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DragonFlyBSD 1.0A review
ValourX writes "NewsForge has a review of DragonFlyBSD 1.0A. If you recall, this was forked from FreeBSD 4.8 a little more than a year ago, and has since achieved several of its goals. According to the review it's not quite ready for prime time yet, but it looks like DragonFly is shaping up to be the ultimate BSD."
Short answer : yes
However the opposite is not true without the consent of the contributors to the GPL code.
A BSD that can run on a toaster or on EarthSim which is compiled from the code tree
A BSD which is very, very secure and runs on at least a couple of different CPUs.
A BSD that runs really well on the most prevalent architecture and has a large software selection that is as easy to install (or easier) than on Windows or Mac OS X. Dragonfly isn't any of things right now but in the future, who knows? That's one of the interesting things about BSD: if an idea turns out to be really useful eventually it makes into all of them (at least where it makes sense) if it sucks, well evolution it pretty ruthless.
Honestly though it does seam like there is lot of acrimony (I suppose that's to be expected in cases where more than one person is involved) and I hope that resources that should have been programming weren't used in the non-technical parts of the effort to fork (i.e. a totally new website &tc.) but I suppose there is no avoiding that. I hope all of this works out, I find LWKT fairly interesting and have successfully launched a product running NetBSD which turned out really groovy.
Can't resist this: OtterBSD?
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
But seriously, I wonder if he looked through the DragonFlyBSD website at any great length, or read through any of the mailing lists before he tried to install. I used dragonfly as my main desktop OS (but wait, it's not able to be used as a desktop os, right?) for a few months prior to the 1.0 release. X compiled fine from ports, so did gnome and a multitude of other programs. I rebuild world and the kernel atleast every other day (major changes are always going on, bugs are always being fixed, etc), and never had, at any moment, an unusable system. There is a guidebook/handbook in development. As for the SMP issues, I can't really say anything, since I don't have a SMP box, but I know that area's a little shakey.
I have a feeling the author of this article was expecting to jump into a 1.0 release OS the same way he would jump into FreeBSD 4.x stable. That's just not the way it works. You have to do research before you dive into a hyper-actively developed OS in the state that DragonFly is currently in. It's like running FreeBSD-current, only with the steel insides ripped out and replaced with titanium, gear by gear.
with most of NetBSD's packages all you type is "pkg_add" or if you need source (like I do mostly) you use pkgsrc and "make && make install in the correct directory. I think this is the case with the rest of *BSD (sub ports with package)
With the windows & OS X you have to find the package on the 'net first
Use Samba for example (disregarding the fact that Samba takes over 16 hours to compile on my platform) You go to the Samba directory in /usr/pkgsrc/net/samba2/ and execute the commands all of the source is downloaded, compiled and installed and because my system already knows it's a 64bit MIPS system I need not remind it so the right config and make file are processed
Having said that I must admit that SuSE's YAST is nice also because of the search & GUI and the YOU update thingy.
I use OSX daily and it's not that convenient! (It would be if Other stuff was in software update rather than just Apple
While I'm ranting about how cool things are OpenOfficeOrg native file formats are truly cool (zipped!?) and I despise XML (Disclaimer I'm an developer for embedded devices and find *ML way to verbose)
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
No, the copyright owner(s) can give explicit permission for ANY uses of their code regardless of whether it also happens to be licensed under the GPL.
As a side comment, I'm not sure I got the review, it seemed a little unfair. Dragonfly is new, but it seems a lot more stable and friendly then the review would wish you to believe.
The code doesn't have to change, it can be the same code that's in the GPLed software. Splitting hairs over semantics doesn't help anyone.