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DTrace Becomes Usable on FreeBSD
daria42 writes "A project to port Sun Microsystems' Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) tool to FreeBSD appears to have achieved some initial success. DTrace was open sourced last year and is one of the coolest features in Solaris 10."
Now we can have Netcraft confirmation of the death with a long DTrace log to back it up.
Trolling is a art,
Here you got some dtrace scripts, direct from my firefox bookmarks.
--
Superb hosting 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, ssh, $7.95
Dtrace is useless, transparent xterms are the new hotness.
I see... "BSD is dying" trolls are immortal... Netcraft confirms it!!!
So, let me get this right, the developers of FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD have 0 value in their work. The code they have written in will be ripped off and sold back to them, as proved by ClosedBSD, an improved BSD OS that I can buy.
> This encourages collaboration, and thus helps the advancement of software engineering.
Is this some sort of joke ?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I'm sure that this stuff will be ported to DeadBSD. See DeadBSD.org for downloads and information.
The code they have written in will be ripped off and sold back to them, as proved by ClosedBSD, an improved BSD OS that I can buy.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/
http://deadbsd.org/
Authorization Required
Browser not authentication-capable or authentication failed.
Ouch- my browser:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.5; FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE) KHTML/3.5.2 (like Gecko)
Sorry, but DTrace is a really great feature regardless of what your political OSS views are. Porting it to BSD only makes it that much cooler.
Huh? Is your ClosedBSD same as my ClosedBSD?
The CDDL under which the code in question was released is a slightly modified version of the Mozilla Public License. So if you used Mozilla or firefox or whatever to post that screed, then you've clearly sinned against the church of RMS.
Oh, and the CDDL IS an OSI approved license, so that means DTrace IS (by the definition most programmers who don't wear Birkenstocks agree on) Open Source.
As a developer, if you value your work, the GPL is the better license under which to release code, as it means no-one can take your work, close the source, and sell it as their own.
CDDL Section 3.1:
So try again.All the code Apple borrowed from BSDs and changed is contributed back with DarWin OS. It is also the core set of components upon which Mac OS X was developed. In July 2003 Apple released Darwin under version 2.0 of the APSL license, which the Free Software Foundation (FSF) approved as a free software license. Previous releases had taken place under an earlier version of the APSL that did not meet the FSF's definition of free software, although it met the requirements of the Open Source Definition.
There's actually a site called "deadbsd.org" ?!? I posted the gp as a joke. Holyshit!
U send me dtrace to hlp me do ur outsourced job plz.
0 525_h1_b_visa_foreign_it.htm
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_runner_06
U hlp ur old frend 2 take ur job plz.
Thx.
You think this will let my employer figure out where that memory leak is coming from?! You can't trace me! I've got... TraceBuster!
(Ok that was seriously cheesy, but I relive the golden days of my youth by quoting movies with Marky Mark apparently. *sob*)
The code they have written in will be ripped off and sold back to them, as proved by ClosedBSD, an improved BSD OS that I can buy.
Wrong. Very very wrong. ClosedBSD is a stripped down implementation of the FreeBSD kernel used for booting a machine as a router.
From the ClosedBSD mainpage: "ClosedBSD is a firewall and network address translation utility which boots off of a single floppy disk or CDROM, and requires no hard drive. ClosedBSD is based off of the FreeBSD kernel, and uses ipfw as its native ruleset management system, and natd as it's network address translation utility."
The BSD name is trademarked, so you won't have linux-like branches coming around that cost money. If it's BSD, it's free.
is contributed back with DarWin OS
Yeeps! Don't do that! I got a horrible shiver up my spine when I read that...
Linux already uses BSD code, so why wouldn't they want to use some more?
I develop under both GPL and BSD licenses, based on the particular piece of code. If I think the code has strategic value (typically a library or framework), I'll develop under BSD so I can use it in any of my closed-source software too. Software which only has utilitarian value is typically released under GPL.
