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NetBSD Quarterly Status Report Published

Posted by timothy on from the what-they've-done dept.

jschauma writes "The NetBSD Foundation published its second quarterly status report in 2005, covering the months April through June of 2005. Among many other things, this status report covers NetBSD's participation in Google's "Summer of Code", the new stable pkgsrc branch and various port-specific items."

19 comments

  1. sad... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Slashdot: News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. ...unless the news is about anything related to BSD, in which case it gets completely ignored (or trolled).

    Kinda sad considering this is actually worth discussing. (i.e. not a dupe or trying to provoke anti-MS comments or conspiracy theories)

    1. Re:sad... by Nimrangul · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Well, the BSD articles seem to be trolled so much because of Linux fans feeling insecure.

      It seems to me to be a case of George Carlin's Bigger Dick Foreign Policy being translated to the software world.

      You see, Linux fans get to say that they work with Free and Open software, but then there are these BSD guys that claim to be working on Freer and Opener software. They don't force cooperation and they don't allow as much binary stuff in their codebases.

      This makes Linux fans feel uncomfortable and since they have no bombs handy, they troll.

      What they need to do is just be the freedom loving hippies they claim to be and stop being bullying jerks, but most of them grew up in a nation run under the Bigger Dick Foreign Policy and thus don't really know how to get along with people.

      I call it the Bigger Dick Sofware Scheme, I'm open to further developing of the theory, just leave proper credit.

      Hmmm, BDSS, maybe if I rearranged those words a little.

      --
      I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
    2. Re:sad... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      BSDS - the Better Software Development System

      Linux user: What? They have better design? Troll them!

    3. Re:sad... by MichaelSmith · · Score: 3, Insightful
      gets completely ignored

      Well my excuse is that it came in at 4:00 in the morning.

      I plan to ignore the 3.0 release in the same way I have ignored the 1.6, 2.0 and 2.0.2 releases on my web servers.

      It will run, I will demand and get total reliability, and will therefore spend very little time thinking about it.

      If you want to talk about something, talk about something with issues

      --
      http://michaelsmith.id.au
    4. Re:sad... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What? They have bigger disks? Troll them!

    5. Re:sad... by setagllib · · Score: 1

      Mod parent up, first intelligent thing I've read on Slashdot ever

      --
      Sam ty sig.
  2. Requiem for the FUD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    // Please *don't* mod this up. It has already been done! Thx

    ... 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."
    What'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:
    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."
    ..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

    --
    Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

  3. Good Show by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

    I am glad to see NetBSD will be getting a Project Evil analogue. Much as I hate the idea of encouraging hardware developers to not release native drivers, I do get a lot of benefit from Project Evil. My ThinkPad has a PC-Card 802.11g interface which only has Windows binary drivers. I can use it with FreeBSD via Project Evil, but I can't use it under NetBSD at the moment. It will also be nice to have HFS+ support. FreeBSD has an unmaintained HFS+ module ported from the Darwin source code, but nothing native. I have a couple of (large) external hard drives that are HFS+ formatted, and would like to use them. HFS+ also have very nice support for indexed meta-data, and it would be nice to use it as a root filesystem for a desktop NetBSD system.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  4. pkgsrc is an amazing piece of technology. by CyricZ · · Score: 1

    Pkgsrc is truly an amazing piece of technology. It has succeeded in merging the packaging systems of the Big Four BSDs: NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD. Indeed, its seamless integration with any of those systems shows its true merit. And with the work of package maintenance shared by the projects, there is now more time to focus on improving the main aspects of the operating systems: the kernel, filesystem, virtual memory subsystem, drivers, networking and so on.

    The productivity of the BSD projects is sure to increase vastly over the next few years as the true power of pkgsrc is recognized and taken into account. I think we may even see the next big computing revolution take place within the BSD community, yet again.

    --
    Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
    1. Re:pkgsrc is an amazing piece of technology. by Nimrangul · · Score: 1
      Um, pkgsrc hasn't merged anything. It's like openpkg and a few other projects - a multiplatform package system.

      Just because there are multiplatform packagers that work on a particular operating system does not mean that the original packager is dropped.

      Much as pf has become a firewall available on all the BSDs, it has not replaced the others to become the One True Firewall - it is an alternative which is available on multiple operating systems should the user desire it.

      And pkgsrc isn't a seamlessly integrated part of anything but NetBSD, because that's where it's from.

      It would be nice if all the BSDs merged together to share resources more and such, but that isn't going to happen this side of hell I fear.

      --
      I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
    2. Re:pkgsrc is an amazing piece of technology. by CyricZ · · Score: 1

      Pkgsrc has merged the collective efforts of all of the major BSDs. No longer do they duplicate the package maintenance efforts for each project. That has been a great improvement, as time is now better spent on other development activities.

      --
      Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
    3. Re:pkgsrc is an amazing piece of technology. by Nimrangul · · Score: 1
      No, cause OpenBSD has it's own ports, FreeBSD has it's own ports and DragonFlyBSD has it's own ports.

      That pkgsrc could be used in that manner does not mean it has.

      As it is, pkgsrc is an alternative to the native packaging systems for the other three BSDs - not the replacement.

      The day that each of the BSD leaderships put out some wonderful press release talking about how they have combined efforts to improving the pkgsrc system as their new ports tree is the day that your assumption becomes valid.

      --
      I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
    4. Re:pkgsrc is an amazing piece of technology. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      DragonFly does not have its own ports. You can choose to use FreeBSD ports plus a bunch of patches. Or you can use supported pkgsrc.

      Also pkgsrc works great for many, many other
      operating systems. I have used it under Linux,
      BSD/OS, FreeBSD 4.x, FreeBSD 5.x, and Mac OS X, for example. Also, PkgLinux distribution has been powered entirely by pkgsrc for about two years.

    5. Re:pkgsrc is an amazing piece of technology. by Nimrangul · · Score: 1
      You post is irrelevant.

      I know full well pkgsrc works on many platforms, you missed Solaris, which Sun dontated some hardware to NetBSD so they could more easily maintain pkgsrc on.

      But that has nothing to do with this, this was some random Joe making the false assumption that pkgsrc is some amazing multiplatform solution that has lifted a great responsiblity off the shoulders of the BSD developers so that all projects would merge their efforts. This is not true.

      Incorrectly you state that DragonFlyBSD does not have it's own ports, it does. It is a split from the already existant FreeBSD ports, but it is it's own tree maintained by other people.

      All the BSDs have their own ports, that was my point - the pkgsrc people are doing extra work so they can have the same packages on more than one platform, no project has chosen to replace the already in-place ports trees with pkgsrc.

      --
      I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
  5. HFS+ by idiotnot · · Score: 1

    I'm wondering if there's a plan to really push for HFS+ migration from FFS. LFS seemed promising, but hasn't moved much, and is slower than soft-updated FFS for many things. HFS+, however, should be faster than either of them. I think they've kind of concluded that adding journaling to FFS is difficult; and at the same time, why bother, when there's another FS out there with an acceptible license that's better?

    That said, I'm really enjoying using NetBSD these days. It's such a nice system.

    1. Re:HFS+ by tenco · · Score: 1

      HFS+ integration is a Google SoC project at NetBSD.