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A New List For Clustering NetBSD

jschauma writes "The NetBSD Project has created a new mailing list, tech-cluster. As the name suggests, this list is intended for technical discussions on building and using clusters of NetBSD hosts. Initially, this list is expected to be of low volume, but we hope to advocate and advance the use of NetBSD in such environments significantly. Subscription is via majordomo -- please see this page for details."

49 comments

  1. hmmm.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    we sometimes call it a beowulf cluster. what do we call this? a devil-cluster?

    1. Re:hmmm.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      necro-cluster

    2. Re:hmmm.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A red-ink-flows-like-a-river-of-blood cluster.

    3. Re:hmmm.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A cluster of *BSD machines? A GRAVEYARD!

  2. BSD not really dying? by scumbucket · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I've been seen a lot of BDS stories on /. lately.
    I guess that means that BSD is not dying after all? Should I believe all the hype?

    --
    CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
    1. Re:BSD not really dying? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      Fact: *BSD is dying

      It is practically universal knowledge that *BSD is dying. Indeed *BSD is hopelessly mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The loss of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.

      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

    2. Re:BSD not really dying? by scumbucket · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      Sigh, I feared as much.

      Thank you for your honesty, AC.

      --
      CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
  3. A new mailing list is front page news?? by Captain+Kirk · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    What next? Are we going to see up to the minute reports on the mailing list traffic?

    1. Re:A new mailing list is front page news?? by KDan · · Score: 1, Funny

      Not quite. I think they're planning to have a separate front-page post for every ACK packet relayed by the BSD clustering mailing lists' smtp servers.

      Daniel

      --
      Carpe Diem
    2. Re:A new mailing list is front page news?? by Brandybuck · · Score: 1

      Why not? We have to keep up with "One the Minute, Every Minute, Slashdot Linux coverage".

      --
      Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
    3. Re:A new mailing list is front page news?? by Jellybob · · Score: 1

      Strange that would happen in the BSD section of the site really.

      Yes, I'm nitpicking. Yes, I'm grouchy today.

    4. Re:A new mailing list is front page news?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I would "moderate" you to hell in an instant. :)

  4. just... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!

  5. Oh good! by captainbonehead · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now I can learn how to build a cluster out of all of those Timex data watches, palms, and toasters cluttering my basement ...

    1. Re:Oh good! by endx7 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Like they say, windows and NetBSD are toaster OSes.

      Windows turns your computer into a toaster.

      NetBSD turns your toaster into a computer.

  6. *BSD is dying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    Fact: *BSD is dying

    It is practically universal knowledge that *BSD is dying. Indeed *BSD is hopelessly mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The loss of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.

    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

  7. Nice. by noselasd · · Score: 1

    Seems cool. Nothing beats having a bunch of daemons chewing at your data.

  8. What We Can Learn from BSD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    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 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.

  9. Multiple Platforms by agent+dero · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Something i'd like to figure out, while I don't run NetBSD personally, how viable it would be to run a cluster of various platforms, for example a couple of macPPC, x-86, and UltraSPARC computers running as a netBSD cluster.

    Would NetBSD be able to overcome these big platform differences?

    --
    Error 407 - No creative sig found
    1. Re:Multiple Platforms by Noryungi · · Score: 2, Informative

      how viable it would be to run a cluster of various platforms, for example a couple of macPPC, x-86, and UltraSPARC computers running as a netBSD cluster. Would NetBSD be able to overcome these big platform differences?

      Actually, yes. While I am not a specialist of NetBSD, it runs very well on all these machines -- I had a doubt about the UltraSPARC, then I read this.

      The only thing that would be slightly different between these platforms would be the installation procedure, and even that procedure is fairly standardized.

      Once the NetBSD system is installed ,everything should work exactly in the same way over all these platforms -- the only difference would be the device names and the name assigned to the network interfaces.

      Please note that this type of cluster has been attempted before and it seems to work very well, albeit much more slowly than a high-performance (all Opteron, for instance) cluster.

