I thought it was some microsoft product....
keanmarine.com
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
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
That's the point. BSD is dying.
*ducks quickly*
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
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?
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.
I'm still waiting for FreeBDSM. We've already got the devil mascott...
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
In Japan, *BSD (especially FreeBSD) is very popular.
You can see BSD Magazine and much more