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Interview with Matthew Dillon of DragonFly BSD
JigSaw writes "Well-known FreeBSD/DragonFly/Linux/Amiga system hacker Matthew Dillon discusses a number of interesting points regarding where the BSDs are going, the status and goals of his latest project DragonFly BSD, the status of his innovative Backplane distributed database, his exciting plans to develop DragonFly into a transparently cluster-capable system implementing native SSI (Single System Image) which is something that no other operating system can do today, and more."
Dragonfly BSD seems to be chugging along quite nicely.
The further away they get from their 4.x FreeBSD roots, though, the more I wish they'd release an ISO. Particularly since the last ISOs for the 4 series of FreeBSD are probably going to be totally gone in a few months.
"The reason for this excitement is that it is becoming clear to us that we can develop very clean-looking, elegant, debuggable, SMP scaleable software using this model whereas using the mutex model generally results in much less elegant (even ugly), difficult-to-debug code. Code complexity and code quality is a very important issue in any large piece of software and we believe we have hit on a model that directly addresses the issue in an SMP environment without compromising performance."
I don't really know what he's talking about, but:
If he's right, everybody wins.
Even if he's wrong and we find out why, everybody wins.
It sounds like Linux isn't hurting BSD any, and methinks for a number of reasons, Linux wouldn't be what it is today without the BSD's.
There is no need for BSD-from-scratch disto.
1: All the BSDs are entirely different operating systems, which are lumped into one category becuase of their roots.
2: Since no extra bullshit is thrown in like linux, there is less need for reworking the base.
3: BSD is not obscure in the least, it is rather alive and florishing.
BTW you forgot to mention Solaris, which has it's roots in BSD too.
I think of the various Linux distros as "forks" of whatever Linus himself runs. There are literally dozens of Linux forks. Too bad Linus doesn't release a distro, so we'd know what Linux is supposed to look like. If you sit down at a Linux system you have no idea what you're going to find. From a Systems Administration standpoint alone that makes *BSD a better choice for corporations with a large number of hosts, but Linux gets all the press.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
If your application is licensed under the GPL or compatible OSI license (learn more at opensource.org) approved by Backplane, Inc., you are free and welcome to ship the Backplane open source database with your application.
followed by:
If you power an application using the Backplane database that you market or sell, or use that application to conduct any form of online commerce (selling/buying products or services over a website) you need to purchase the Backplane Commercial License.
The example given is if you run an email service from which you sell access to other companies, you must buy the commerical license.
My question is, what if the program that provides the email service is GPL. Do I have to buy a commercial license or not? One of the great things about GPL software is that if it's an internal piece of software, you can mix proprietary and GPL code as much as you want, as long as you never redistribute the program to anyone.
Also, how does dual licensing work with this? Can I license it under the GPL to myself, and then sell copies under another license to other people? Obviously THEY would have to buy a commercial license, but do I?
Just trying to point out some holes in the licensing..
Oops, just noticed the part at the end saying:
NOTE: In any of these examples, if the entire application or service is 100% GPL compatible, you may use the Backplane Free License.
But that still leaves open the question about dual licensing..
Um, linux is a kernel, not a distro. the linux kernel is what "linux is supposed to look like" to linus.
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