GPL is of good use to a lot of projects, but IMHO it's a terrible license for frameworks and libraries. The LGPL does improve the situation for libraries somewhat, but it's won't work for all situations. That's why many "standard" libraries use more open licenses than (L)GPL; if you're not allowed to use the canonical library in all situations, it's not a useable standard.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
hehe no, I thought I was making it up !
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Isn't it up to each individual developer to decide what license to use for their original code? Isn't that what choice is all about? If I choose not to use one license or another for my code, why should you care? It is, after all, my code.
my fault, I thought I was making the name up.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
you missed the caveat : IMPROVED
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
That's one hell of an emotional world.
I'm glad I don't live in that world, and can be a FreeBSD developer instead ;)
Eivind, who recognize that when people develop things based on his code, he's got a chance of getting things back, and when they choose another codebase because his is GPL-licensed, he has ZERO chance of getting anything back.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
I don't think any commericial distro would call itself closedbsd... :p
for some reason i think it doesn't look good in your advertisement
but it's still quite funny to see that it actually exists.
You didn't call it "Spinal Tap".
In a word, yes. You just need to replace "ClosedBSD" with "OS X."
Fortunately, Apple was kind enough to open source Darwin, but it didn't need to, and it choose not to open source the Aqua UI and the Finder shell. I could be mistaken, but I don't think they would have been able to do this had Darwin been based on GPL'ed software.
A better example of the GPL's strength would be the Linksys WRT54G router. I've got one myself and it does all kinds of awesome things it wasn't able to do out of the box (hell, you can even run an OpenVPN server on it), all because Linksys was forced to release their source code under the GPL.
That said, the BSDs are great projects (as are public domain projects like SQLite) and I wouldn't want to see them disappear. I believe that the core focus of the OSS community should be on GPL'ed software (because "embrace and extend" does in fact happen), but there's definitely an argument and a place for BSD-style licenses.
(and he doesn't even say why)
Wikileaks, no DNS
Dtrace is the exact opposite of error vomit, and I dont recall ever hearing it called that anyway. The entire principle is that you dont need to go inserting metric shitloads of debugging and printf("we got here") statements all through your code, recompile it and then see that the error doesnt occur because all your debugging has now slowed your code enough to prevent the race condition that caused the original error.
True - its a L3 and developer tool for the most part, but there are plenty of scripts out there to show what it can do for an admin. Take a look at http://users.tpg.com.au/adsln4yb/dtrace.html for starters. Stuff like iosnoop, iotop, opensnoop and kill.d can be used quite regularly by admins without the need for putting debugging into active applications.
"If everybody is thinking alike, somebody isn't thinking" - Gen. George S. Patton
I dont think DTrace on FreeBSD is going to sway over and change the mind of those who use and pay and contribute to the GPL. From a strategy point of view it just made BSD's that much more competitive with Solaris and Sun offers. With the GPL you at least get some improvemnts back if your contribution is of value and nobody can close its acess.
Well, or GPL people could take the fine contribution of the BSD people, and port it to GPL. Therefore both communities can benefit. If Sun had released it under GPL, the BSD people would have been prevented from doing this. At least that is my understanding. So in this case the BSD licence seemed like a good choice, the one that maximises freedom for developers.
Furthermore, I believe Sun has stated that they would be happy if DTrace was ported to Linux, and though they can't pay developers to do it, they can provide other help (perhaps like the testsuites).
Again I'm baffled by the level of hostility towards Sun on Slashdot. Here they open source an amazing tool, and help us port it, and they get a lot of nasty comments for it.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Dtrace is one of the best Unix development tools around, no joke. However the project is nowhere near available for FreeBSD users....
;)
From Bryan Cantrill's blog: "If you run FreeBSD in production, you're going to want John's port as it stands today -- and if you develop for the FreeBSD kernel (drivers or otherwise), you're going to need it."
Now compare this to Birrell's announcement: "There is still a lot of work to do and while that goes on, the code has to remain in the FreeBSD perforce server. It isn't ready to get merged into CVS-current yet."
Great news and nicely done... but, um, come back when it's ready for -CURRENT primetime before telling Zdnet it's ready
LGPL is the most misunderstood open source license.