      --
      The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
    2. Re:Multiple Platforms by serial+frame · · Score: 3, Insightful

      For clarification, I believe he was insinuating that NetBSD already runs on those platforms. His question is, of course, will several machines of different processor types be able to share and distribute processor time? For the time being, that answer is, unfortunately, no. However, if we are talking storage clusters, then yeah, everything would work out just fine.

      --

      -
      And the Angel said unto me, "These are the cries of the carrots! The cries of the carrots!"
    3. Re:Multiple Platforms by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Heterogeneity support: The PVM system supports heterogeneity in terms of machines, networks, and applications. With regard to message passing, PVM permits messages containing more than one datatype to be exchanged between machines having different data representations.

    4. Re:Multiple Platforms by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you're careful of the data you pass between them, you could use an interpretted language to run the same program on each one. It wouldn't be as pretty as a warehouse full of Opteron boxes, but it would enable you to make use of the various machines.

      A Perl script would run the same on all the disparate computers if you took care how it was written.

    5. Re:Multiple Platforms by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes. We're actually using NetBSD/shark, SunOS/sun4c and Solaris8/sun4u with the PVM package (NetBSD
      pkgsrc/parallel/pvm) for a parallel programming course here.

  10. *BSD Wailing Song by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    The *BSD Wailing Song

    What's left for me to see
    In my ship I sailed so far
    What can the answer be
    Don't know what the questions are.
    And after all I've done
    Still I cannot feel the sun
    Tell me save me
    In the end our lost souls must repent.
    I must know it is for certain
    Can it be the final curtain
    As long as the wind will blow
    I'll be searching high and low.
    Who knows what's really true
    They say the end is so near
    Why are we all so cruel
    We just fill ourselves with fear.
    And heaven and hell will turn
    All that we love shall burn
    Hear me trust me
    In the end our lost sould must repent.
    I must know it is for certain
    Can it be the final curtain
    As long as the wind will blow
    I'll be searching high and low
    Final curtain
    Final curtain

  11. AI? by utlemming · · Score: 0

    Imagine the fun we could have if we got a NetBSD cluster with AI capabilities -- "It's the DEVIL!"

    --
    The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
    1. Re:AI? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      it is a "tool" or "instrument". Used as follows "the windows planform is a tool of the devil" that is a bad example but you get the point...

  12. Mosix? by DAldredge · · Score: 1

    Are there any projects like OpenMOSIX/MOSIX for *bsd?

  13. Troll-in-one by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll


    To spare this section of all the trolls (yeah right!), I have incorporated every *BSD troll into this one message. If you have mod points and you're a wanking Linux fanboy, please mod this up rather than only modding up the one-shot trolls. Thank you.

    Oh, and if I've missed any, please add your troll as a reply and I'll include it in the next Troll-in-one.


    _*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*

    The *BSD Wailing Song

    What's left for me to see
    In my ship I sailed so far
    What can the answer be
    Don't know what the questions are.
    And after all I've done
    Still I cannot feel the sun
    Tell me save me
    In the end our lost souls must repent.
    I must know it is for certain
    Can it be the final curtain
    As long as the wind will blow
    I'll be searching high and low.
    Who knows what's really true
    They say the end is so near
    Why are we all so cruel
    We just fill ourselves with fear.
    And heaven and hell will turn
    All that we love shall burn
    Hear me trust me
    In the end our lost sould must repent.
    I must know it is for certain
    Can it be the final curtain
    As long as the wind will blow
    I'll be searching high and low
    Final curtain
    Final curtain


    _*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*
    • flask of ripe urine
      pressed to bsd lips
      bsd drink up

    _*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*

    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.


    _*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*

    It is common knowledge that *BSD is dying. Almost everyone knows that ever hapless *BSD is mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The erosion of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.

    OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of BSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet p

  14. Death is not pretty by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    It hurts 'n' stuff.

    1. Re:Death is not pretty by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      Yet Suicide is Painless
      It Brings on Many Changes

      And why don't you take that option, because your 'BSD is dying' posts show how useless you really are.

