Posted by
timothy
on from the how-many-shopping-days-left dept.
ocipio writes "FreeBSD 5.2 is scheduled to be released by Christmas. Recently marked 5.2-BETA, the ports tree is in a freeze and developers are asking for testing. A TODO list is available for those interested."
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.
Elegy for *BSD
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
Elegy For *BSD
I am a *BSD user
and I try hard to be brave
That is a tall order
*BSD's foot is in the grave.
I tap at my toy keyboard
and whistle a happy tune
but keeping happy's so hard,
*BSD died so soon.
Each day I wake and softly sob
Nightfall finds me crying
Not only am I a zit faced slob
but *BSD is dying.
STRANGE ATTRACTORS
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
All species are subject to cycles of sustained growth and sudden calamity.
It is a rhythm as old as life itself, and is an integral part of the
evolutionary process.
The classical symptoms of a species in crisis
include:
Increased aggression
Sexual dysfunction
And disease.
It is a fact: *BSD is dying
Troll-in-one for the gay Linux fanboy wankers
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
All the *BSD is dying posts are contained in this one post to spare the BSD section of the heavy trolling. If you have mod points and you're a wanking Linux fagboy whose momma never loved him, please mod this up so that everybody will know your dark and dirty private fantasy -- that *BSD is dying, and that you masturbate like a monkey on drugs! There's no need to post your own trolls, as they will only be redundant and you'll make yourself look even more like an asshole than you already are!
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. Keep your flames to yourself -- I already know you have a distorted psychological need to imagine BSD as dying because it only helps to relieve the cognitive dissonance you are currently experiencing with Linux. In reality, though, it only shows a deep-seated jealousy towards BSD, which you'll go to any lengths to deny.
_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_
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
I must speak out about *BSD!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
I must make it clear that:
1) *BSD is associated with the Devil (see mascot). 2) *BSD promotes anti-social behaviour. 3) *BSD encourages a homosexual lifestyle. 4) *BSD stands for destruction of the economy. 5) *BSD attacks the average man in the street. 6) *BSD allows no critisms of its mission. 7) *BSD harbours terrorists and other state enemies. 8) *BSD collects weapons of mass destruction. 9) *BSD believes in the enprisionment of mankind. 10) *BSD is dying.
Notable quotables
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
FreeBSD? In the immortal words of DeForest Kelley:
Slashdot Mirror
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.
It is a rhythm as old as life itself, and is an integral part of the evolutionary process.
The classical symptoms of a species in crisis include:
- Increased aggression
- Sexual dysfunction
-
And disease.
It is a fact: *BSD is dyingAll the *BSD is dying posts are contained in this one post to spare the BSD section of the heavy trolling. If you have mod points and you're a wanking Linux fagboy whose momma never loved him, please mod this up so that everybody will know your dark and dirty private fantasy -- that *BSD is dying, and that you masturbate like a monkey on drugs! There's no need to post your own trolls, as they will only be redundant and you'll make yourself look even more like an asshole than you already are!
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. Keep your flames to yourself -- I already know you have a distorted psychological need to imagine BSD as dying because it only helps to relieve the cognitive dissonance you are currently experiencing with Linux. In reality, though, it only shows a deep-seated jealousy towards BSD, which you'll go to any lengths to deny.
_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_
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
_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_
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
I must make it clear that:
1) *BSD is associated with the Devil (see mascot).
2) *BSD promotes anti-social behaviour.
3) *BSD encourages a homosexual lifestyle.
4) *BSD stands for destruction of the economy.
5) *BSD attacks the average man in the street.
6) *BSD allows no critisms of its mission.
7) *BSD harbours terrorists and other state enemies.
8) *BSD collects weapons of mass destruction.
9) *BSD believes in the enprisionment of mankind.
10) *BSD is dying.