LGPL allows you to create both "derived works" and "works based on the library" and provides an option for either using LGPL or "using your own terms" for the resulting work.
HOWEVER: if you choose to "use your own terms" then those terms MUST include certain conditions required by LGPL such as allowing reverse engineering, etc.
I bet 99+% of coders that use LGPL libraries don't understand that their "own terms" must include certain conditions.
In other words, "your own terms" cannot be whatever the hell you like.
Last week I had a major problem trying to get Linux nfs4 clients to mount from Solaris 10 servers. Even though on the Linux client the domain uid mapping superficially worked (I saw the correct user/groups displayed) the NFSv4 Server Kernel Module was still using LINUX uid/gid combinations supplied by the linux client to go to the filesystem driver with to ask for permission.
You, sir, obviously don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about.
Here's my script, btw
#!/usr/sbin/dtrace -Cs
#define ACCESS4_READ 1
#define ACCESS4_LOOKUP 2
#define ACCESS4_MODIFY 4
#define ACCESS4_EXTEND 8
#define ACCESS4_DELETE 16
#define ACCESS4_EXECUTE 32
fbt:nfssrv:rfs4_op_access:entry {
requested_access = ((struct ACCESS4args *) arg0)->access;
cs = (struct compound_state *) arg3;
cr = (struct cred *) cs->cr;
printf ("uid = %d gid = %d\n", cr->cr_uid, cr->cr_gid);
printf ("ACCESS4_READ = %s\n", requested_access & ACCESS4_READ ? "yes" : "no");
printf ("ACCESS4_LOOKUP = %s\n", requested_access & ACCESS4_LOOKUP ? "yes" : "no");
printf ("ACCESS4_MODIFY = %s\n", requested_access & ACCESS4_MODIFY ? "yes" : "no");
printf ("ACCESS4_EXTEND = %s\n", requested_access & ACCESS4_EXTEND ? "yes" : "no");
printf ("ACCESS4_DELETE = %s\n", requested_access & ACCESS4_DELETE ? "yes" : "no");
printf ("ACCESS4_EXECUTE = %s\n", requested_access & ACCESS4_EXECUTE ? "yes" : "no");
}
From a strategy point of view it just made BSD's that much more competitive with Solaris and Sun offers.
Now, last time I checked, Sun regards Redhat as one of its main competitors for 'enterprise unix' systems. So, since you are saying is that due to dtrace, FreeBSD became more competitive with Solaris, doesn't that mean it became that much more competitive with at least Redhat Linux?
With the GPL you at least get some improvemnts back if your contribution is of value and nobody can close its acess.
What the fuck does this have to do with anything? Ah, I see, you were just looking for a reason to do some 'GPL advocacy'.. Let me make some small suggestion: Advocacy like this is just annoying the hell out of people, and makes you look like a fanatic idiot.
Not to mention that the fud you are spreading is just that, fud. Nobody can close access to existing BSD licenced code EVER, got that? (and yes, people can derive from a BSD licenced work, and keep their source changes private while distributing the binaries. If people want to do that with GPLed code, they cannot distribute, or have to obtain an alternative licence from the authors, see the Trolltech business model)
As a developer, if you value your work, the GPL is the better license under which to release code, as it means no-one can take your work, close the source, and sell it as their own.
Now, the modern BSD licence only contains 2 clauses, is really easy to read, and yet you fail to understand it. You think anyone should take your advice?
You can NOT take a BSD licenced work and claim it as your own, that is basicly the one and only thing that licence prevents you from doing. All you can do which you cannot do with the GPL is keep changes to the source private while distributing the binary result. You may believe that is bad, and you are entitled to your own beliefs there. I happen to believe otherwise, and with me, there seem thousands of people who believe otherwise, but again, that is a matter of opinion, and not a matter of fact.
It means every change is visible to you,
No, it does not. It only guarantees that if you get back a binary of some derived program, that you also have a right on getting the source with the changes. You have no right to see anyones changes if they decide to not distribute the result but use it for their own internal work for example.
and that you are free to incorporate the changes other people have made to your product back into it, or into other projects you are working on.
