Slashdot Mirror
DragonFlyBSD Team Interviewed
lowks writes "A nice little interview from the ONLamp BSD advocacy page where we get to peer a little into the goings ons and updates as well as plans for DragonFlyBSD. Highlights include the rationale behind DragonFlyBSD and peeks into the current engine as well as goodies planned to be implemented in the future versions. DragonFlyBSD is another flavour of BSD which forked from the FreeBSD 4.x branch not too long ago. It's headed by Matt Dillon, who forged out on his own and started DragonFlyBSD due to technical differences with the FreeBSD team ."
Or I suppose it could be that I'm mildly interested in Dragonfly and I think Matt et all have a strong argument in LWKT.
Hmmm now I wonder what sort of SMP strategy is used in OS X??
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Please. There are what, 300 different Linux distros?
Guess what, different people have different goals and needs. Matt Doollon wanted to implement SMP in a different way than his (then) fellow FreeBSD developers had envisioned. NetBSD guys want to run on every platform out there. OpenBSD is about security.
Go back to your cave if you have nothing to contribute, but don't tell people what to do with their free time.
Mike Bouma
It seems like this new DragonFLy BSD project could become very interesting. I have been wondering for a while what their exact purpose was for the split, and I think I like it. Their goal of implementing cleaner and more scalable structures sounds like a worthy one, even if it is a long tem goal.
Who knows, someday the BSD world might break up lke this:
OpenBSD is for Routers and firewalls
NetBSD is for XBox/Toaster/microwave/everything else =P
FreeBSD is for Servers
and
DragonBSD is for SSI Supercomputers or other highly scalable systems.
Since we can safely assume that the *BSD developers are running their own OS, this implies that the 5 developers are very, very productive! So all the thousands of GNU/Linux kernel hackers quite simply can't match the quality, stability and speed of what is done by the 5 (five) *BSD hackers. By the way, the *BSD hackers has to develop userland in addition to kernel work ;-)
Good News Everyone!
Turns out that *BSD is stronger than ever!
According to an Inernetnews article, Netcraft has confirmed that *BSD has "dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
There has been a steady increase in *BSD developers over the past decade.
There are currently 307 FreeBSD developers as of the 2004 core team election.
You can read more about FreeBSD here
If you would like to try out a BSD, you can download: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or DragonflyBSD
Enjoy!
Why is it that, for any BSD article, half of the responses are standard, boring, retarded "BSD is dying" posts. I think it is just a bunch of linux evangelists with massive insecurities, just wanting to ensure that linux stays at the top of the heap when it comes to open-source operating systems. Who says that all competition has to come from Microsoft? It's not like they're amazing to begin with. (For the record: I am a happy Linux user. I tried OpenBSD, and found that I didn't like it. This does not stop me from realizing that some people like it more, and that it may be better for some purposes. At the moment, I am considering giving FreeBSD a try. Generally I'm open-minded towards all operating systems. Yes. Even Windows, to a lesser degree)
It looks like BSD is gaining more market share now that ever before. There is a new company Crescent Anchor with a commercially supported BSD operating system called SilverOS which looks likes its based off of the upcoming release of DragonFly. Http://www.crescentanchor.com
From reading through the site site the operating system looks very interesting. They already have a large client base, with some very respectable companies listed. I think I'll order a copy and at least give it a try as FreeBSD 4.x is what we use at work and I've noticed the development work on 4.x has slowed down a lot in the past year . SilverOS/DragonFly might be what we start running next. We've already been looking at DragonFly for some time now and if there is a company offering commercial support I can't see a reason not to start using it now.
Matt is still on some of the mailing lists. I've seen him recently (past several days) involved in some very deep technical discussions.
I personally think that even if Matt had not lost his FreeBSD commit bit, he might have started DragonFly anyways. DF is an excellent vehicle for trying out some new architectural approaches to problems that are just fundamentally different from FreeBSD 5 was/is doing.