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BSD Certifications Coming Soon
hugo_pt writes "The BSD Certification Group was formed in January, 2005 to create a BSD certification program that is recognized as the industry standard for administering BSD systems. The resulting certification process will provide a measure of excellence in both understanding and the ability to perform complex administrative tasks on BSD systems. 2005 will prove an exciting year as the BSD Certification Group develops certification level(s) and testing methodologies. Stay up-to-date regarding the latest developments by joining the public Mailing List. This initiative will prove very important for BSD administrators, as right now, companies don't have any way of knowning if a person is an experienced BSD administrator."
in the thread. Several of the comments there are responses from the BSD certification people.
Sitting Walrus Blog
Which license will the study material be release under?
News: BSD is now certified dead.
...future performance.
So, how does one get set up to give the classes to teach the young pups how to ace this "test"? There is certainly money to be made by promoting the merits of having certified staff members to clueless companies and equally-clueless techs signing up in droves to "prove" themselves.
I say, certification for all!!!!
Now, please turn to page 5 of the required blue handbook (only $79.99) and page 45 of the required red workbook ($150, no returns), and we'll begin... *cackle*
Yeah, right.
On a more serious note, when Linux was the obvious choice, but issues of security and stability where deciding factors, I've always recommended BSD (yes, I know BSD is not Linux, thank you).
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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 the Amazing 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
I
... We see our bourne,
I heard a small sad sound,
And stood awhile among the tombs around:
"Wherefore, *BSDs," said I, "are you distrest,
Now, screened from life's unrest?"
II
--"O not at being here;
But that our future second death is near;
When, with the living, memory of us numbs,
And blank oblivion comes!
III
"These, our UNIX ancestry,
Lie here embraced by deeper death than we;
Nor thread nor kernel can you descry
With keenest backward eye.
IV
"They count as quite forgot;
They are as systems who've existed not;
Theirs is a loss past loss of fitful breath;
It is the second death.
V
"We here, as yet, each day
Are blest with dear recall; as yet, can say
We hold in some soul loved continuance
Of shape and voice and glance.
VI
"But what has been will be --
First memory, then oblivion's swallowing sea;
Like Mac and Amiga, shall we merge into those
Whose story no one knows.
VII
"For which of us could hope
To show in life that world-awakening scope
Granted the few whose memory none lets die,
But all men magnify?
VIII
"We were but Fortune's sport;
Things true, things lovely, things of good report
We neither shunned nor sought
And seeing it we mourn."
It's a matter of degrees. If, for example, you have a laboratory using Linux boxes for custom programs that do functionality related to special experiments or programs, "security" is not really an issue, most of these boxes are not on "The Net". Likewise, equipment on the floor of the production facility are not generally susceptible to HACKERS. Here is a mistake that many here at Slashdot make: All servers and computers are "on the net" or somehow related to net functionality. Not so.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
... facts are facts. ;)
FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
W hat's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."
NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)
OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.
*BSD in general:
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
Wow, another OS has a certification? Does this mean paying a buttload of money just to get a piece of paper saying you're good at reading a book that tells you how to pass the certification? What a joke. You're not going to find real UNIX admins giving a *$&! about certifications. You'll find them sitting in the back room of a corporation writing shell scripts and working or playing with their servers. ...possibly rocking back and forth saying pebkac over and over due to the outstanding number of support emails they get from the front office...
I for one consider this a marvelous life.
Both certs exist solely to "prove" you know linux to HR people with no clue, and no way to tell completant applicants from morons. Get whichever you find easier/cheaper/more convenient (depending on which matters more to you). Because for the people hiring you, they are the same thing.
C'mon, the certification is so the certifiers can make money off the masses.
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 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 ever deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
Given what people usually think of certification programs, here's what we might see as some questions on the certification exam:
1. How do you install a new software package?
A. make port
B. make sherry
C. make install clean
D. make love ^war
2. BSD stands for:
A. Bill Gates Steals our Dollars
B. Bitchin' System, Dude!
C. Berkeley Software Distribution
D. Berkeley people Smoke a lot of Dope
3. Which version of BSD is the best and why?
A. FreeBSD - because PHBs like the word "free".
B. OpenBSD - because the average user thinks clicking on free porn links in emails from Nigeria is safe.
C. NetBSD - because running it on grandpa's pacemaker gives new meaning to the kill command.
D. Dragonfly - because it sounds like a cool SciFi series.
E. Any of the above as long as it makes a Linux advocate feel insecure and act petty.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
I mean it's nice, but it's also kinda useless -- especially if you are unemployed. Neither can 50% of German PC "Magazines" spell the word BSD[1] nor does anybody here care about Yet Another nameless Certification.
d =855
It should make a name for oneself first - obtaining acceptance in the industry should be a primary goal of this new Certification Group.
[1] http://www.bsdforen.de/attachment.php?attachmenti
Same old GNU/Linux FUD, that has been disproved countless times..
In short: the MIT research is *11 years old*, and that Rice study on the TCP/IP stack uses FreeBSD *2.2.6*.
I really don't understand why so many people are against BSD Certifications. Particular fear of something? If you are not found of it, simply don't atend it.
Well, I think that's extremely important for BSD and its future worlwide standard BSD certifications. It's the best way of getting into the corporate world. BSD will be known as an alternate and responsible by big and small corporations and governments will be aware of it.
It's not simply "a paper to check out what you know". It's a way of knowing that you are able, by universal standards, to act responsibly with BSD. It's a clear way of being represented and, socially speaking, it's a way of getting an institucional presence in the business scenario.
Well... I hope all this odds cease now.
for an additional $5 and half an hour of training, in addition to BSD upkeep you can become a certified mortician as well!!
When Microsoft started their certification program some years ago, I saw it as an attempt to leverage more money from the Windows platform. Especially when you see the questions relating to specific dialog boxes on specific versions of the platform.
However, ISO 9002 compliant companies need to document and observe various procedures. And when it comes to hiring, it's easier to list a bunch of certificates required rather than rely on experienced opinion. The hiring procedures become more distant from the acutal job as the company becomes larger.
So Microsoft certification has become successful. A rather clever idea, if what you want to do is increase your revenues. It's spawned a whole new industry in books, tuturials, exams, fees and HR personel who check more boxes.
RedHat's had certification for years too. But they're expected to. They're selling Linux to organisations who expect to spend money on this sort of thing, who expect a set of expensive services, not just a kernel with GNU tools.
And so it seems that BSD certification is an attempt to legitimise BSD to these big spenders, and make all us BSD users/developers/administrators feel we ought to pay too.
If I am to pay, who do I pay bsdcertification.org or bsdcertification.com?
Neither I think.
Everyone hates certs in this crowd. Somehow they make you less hardcore. Whatever. Certs are good for a couple reasons:
1. They give someone focus. Some people can learn on a job, others are very disciplined. Personally I drift around wondering what to study next, so even if I don't want a cert (I only have 1 right now) I will pick up that cert's book and work through it knowing I might take the test sometime in the next year or two.
2. They make you look good to non-geeks. You know, the ones doing the hiring. The ones who list MCSE and CCIE as basically equivalent.
3. They get the technology out there. As a FBSD user I want to see the certification books at Costco. I don't believe FBSD is a geek-only endeavor, and making it accessible to normal people doesn't make it worse.
4. Finally, certs give you some assurance that the person can do *something*. What that something is depends on the test, but at least you know they can, for example, install RH/Apache, set up AD, manipulate database permissions, etc.. From there you have to figure it out yourself but at least you have a little bit of help out of the gate.