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OpenBSD Hackathon Underway
Triumph The Insult C writes "Aside from some stealth developers, the annual OpenBSD Hackathon, held in Calgary, is underway, according to Theo. They've been doing some recent work on SMP, and have some impressive AMD SMP gear there that they've got to hack around with. A few years ago, it was PF. Who knows what they'll come up with this time that knocks our socks off."
If history repeats itself, it'd be an Apache clone.
Combine OpenBSD with a Plumbers conference and they can both participate in a Crack-a-thon.
Other plans include replacing BIND with djbdns, and integrating SPF+ with sendmail.
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Yoda now confirms: *BSD IS DEAD!
These hackathons always scare me a bit. Major functionality has a habbit of going from non-existant to solid before it's over.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD 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 posts.
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 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 OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Whoever modded this as Interesting is a fucking clown.
Try clicking on the links before blindly believing this idiot's assertions
FYI, this is an elaborate soviet russia-style troll.
Props to the O-BSD team....come up with some good stuff, y'hear!
Accordingly, word on the street is that significant effort this hackathon will be put into fixing the first ever OpenBSD virus...
I think a fix has already been found for this particular "virus".
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
It's at times like this that we need a "-1: Idiocy of post only matched by idiocy of moderation" option for moderation.
# fstat -f / | ipsecadm - - | tcpdump -i - | less
Thanks for your contribution to my state of the art, nacturnation (do you mind if I call nacty?)
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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 [theos.com] 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.
Of course, nobody would care for a better installer. Nobody in his right mind would demand one. No, not me. Not anyone! Allocating resources to an installer? Preposterous!
People move along, there's nothing to see here.
(Disclaimer: This is a joke. Now shoo!)
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.
With all the work that has been done on SMP, hopefully they'll get some good work done on it. miklas@ has done some wonderful work, while I may not agree with the big kernel lock, it's a start.
/. instead of hacking SMP up there :-p
Good luck to those reading
Error 407 - No creative sig found
[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It
Hacking their way into BSDs coffin
Jesus god you're a faggot.
Actually all users could use a thoroughly code-reviewed system with a safe default install.
The net would be a bit safer for sure, even if it was just a bit.
More user-friendly installer => wider user-base => less zombies for DDoS. Maybe even more money for OpenBSD development? More OpenBSD related jobs? More interest in embedded ports? More positive PR?
Too bad you're so shortsighted!
All major 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 only be among OS hobbyists. *BSD continues to decay, and nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time; for all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
I a few weeks ago, I decided to give OpenBSD a try, having used FreeBSD and Linux quite a lot. So I downloaded and wrote the ftp install disk and booted it on my old AMD Athlon 750. I set up all the disks slices and everything was going fine until it was time to initialize the NIC so I could start downloading packages. The install issued an error message about a "stray interrupt" on IRQ 7 and then it locked up hard. So, I thought "that was strange" and power cycled the machine and tried again. Same thing. So I googled through countless message boards and determined that the kernel probably didn't like the chipset on my motherboard. There were various fixes offered (such as enabling lpt in the bios) but none worked.
Now the interesting thing is that a vanilla linux kernel (I built Linux From Scratch on this box before) will issue a similar message ("spurious interrupt"), but Linux won't lock up like OpenBSD did. Linux just sends the message to stderr and keeps on working. Most distribution tweaked kernels don't have any problem at all and never complain.
Well, "no problem, you've got some flaky hardware" you are probably getting ready to say. I thought so too. So I tried it on another box (This one a P-3 450 Compaq). This time the installer wouldn't even boot. It issued some cryptic message and stopped before the installer's kernel was even booted. Having struck out on two machines, I gave up and installed FreeBSD without incident.
I had started with high hopes of giving OpenBSD a whirl because I wanted to try out what has been described as a bloat-less, minimal, well put togather unix that emphasized correctness over bleed-edge features. I was not impresed. The whold affair has sort of put me off from OpenBSD. I know OpenBSD is focused on security and not having pretty installers. I don't care if the installer is pretty, but I do care it it locks up and is unusable on fairly standard equipment. Neither of these machines have anything exotic about them. They are just standard x86 boxen that work well with FreeBSD and Linux. The OpenBSD team needs to give their installer some more polish (from the functional standpoint not the prettiness standpoint)
Christ. I know this post is offtopic also, but what is the deal and all of these people bashing FreeBSD. I mean... if it's actually dead, new updates wouldn't be coming out, would they? You do know that FreeBSD 4.10 was released recently, don't you? I'm going to be throwing together a computer this summer just for installing FreeBSD on. As long as software has some users and continues to be updated, it's not dead. Hell, Windows 95 isn't even dead yet... it may not be updated any more, but a lot of people still use it.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
I believe i read that one of the points of this was going to be dramatically improving the fail-over abilities of OpenBSD.
