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More on OpenBSD 3.7 Release
putko writes "As previously reported, OpenBSD 3.7 is released. Here's some interviews with the people behind the release about the new features, including information about which companies are complying with requests for documentation and permission to freely distribute required firmware, and which are not. Ralink Tech and Realtek 'GOOD,'Intel 'BAD.'
The next time I build/buy a wireless product, I'll want Realtek or Ralink Tech inside -- because getting software to work with it will be easier. Ralink Tech and Realtek are Taiwanese, by the way."
Are there actually any Free 802.11g drivers for Linux? Last time I checked, the only one in the kernel was prism54, which is useless for any device you can buy at the moment. :(
If I post "its good that linux is still going" in a linux thread will I get modded up for that? And "BSD" isn't still going, the last release was 4.4BSD lite way back when. There are a few different OS's based on that code, they each have their own names, their own developers, their own goals, and they aren't all going to magically die all at the same time somehow.
Have any of you noticed the the hardware producers are standing in the way of open source software ? If you intend to install a Linux BSD or SunOS, drivers for the videocard`s, LAN card`s, TV Tuners, digital camera`s are very hard to find. On the driver CD suplied by the vendor you will find only drivers for Windows. So the point of this news should be not who are able to distribute the firmwares then why are they not suplied by the vendor on the install CD and why can`t they be included in the OS.
Think like a hacker, act like a hacker, but never become a hacker !
Intel denies help with firmware, yet they donate coders to the Linux kernel (maybe *bsd's too, haven't checked out)
I guess it's safer for them to donate developers than to give away what i guess they think they have ("trade secrets")
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
All the packages in OpenBSD 3.7 packages directory are bad. They all expect libraries of previous releases, makes me think they were simply copied from 3.6, and older in a few cases. I had to make links to libc.so.39 as libc.so.38, libc.so.37 and libc.so.36 to make various apps work, same for ssl, crypt, libstdc++ and a bunch of other libs.
At least the core OpenBSD 3.7 is complete and I imagine the packages will be brought up to date in time. Till then, compile your own or use ports.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Now, no one hesitates to bust on the Monopoly Squad for being a monoculture.
Here you have some smart people making sure that the same can't be said of *nix, and they can't get no lovin'.
Hypocrisy looks better on the other side of the argument.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Oh, no, wait. That was AT&T, in their bid to have BSD declared AT&T proprietary, on the grounds that BSD coders may, potentially, have seen AT&T Intellectual Property and therefore be encumbered for life, along with everything they wrote.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Notepad is a Windows programme, if you want Windows you should try running Windows.
And of course, Windows doesn't have crashes either.
I'll admit it, I'd not read this troll before, but it's not funny or even very well done. How long as OpenBSD 3.7 been out? Two days you say? So how many days is a "few" then?
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
Ah! This must be the latest cookie-cutter troll. Was posted with Linux in place a few days back.
the full comment that gave it that legendy reputation is in the following source file (you have to scroll past the license boilerplate first).L ENG5
http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/pci/if_rl.c?v=RE
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
A number of OpenBSD developers will be speaking at the CUUG meeting on tuesday the 24th. It's extremely interesting to see them discuss the stuff they do, and it's a good opportunity to ask questions.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
OMG TEH TAIWANESE ARE COMING
Maybe we should just nuke the entire country to be safe?
There is a difference, snapshots are not expected to be as stable because they're there for testing purposes.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
"An employee suggested to me that we load 3.7 on a few machines here as an evaluation. [...] I made the employee uninstall 3.7 from the machines and lets just say he's not with us anymore."
You kicked an employee out because an evaluation that he suggested didn't work out? That is, pardon my French, completely fucked. The whole reason you do evaluations is so that you don't end up in a position where new products put people's job on the line.
Apart from anything else, from now on if an employee suddenly discovers a product that at a stroke will double productivity, halve costs and save small kittens from drowning, do you think they're going to tell you about it? No, they're going to hide behind conformity, in the hope that that way they'll keep their jobs.
Congrats, you've singlehandedly halted improvement of your company's computing infrastructure. I'm sure it'll mean far less trouble for you, right up to the point where an innovative competitor buys you up and fires everyone.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
in production you would have 2x boxes and use carp to fail from one to the other. Also you wouldnt do it in the middle of the day, but in off peak hours. Additionally you dont run all the eggs in one basket so to say.
BOFH has nothing on you. Kudos, but I'm damn glad I don't work with you :P
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
I wish HW manufacturers would just release the specs, because it's usually possible to hack it anyway, and closed firmware doesn't give them an edge in the marketplace, for the reason I state in the topic. I think one obstacle in their minds is that if the HW dies while using untested (by them) firmware/drivers, they might be liable. Simple enough--just state in the warranty that it only applies to officially released firmware/drivers. Maybe then we can all get on with our lives instead of living in paranoia.
Don't give the PRC(People's Republic of China) any ideas...
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
It reminded me of one of Grandpa Simpson's rants. Including that I fell asleep in the middle of reading it.
To be 100% precise, the original port by William Jolitz and his wife to the i386 architecture (probably one of the smallest BSD development teams of all time, and probably the least-credited for the work they did) had potentially encumbered code.