Not if you are for example called Trolltech (qt), Sun (OpenOffice) or anyone else who deals with dual licencing, but generally that is the idea of the GPL indeed. It is a good argument for it, despite it not always working out.
This encourages collaboration, and thus helps the advancement of software engineering.
The fact that all TCP/IP (ip4) implementations are mostly compatible, that most of the basic protocols used on it are compatible between vendors and such are pretty much because there is good and for any purpose usable BSD code around to implement those things, which was either used directly or used as a reference implementation to test against.
This single tiny detail makes that there is actually some choice instead of having ended up with a proprietary network owned by either aol, microsoft, ibm or some other big entity.
I leave it to your imagination what this means for software development.
I will give you one more suggestion, learn to appreciate someone elses work, esp. when that work is pretty good and they actually insist on publishing that work such that everyone can use it. If you just feel that instead of appreciating such things, you must use the occation to spread lies and fud then I call you a moron.
Yeah, killing the product line of a Linux based router is definitely a win, they won't make that mistake again.
OSX - you seem to have missed the caveat : improved.
License wars, yawn.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
hmm, did you reply to the wrong post ?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Try leaving things "up to each individual developer" in a basic include file. Licenses are not a good place to be "individual", they're a place where using a standard saves time, space, and money wasted on weird lawsuits and legal conferences to protect people's work.
If your license is weird and prevents us from doing good work with it, then we will choose not to use it. Please look at the demise of the WU mail client, Pine, for an example. The software was written by people like Mark Crispin, the creator of IMAP. But because the licensing is so restrictive, no Linux distribution can include it as part of their default installation without facing lawsuit from WU for patching it to fit their layout, at last without explicit permission from Washington University. And WU just doesn't grant such permission, or at least never that I have seen. Qmail has the same problem, so did XFree86: by tightening up licensing to prevent software forks, they've effectively doomed their software.
XFree86, fortunately, got forked off to Xorg. Pine and Qmail, however, seem to be evaporating from servers and distributions as "too dangerous to use". Those are real licensing issues where "individual" licensing efforts have interfered with the software's development and use.
The probability that Apple would have based OS X on GPL'd code is approximately zero. If there had been no BSD codebase to use, Apple most probably would have either licensed a proprietary Unix implementation, or developed its own (non-standard) kernel in-house.
Developing a kernel for a small set of hardware (like Apple's) isn't a monumental task, and could easily have been done. Apple clearly benefits from being able to use BSD codebases instead, and vice-versa, but it was not at all necessary.
> It means every change is visible to you,
That's not always true. If you modify a GPL-ed web application (or server software) and don't distribute it (only run it for / show output to your visitors) -- the you don't have to publish (open source) the modifications.
Fortunately, Apple was kind enough to open source Darwin, but it didn't need to.
Apple has closed part of the Kernel now called XNU.
Is Apple kind, or are they just putting up a facade, closing the source where they see fit?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I saw Bryan Cantrill give a demo of DTrace at my university. I was pretty impressed.
I wanted to use it for my application to diagnose performance and race condition problems. However, then I realized I'd have to wrap all the instrumentation so that it would still work portably. Then I thought it seemed like an awful lot of bother just to get some profiling in there, especially if I was going to support an alternate method of collecting the same events so as to make the whole application (which includes profiling support) portable.
"Sorry, we have to run it on Solaris or FreeBSD to debug/optimize" was ultimately what made me stay away from it. I looked into getting OpenSolaris working, and by the time I'd finally finally discovered from Sun's extremely confusing website and the equally confusing OpenSolaris webpages that what I wanted was Solaris Express:Community Release (SX:CR) so that I could get some interesting DTrace fixes and features, and had even burnt the 4 CDs and was all ready to commit to the Solaris way of life, I just got the heebie jeebies.
Hopefully, just hopefully, the FreeBSD port works out well, and there will be a version for Linux sometime soon... there's hope that the advent of the GPLv3 will ease a lot of political slash licensing problems.