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
Actually usability and security often enough go well enough hand in hand.
The easier the default install, the less likely are errors. The more powerful the configuration interface, the less errors, the more safe installs.
Features like W^X or stack canaries make it harder to crack a box, but not impossible. But an app free of overflows and with a good config does. So add nice management/installation tools.
In fact, with the choice of already available installer apps out there it shouldn't be too hard adapting one, so what's the big deal?
Most of the security of OpenBSD stems from careful code review, not featuritis. But they won't be reviewing, I bet, but adding features.
Oh, and beside: I guess they'll mostly focus on SMP anyway. That's not a security feature at all, so your point is moot. Most of the current OpenBSD user population doesn't even have use for it, so it clearly is a feature aimed towards more popularity.
The OpenBSD team needs to give their installer some more polish (from the functional standpoint not the prettiness standpoint)
It seems you have been quite unlucky.
I've been using OpenBSD since 2.5. The installer was a bit of a shock at first, but once it makes sense, it is wonderful (and it is sensible). I usually can install OpenBSD with X in under 5 minutes and I've only ever found one machine to not install for me (an IBM Thinkpad series 1300).
I've installed on tons of x86 machines, some MacPPC, a 68k Mac and a Sun Ultra 10. No problems. I cannot say the same for some Linux distros or the other BSD's.
I plan to have another crack at that Thinkpad, now that OpenBSD 3.5 has new boot code.
There are times when OpenBSD won't work, where some Linux distro does or vice versa. So try again. Don't write OpenBSD off because of a few bad initial attempts. I've been using Linux for about 7 years and tried lots of distros and the BSD's. I settled on OpenBSD (and Debian when I must use Linux).
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Fewer and fewer normal people have any interest in *BSD whatsoever. *BSD has become primarily the realm of the weirdo and emotionally disturbed. Perhaps someday in the future we will turn on the Antiques Road Show and find some *BSD bric-a-brac in a curio display.
what's a stealth developer? Do they dress in black and only program on black laptops in the shadows, where no one can see them?
Now you face my Ninja C++ operator of death!
Is some more info on what SMP(Symmetric multiprocessing)actually is and what it's advantages and drawbacks are.
Creative Demolition
I was using a 3.4 install disk. The Compaq that I tried it on wouldn't even boot at all with 3.4. If the boot code is different on 3.5, I'll give it another try.
Oh cool, I hope it works for you.
Sometimes when I create OpenBSD -stable UltraSPARC CD's, I boot from older genuine OpenBSD UltraSPARC media and then swap with my -stable CD (because I have put little effort into figuring out how to make a bootable UltraSPARC OpenBSD CD). One day, I rekon it might bite me. ; )
My Thinkpad is a type 1161-41U. OpenBSD 3.5 bootable CD (home made from -stable), I can confirm, still does not boot.
I might try booting from various 3.5 floppies...
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
I guess the only chance OpenBSD will ever have in the corporate world is on servers and firewalls, and in security-related embedded devices.
It's fine for this because it is designed for this and it clearly is the focus of its designers.
I cannot imagine a desktop OpenBSD simply because nobody is there who's willing to apply the necessary polish to make it worthwhile and usable in a user sense.
If no one is willing to contribute a better installer, while every Linux distro can offer one (even Debian is hacking on a better one), it's fairly sure no one wants one, or the people that could make one are deterred by some aspects of the OpenBSD project - perhaps on a personal basis, or simply because they think their work would not be appreciated, or because they think OpenBSD's tiny marketshare would simply grant them not enough fame or whatever rewards open source work.
I'm aware that the *BSD projects already are fairly well behind on attracting developers. I guess the Debian project alone has more developers than all *BSDs together. I guess there wouldn't be a ports tree else. If there would be enough maintainers, all would be packages.
So I'm not very surprised there are not enough people for writing installers or polishing the dektop. Yet a usable installer would greatly help OpenBSD popularity, leading to a greater developer exposure.