Most of the "potential" encumberances were header files and a few relatively minor bits of code that AT&T could easily have just released to the public. However, AT&T wanted to play dirty, and decided that ANYONE who saw AT&T code was "encumbered" and that therefore any code later produced must also be encumbered.
As was noted by commentators at the time, this means that those who use constructs such as "for" loops that use the ++ operator are in violation of AT&T Intellectual Property terms, as this specific practice originated from a book by an AT&T coder.
AT&T did lose their lawsuit against iBSD, but iBSD folded not long after because of the suit, IIRC. (The suit actually came about, not because iBSD were using AT&T stuff - the Jolitz' had been doing so for some time by then - but because they were selling it and not giving AT&T any kickbacks.)
Interestingly, as part of the SCO vs IBM case, SCO want to revisit that decision and get it overturned. Again, it seems to have little to do with Linux actually including any of this supposed code, but because IBM and SGI are making money from Linux and SCO isn't.
Personally, I think anyone who demands kickbacks of this kind should be banned from visiting any website other than MSNBC's weblog. Well, at least they'll find kindred spirits there.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The "BSD-is-dying troll" is:
[ ] an idiot, [ ] green, [ ] bored, [ ] Pixar animated
And therefore should be:
[ ] shot at dawn, [ ] sent to work at SCO, [ ] enlisted
Besides which, the troll is so ancient that:
[ ] Archimedes discredited it, [ ] It underwent heat-death prior to the birth of the solar system
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Henning Brauer: Nobody ever gave us anything back. A plethora of vendors ship OpenSSH--commercial Unix vendors (basically all of them), all of the Linux distributors, and lots of hardware vendors (like HP in their switches)--but none of them seem to care; none of them ever gave us anything back. All of them should very well know that quality software doesn't "just happen," but needs some funding. Yet, they don't help at all.
That just blows. A while back the OpenBSD team had to raise funds to acquire Dell hardware so that their CVS server could scale up. The CVS server that holds repositories for all Open* projects. You would think that one of these companies would have just donated the hardware. But nope.
Not often you see that combination of words when referring to network cards...
Does the help from Realtek mean that open source operating systems (i.e. Linux/BSD/ReactOS etc) will be able to better support the RTL8180 WiFi chipset? (if so, thats GREAT because I own a RTL8180 board :)
Did you have an onion tied to your belt? I hear it was the style at the time :)
Useless as in, every device currently available (at least in the UK and I thought the US) uses the SMC 2802W V2 chipset, that the prism54 driver won't support. Bastard manufacturers made the change without changing their products' model numbers, or even FCC IDs(!), so you don't know what you will get until you get it. That's the reason I am stuck with using the shitty Windows drivers via the excellent ndiswrapper.
prism54 chipset cards suck anyway, because you need to use non-Free firmware.
Here's a quote:
"And to the Linux "vendors" that regardlessly ship non-free firmware images with their OSes, I'd say that they are playing against their camp. Why would vendors ever change their policies if such things are accepted by the open source community?"
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Does CrossOver Office work on OpenBSD?
:-)
It all depends on what you define as "desktop"
The OpenBSD FAQ states clearly that they're not trying to overtake the world. OpenBSD is an excellent Unix-like system, and it looks works and feels just like any Gnome or KDE desktop would.
Right now, for me, the biggest difficulty I'm having is with source code full of Linuxism that present difficulty when compiling on OpenBSD for compiling on Unix, because some Linux fuckheads forget they're supposed to be on Unix (I'm sorry, I feel strongly about this...)
"Desktop" for me means "programming language", "scientific applications" and "mathematical software." And when I say "programming languages", I don't mean C, Python, Perl, etc. But Qi, Common Lisp, Haskell, Mozart, Mercury, etc...On all that stuff, I am having some difficulty on OpenBSD because of the said "writing for Linux" mentality (so I keep Debian around...). But I think the trend is for things to get better...Look at FreeBSD, they have everything you have on Linux...
You can't blame BSD folks for that, you have to educate people about Unix.
But if you feel you need CrossOver Office (and you might, for legitimate reasons), you haven't really given up on your Microsoft dependency, have you? So why sweat it?
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
ORN: A lot of companies have been using OpenSSH in their products (Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Apple, GNU/Linux vendors, etc.). Did they give anything back, like donations or hardware?
Henning Brauer: Nobody ever gave us anything back. A plethora of vendors ship OpenSSH--commercial Unix vendors (basically all of them), all of the Linux distributors, and lots of hardware vendors (like HP in their switches)--but none of them seem to care; none of them ever gave us anything back. All of them should very well know that quality software doesn't "just happen," but needs some funding. Yet, they don't help at all.
This seems like a stupid comment. You do work and the license it under the BSD licence. You cant complain that these companies comply 100% with the license. If you want money for it, start a company to develop that software and then sell it. You can't say "software should be free" and then complain that others dont pay for/contribute to it.
When will OpenBSD finally boot above cylinder 1024 or whatever? I am very serious about this because I love OpenBSD and would like to see it on more desktops. It has progressed much in the last 10 years.
Do we have to wait for version 5.0 before Theo "gets it?"
Rob