DTrace is really incredible for application developers. You can insert lightweight, shippable, debugging and profiling points wherever you want them. I just feel you can't outright commit your project to it yet which is sad. It's the kind of stuff that should be made a POSIX standard, quite frankly.
Hi there, first I don't give a flying fsck whether i get l33t points over this or really whether I get modded down.
:-). I guess the real
I hope however that either of our posts get modded up so that people actually take notice of this thread.
That out of the way I don't really care whether droves of Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD etc.etc. users rush and adopt
(Open)Solaris. I would definitely switch to Solaris also at home instead of Linux if it supported all of my hardware
but I guess the home-user is besides the point I suppose you trying to make. Suffice it to say I can see no rush to
AIX on the pseries or to HP-UX either but that has more to do with market saturation than anything else.
The more interesting statistic to look into is how many Solaris 2.5-9 users have upgraded to Solaris 10. We admittedly
didn't get all excited about DTrace alone, actually it was Solaris Zones that pulled us in.
Oh I forgot. Microsoft Windows. Either risking to come off arrogant or preaching to the choir here, I suppose people
using that can't be expected to migrate to Solaris either, mainly because of their investment in "Microsoft Technologies" but also from my personal experience due to an (utter) lack of broad technical background on behalf of their staff.
These people for the most part don't trace first and see if they can tackle the problem. They consult "Knowledgebases" or call Microsoft.
So the question is, what rush are you expecting that nobody else is (well apart from the marketing/sales depts trying
to justify their upkeep) ??
2. Is it definitely going to work wonders for BSD. It made my life on Solaris a hell of a lot easier. It'll make
people's lives on (Free)BSD a hell of a lot easier. Soon I'm sure it will do that on Linux and after that on AIX,
HP-UX oh and maybe in a few years hence even on more esoteric systems like Stratus VOS etc.
As an administrator it does wonders for me over and over, because now I can trace SCSI cmds/responses from devices,
trace NFS problems like the one I just bragged about and the like. I get so much faster and easier clued in where
the problem is by looking at what's going on under the hood so yes it is making me vastly more productive as an admin.
3. DTrace is also useful for "regular IT folks" and I guess that's where our real mentality problem kicks in. Firstly,
even you who is definitely not an engineer can use DTRACE scripts other people develop. It's easy, at times all you
need to do is dtrace -s script.d and there you are. But going back to our mentality problem. You're right. I think
DTRACE is not really made for "regular IT folks" that are not fluent in C or don't have a working knowledge of processes/threads/user virtual address space vs. kernel address space etc. etc. I guess "regular IT folks" like that wont get much mileage out of DTRACE but still like I said they can use already developed scripts with maybe someone over the phone helping them. And that brings us to some Level 3 support guys @ SUN in Bulington... their main problem with DTRACE is not that it's of no help or no value. In fact our competition at one site opened a call with Sun on an issue we were already working on and then sent us a DTRACE script Sun support wanted to run. We compared it to our own script we had started on the problem and Sun support was looking exactly at the same cause of the problem we were
issue some of the Level 3 Support guys @ SUN in Bulington have is that DTRACE gives third parties like us a hell of a lot more clout in diagnosing problems which results in a lot less calls to them and that's making them vomit.
To tell you the truth I mulled this aspect of DTRACE over too, that it would give the customer and competitors more
insight and transparency into the system, but like you said yourself DTRACE is nothing for "regular IT folks" so
on the bottomline it's a definite plus for us.
"Well, or GPL people could take the fine contribution of the BSD people, and port it to GPL. Therefore both communities can benefit. If Sun had released it under GPL, the BSD people would have been prevented from doing this."
Sun's Dtrace is CDDL licensed, not BSD. Also, we wouldn't have been prevented from anything if Sun had released it under the GPL. We just would have imported GPL software over CDDL software.
The only joke in this thread is you, asshat.
