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NetBSD Summer of Code Summary
UltimaGuy writes "The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce the results of its participation in Google's "Summer of Code". After Google announced this program to introduce students to the world of open source software development at the beginning of June, the NetBSD Project was happy to join the approximately 40 other open source groups as a mentoring organization and compiled a list of suggested projects. I personally think the Project tmpfs: Efficient memory file-system as the most successful one."
Would this be their 'Autumn of Results'?
The opposite of progress is congress
Seeing that userfs is still in early development, perhaps an effort could be made to unify the API with FUSE. Then we could develop filesystems in a way that is portable between Linux and NetBSD, and possibly others once they follow suit.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
[I'm probably behind the times and it already exists ... if so, then sorry, gimme a URL to it pls. :-)]
Being a big-Unix person, I find the SysV approach to subsystem control through "init.d/blahblah {stop/start}" very sysadmin-friendly, so Linux has always got a big pat on the back from me for that. In contrast, the old *BSD approach has always seemed less helpful when you need to bring subsystems up and down regularly. One manages, but it's a pain.
I guess I was hoping to see SysV-type subsystem control among the Summer of Code projects. It sure would be handy for sysadmins.
Let's do a run down:
# still bare-bones
# simple filesystem with some hardcoded files (which are modifiable) written
# "The framework coughs but manages to avoid complete and utter defeat."
# code not yet imported
However, in the end: all SoC goals met ?
That just seems...... off to me.
You do understand that you are just playing catch-up with Linux, right?
...community when I say "Thanks Google."
The tmpfs is a good project for many reasons, and one big one is because of the documentation. Documenting the "hows" of making a filesystem is something that I find fascinating.
I once wrote a ramdisk driver from scratch on MacOS 7; it would have been nice to have enough documentation to actually write a new filesystem to use on it instead of HFS.
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
The Summer of Code can only lead to...
The Fall of programming progress...
The Winter of endless loop hibernation -- a bitter code spell, indeed...
And the Spring of 1000 bugs! (looks like time to gear up for another Summer of Code, eh?)
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Minimalist barebones computer, motherboard, and CPU reviews.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
... 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:
..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."
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Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
I really like the idea of summer of code. I've been watching a few projects to see how they were doing. Unfortunately, few had any kind running progress and there really weren't many summaries.
It would be cool if more would tell the world how things turned out. I noticed that some of the NetBSD projects didn't get completed in time. I suspect that some organizations might be afraid to summarize because they would show that the projects didn't get completed, but I say that's OK. In business some projects get started and then scrapped before completion; it's how life goes.
But if there were more summaries out there, I think we could see more commercial organizations stepping up and taking an active and visible role in financing the future of interesting OSS projects.