    2. Re:Death is not pretty by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      haiku

      flask of ripe urine
      pressed to bsd lips
      bsd drink up

  15. You Have Been Trolled by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    You Have Lost

    Have A Nice Day

    1. Re:You Have Been Trolled by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      Please feel free to kill yourself also.

    2. Re:You Have Been Trolled by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You lose. Try again.

  16. 17 meg file problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait


    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.

  17. BSD can suck my hairy cock by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    I mean who gives a flying fuck about it all.

    Install something halfway good.

    Hint: Use Tux's OS

    P.S. *BSD is dying.

    Zealot Out.

  18. BSD's failure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    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 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.

  19. Maybe this will spark interest in NetBSD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I see NetBSD as a great clustering platform. It's small, it's low in resources, and it's truly open source. The only thing is things like OpenMosix aren't there for NetBSD. Maybe someone will start developing a patch that does that kind of stuff.

    BSD Gear

  20. Light out, pard. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    Somewhere, in a lonely hospital room,
    *BSD is dying
  21. Coping Stratagies by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    Although it is true that BSD is dying, there are some helpful steps you can take ease your sorrow:
    • deal with the inevitable.
    • grieve for your loss.
    • move on. Never let your emotions get mixed up with something as silly as a computer operating system. It isn't healthy. So BSD fails. Big whoop. Deal with it and move on. Hope this helps.
  22. BSD: Feeding tube re-iserted by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Oct. 23 -- BSD resumed receiving life-sustaining care yesterday in a Florida hospital room, but many experts said there is virtually no hope that it will ever recover, despite it fan boy's desperate hopes.

    "IF IT'S over a year, BSD's not ever going to get up," said Fred Plum, a professor emeritus at Weill Cornell College in New York. "You'd just don't see it. It just doesn't happen."
    BSD, 39, has been in a persistent vegetative state since its heart stopped for unknown reasons in 1990. A feeding tube in BSD's stomach was removed this past Wednesday after its husband, Theo De Ratt, who said his wife had told him she (BSD) would not want to be kept alive under such circumstances, won a long series of court battles to have life-sustaining nourishment withdrawn so she (BSD) could die.

    1. Re:BSD: Feeding tube re-iserted by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      Great! I've added this to the troll-in-one, ready to go for the next BSD story. All the other BSD is dying posts are dupes, but at least yours is original.

  23. Re:Mice. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    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: NetBSD is dying

  24. Take the feeding tube out of *BSD! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    _d8b____________________d8b_______d8,
    _?88____________________88P______`8P
    __88b__________________d88
    __888888b__.d888b,_d888888________88b_.d888b,
    __88P_`?8b_?8b,___d8P'_?88________88P_?8b,
    _d88,__d88___`?8b_88b__,88b______d88____`?8b
    d88'`?88P'`?888P'_`?88P'`88b____d88'_`?888P'

    ______d8b________________________d8b
    ______88P________________________88P
    _____d88________________________d88
    _d888888___d8888b_d888b8b___d888888
    d8P'_?88__d8b_,dPd8P'_?88__d8P'_?88
    88b__,88b_88b____88b__,88b_88b__,88b
    `?88P'`88b`?888P'`?88P'`88b`?88P'`88b

  25. A lesson to be learned by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    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 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.

  26. Bob Hope joins the "B" team by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    We must report with a heavy heart that Bob "I'm still dead" Hope has gone on to join the "B" team. 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
    • 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.
  27. FreeBSD is dying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    You don't keed to be Kreskin to look into FreeBSD's future. Even a child knows that FreeBSD is dying. All major marketing surveys show that FreeBSD has steadily declined in market share. FreeBSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim.

    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.

    The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The loss of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral. In truth, for all practical purposes FreeBSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking. It's a fact: FreeBSD is dying.

  28. Hard Times for FreeBSD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    Sure, we all know that FreeBSD 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 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.