Fortunately, Apple was kind enough to open source Darwin, but it didn't need to,
Not only that, they also contribute code back to FreeBSD, which they also don't have to. It is directly to their advantage to do this however (if it gets accepted it means it gets maintained without Apple having to pay developers to do so). Now, Apple isn't exactly alone in this either, considering things like FreeBSD's netgraph and jails just to name some other things contributed by conpanies who could also have decided to keep those things to themselves.
and it choose not to open source the Aqua UI and the Finder shell. I could be mistaken, but I don't think they would have been able to do this had Darwin been based on GPL'ed software.
You are wrong.
Those are applications runniong on top of the core system, and they can be kept closed source just as much as you can have a closed source application for the GPLed Linux, and it is legal to create a CD that distributes both.
For that matter, there exist closed source X implementations and desktops that run on Linux as well, giving you a near equivalent (as in, a gui 'engine' and a desktop environment, not judging that they are of eqivalent quality)
On the other hand, if a developer wants to create a new license, who are we to say he cannot? I appreciate the concern regarding the proliferation of OSS licenses of late, and I (as a user of and contributor to OSS) agree with you that fewer licenses are better than more licenses. However, we cannot dictate to anyone which license must be used for their original code. If you don't like the license someone chooses to use, then don't use the code that was written under that license. It's really a simple concept.
You just got schooled and you didn't even know it. Too funny.
it's old, tired crap.
... is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_kYaPZ6eds
On an impulse I looked up what other things Plembo has to say on slashdot and I found only today's two posts.
http://slashdot.org/~plembo
Re:Maybe you should wipe your mouth after vomiting Monday May 29, @11:51AM 2 0
Dtrace - is often referred to as "error vomit" Monday May 29, @10:37AM 2 0, Redundant
Of course, either this gentle(wo)man happened across Slashdot where he or she saw DTrace on FreeBSD being discussed
and feeling strongly about DTrace and how it was purportedly perceived as "error vomit" by one or two individuals at Sun Support in Bullington and immediately signed up over that... or a really envious Troll who just dropped by to upset some
(Free|Net|Open|Dying)BSD people either for fun or profit. We'll never know what's the score here but I also doubt we'll hear much more from Plembo.
A couple of years ago I busted a wannabe Monsanto shill who just had three posts to his name. Professional shills take time on a discussion board to build reputable accounts developing rapport with the group and then in time become opinion leaders. On second thought if you work for one of Sun's PR companies and just conned me into attacking and beating the shit out of would-be Solaris 10 deriders, man you did a great job here, more power to you.
you have to get their permission to use the code in a closed-source environment. With a BSD license you don't have to worry about this... .. because nobody will contribute to your project.. :o) /me ducks!
(man, these license wars are FUN!)
http://sourceware.org/systemtap/
http://sourceware.org/frysk/
Free OS (the BSDs) gets DTrace. If a commercial OS wants to implement it, they get DTrace (easily, as the code is open). Net result = better software in BOTH the free and payware segments.
How is this bad?
One thing the GPL weenies just don't seem to get, is that BSD people *DON'T CARE* if people use their code to make money/sell commercial software, because the aim is to improve the quality of software in general - not to impose some sort of political agenda.
No one is going to FORCE you to BUY Dtrace in a commercial OS when the free version exists - but, if the commercial OS has features that you personally need, the option is there.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
A good point. You have BSD software to thank for all standards.
NFS still hasn't seen any replacement, even though it has serious limitations, because most all the alternatives are GPLd, or otherwise encumbered like AFS.
Telnet had vastly outlived it's useful life, but was still forced into service, with a few hacks like skey auth, kerberos auth, and encryption. It remained in service until OpenSSH came along.
PGP/GPG, though being very good, have not become standard at all, and instead e-mail and other communications channels remain plain-text.
The MKV (matroska) file format is quite good, but GPLd, and so the Ogg/Ogm container remains more popular, although it is admitedly quite limited and flaky, so it isn't getting too widely adopted, either.
