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October-December 2003 FreeBSD Status Report

Posted by Hemos on from the the-state-of-the-union dept.

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has posted the 2003 FreeBSD year-end edition status report. He says many new projects are starting up and gaining momentum, including SGI XFS port, MIPS, PowerPC on PPCBug-based embedded boards, and networking locking and multithreading. The end of 2003 also saw the release of FreeBSD 4.9, the first stable release to have greater than 4GB support for the ia32 platform. Work on FreeBSD 5.2 also finished up and was released early in January of 2004."

4 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How can BSD have XFS? by VojakSvejk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    NTFS is not GPL, but Linux can have it.... the implementation of XFS in Linux is GPL, but there's really nothing stopping someone from implementing it the spec themselves.

    And then I suppose OSX could have it, too...

  2. Re:How can BSD have XFS? by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Implementations have copyright, ideas do not. Hence as long as the file system handler code has been written from scratch, it can be any license the author chooses.

    As opposed to any license the author cheeses, which makes no sense whatsoever.

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  3. Re:How good is digital camera support? by dizzy+tunez · · Score: 5, Informative

    FreeBSD has gphoto too. It`s in /usr/ports/graphics/gphoto2.
    Just do a 'make install clean' in that directory, and it will install gphoto and all of the depedencies it requires.

    FreeBSD also got some(all of them, maybe?) of the GUI applications that uses gphoto, like gtkam. KDE probably has one too.

    --
    "If you loved me, you`d all kill yourselves today"
    Spider Jerusalem
  4. Re:OS X? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Apple has a lot of local changes that likely will not be incorporated back to FreeBSD, similarly to the local changes they have in GCC.

    I think the primary reason there was more contributing back in the KHTML/Safari case was that there is a lot of user-visible improvement to be done there that everyone can agree on. Apple's focus in the lower-level parts of the system is often different enough from other projects that they aren't applicable directly.

    Open source projects (especially the BSDs) have a bit more of a perfectionist "find a good solution before doing anything" mentality compared to proprietary software, where it's more often "we want feature X, make it work somehow".

    Actually sometimes I think (feel fee to disagree) Linux has a sort of "lets do it somehow right away and then improve it" mentality, i.e. more by evolution than by design, which also gives good functional results but less consistency.