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FreeBSD 5.3 on the Horizon
underpar writes "ZDNet UK is reporting that FreeBSD is nearing a code freeze. August 15th is the deadline which will be followed by the usual beta testing and a final release hoped for by October 1st. ZDNet interviewed the software engineer leading the release work, Scott Long, for the article. He says: 'The 5.3 release will be the first one where we see the real benefits of that. The multithreaded network stack will outperform everything we've done before, for running applications such as Apache or MySQL.' Status reports can be found on the FreeBSD website." I've been using the last technology release of FreeBSD for some time now, and am really looking forward to the 5.3 release, as well as the 5-STABLE branch that's rumored to follow soon after.
Quoth the status report:
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Patents which will have rock solid prior art and thus will be invalid -- I doubt Microsoft would waste the money. They've certainly used BSD source before, and had access for plenty longer; can you point to anything from there that they've already patented?
As a life-long practicing Christian, active in my local church, with many practicing Christian friends, I just can not in good conscience use an operating system that uses an image of Satan as its mascot.
Context is everything. The BSD "daemon" is in no way supposed to lead people in worship or in any other way lead people to violate commandment #1. In fact, as an open source project, I feel that projects such as FreeBSD and Linux best represent the kind of software development the Acts early church of the Apostles would do: communal. Honsetly, it is not menat the celebrate satan or represent some sort of mystic iconography.
Microsoft, on the other hand (which you currently use in favor of BSD), is a perfect example of immoral greed (if you mods disagree; fine. I'm just calling it how it looks from here), which I find much more morally reprehensible than a cartoon devil; because unlike the cartoon, it is real.
So, as a recent convert to Christianity, I find a great moral symbol in the fact that I run 100% open source at home, as opposed to corporate mammon.
Other folks have responded. I'll just point out that the mascot is not Satan. Just as the mascot for the Duke Blue Devils and the icon on Underwood Devilled Ham are not Satan either. There isn't any thing holier about commercial products that have angels as their icon and the Anaheim Angels are not automatically the more righteous baseball team. (Back in the 80s there were baseball players with the name Teufel and Gott. It was not the apocalypse when they faced off.)
You have your faith and its symbols, ethics, and morals. It is a serious question as to how you integrate this into what some may call your secular existence. If you honestly believe that either God, Beelzebub or you will be confused as to your allegiances and as to what your mortal life means, then, you're right, stay away from FreeBSD.
Now, unlike the duality of heaven and hell, there are more than two points on the operating system spectrum. Other unix-like operating systems which do not use a devil mascot are NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux (many distros), and Solaris x86. The latter is a Unix operating system. Seek and you shall find.