Hardware players like the Rio Karma include support for formats like Vorbis and FLAC, but not musepack and the like, because it was previously GPL'd, and releasing their firmware, or making the firmware modular to keep the code seperate, was unacceptable to the developers. While Vorbis and FLAC may not be quickly taking over the world, they do continue to get wider support every day. Before FLAC was BSD licensed, you couldn't even find any hardware players with lossless compression at all, even though there were several popular formats. Their license were too restrictive.
People talk about how great Aqua is, but it's not exactly taking the world by storm. OpenStep is GPLd, and is really failing miserably to get a foothold against GTK, QT and Motif toolkits, as well as native X11 (QT and Lestif are GPL'd, but they have closed-source commercial counterparts for those willing to pay).
I could go on, and on, but I think that's enough to make my point. If you want a standard, you can't use the GPL.
That's a very trivial example. The same could be said of something like the iPod, which doesn't use GPL'd software at all, and you can still load Linux on it and get extra features unavailable with the built-in firmware. Or most other embedded hardware, like hundreds of handhelds which have Linux/BSD ported to them.
What people fail to realize is that "embrace and extend" doesn't take away any of the work you've done, never manages to catch-on, and you're really throwing the baby out with the bathwater trying to prevent it.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
msmith's last commit was 20020504. This posting probably predates that.
Since his last commit, FreeBSD has released, in order: 4.6, 4.7, 5.0, 4.8, 5.1, 4.9, 5.2, 4.10, 5.3, 4.11, 5.4, 6.0, 6.1, and 5.5. That's 14 releases from 3 different release branches.
The current codebase bears only a vague resemblance to what was in 4.6. After 4.6, 4.X was made far more stable; then 5.X incorporated major new features including rewritten SMP support and added support for laptops and wifi; and now 6.X is consolidating those changes and concentrating on performance and bugfixing as well as adding features.
We probably have far more developers now than we ever have had in the past. People have come and go but development has continued, if not accelerated.
Four years is an eternity in Open Source. Our troll needs to get over it.
Something as FUCKING AWESOME as DTRACE and YOU DARE to come here and open our SHIT MOUTH and speak out against it?
Clearly you have not read why they've done it. To prevent piracy of their source. Do some google searches before spouting off.
... they use the public domain. public domain is the stem cell
of licensing, whereby you can take such code and graft any damnfool
license onto it if you have the inexplicable urge to think smaller.
oh, and real men don't use 'dtrace', they use 'printf()' --
if it's good enough for ritchie & thompson, it's good enough for me!
That's right. The GPL just don't get that.
I've never seen anyone complain that a commercial entity used some BSD code as the basis for a project (except for Theo and his SSH rant =).
Imagine the devastation if the first TCP/IP stack out of Redmond had been all their own work!
I wonder how many of the "gpl stops you getting ripped off" people have ever PAID for Linux ?
I've bought it twice and I don't even like it !
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
However, if you read the signature to my previous reply, you'll find a crucial clue for why the BSD license usually is MORE efficient for getting changes back (with the occasional generic closed derivate as a result; SunOS was the last one we didn't get much back from, AFAIK.)
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
haha, you TOTALLY misunderstood me =)
I was replying to this from the parent to my post :
"As a developer, if you value your work, the GPL is the better license under which to release code"
Because of that confusion it took me a few reads of your post (after I replied) to work out what you actually meant - and it was a spot on reply.
I'm not surprised you took umbrage if you missed that bit. I'm a FreeBSD user and am totally behind the BSD philosophy.
keep up the good work =)
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Green Hills Software already has a product which can trace anything. I think it does it by recompiling (or relinking?) the software with its proprietary compiler. But once you do that you can trace anything, not just system code. Seems like a cool product if you have the dough. Here's more info, with screenshots: http://www.ghs.com/products/timemachine.html
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
What the fuck does this have to do with anything? Ah, I see, you were just looking for a reason to do some 'GPL advocacy'.. Let me make some small suggestion: Advocacy like this is just annoying the hell out of people, and makes you look like a fanatic idiot.
Three guesses who is being annoying and acting like a fanatical idiot, and it's not him.
As far as I am aware, the BSD license was not designed with this goal in mind. The GPL was designed with the goal of keeping the source code available to the developer community.
Whether this goal is achieved is debatable, but I think the GPL (or licenses similar to it) deliver the best chance of keeping systems open as we move into a heavily DRM'd world.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
People talk about how great Aqua is, but it's not exactly taking the world by storm. OpenStep is GPLd, and is really failing miserably to get a foothold against GTK, QT and Motif toolkits, as well as native X11 (QT and Lestif are GPL'd, but they have closed-source commercial counterparts for those willing to pay).
Yet a framework needs a license as wxWidgets so it can be used everywhere. Anything else is IMO ridiculous.
I could go on, and on, but I think that's enough to make my point. If you want a standard, you can't use the GPL.
That's not entirely correct, it quite much depends on what kind of object is licensed. While it may make sense to license an OS or an application GPL, anything which don't need to be linked, it's no questions a framework or a file/music format can't have the same license. In a such case the wxWindows or a BDS license is much more appropriate.
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
Maybe. I'd have to do a proper analysis of the different economic modes here, and so far I feel there's too many variables for it to be possible to do properly. I'm sure that a world where we're forced to use the GPL for open source is a poorer world, at least - it lose us a lot of positive economic modes.
BTW: Are you the same Michael Smith I know as msmith@ ?
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
90% of gpl projects don't really get any _real_ contributions aswell,
so nothing lost here as long as `only` 10% of bsd people get contribution.
lately i have started to keep away from gpl. opensource'n'shit is nice, but
business is business. i "need to/want to/will" keep my some stuff closed
just to keep the competitors one step behind. otherwise i'd be doing work
for them and they'd get a cost/development advantage over me with you using
my gpl-d code.
this is like giving the hand to the people that
are cutting it off from you with a chainsaw.
gpl is good idea for some stuff but certainly not everything.
bsd is much more universal.
ps. real bad boys (billy, larry, steve) will eventually get your opensource code
anyway (they can rewrite it from the scratch, they have the dev. power for it),
no matter how you license it. and they will sell it to you.
So what are the plans on porting dtrace to OpenBSD?
No sorry. I am smithm@ or smithmr@. I was once a member of the Michael Smith webring, though :)
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
The point is that if others contributed to your GPL'ed code, you have to get their permission to use [their] code in a closed-source environment.
Thats only half the point. It also applies to your competitors. It goes like this: Company A has a product which consists of an extensible core and a bunch of plugins. How do you kill the competition? Release a GPL 'community edition' of the core, and *some* plugins. Release patches to the community edition, but never take patches back into the commercial version. A thriving community evolves around LGPL plugins, and some users who wouldn't have bought anyway upgrade to your pay-for version. Meanwhile, your competitor dies the death of a thousand cuts.
Alternatively you can release the core under a BSD+advertising clause. If your competitors want to use your core instead of their own, they have to advertise for the opposition.
> Imagine the devastation if the first TCP/IP stack out of Redmond had been all their own work!
It doesn't contain any BSD code either. When are you morons going to stop perpetuating this myth?
Microsofties must be getting a good laugh at your pathetic investigation skills when strings ftp.exe comprises all of it.
Fortunately, Apple was kind enough to open source Darwin, but it didn't need to, and it choose not to open source the Aqua UI and the Finder shell.
Kind enough? Apple wasn't kind, they just recognize the value of the open source model. By contributing changes back, they maintain more parity with other software developers using the same or very similar code. Thus, they can pull in more changes and improvements others make, more easily.
I could be mistaken, but I don't think they would have been able to do this had Darwin been based on GPL'ed software.
The GPL certainly is a barrier to some usages, which is probably why Apple chose to use mostly BSD licensed software, and license much code they develop with a similar license.
That said, the BSDs are great projects (as are public domain projects like SQLite) and I wouldn't want to see them disappear. I believe that the core focus of the OSS community should be on GPL'ed software (because "embrace and extend" does in fact happen), but there's definitely an argument and a place for BSD-style licenses.
If I was starting a new project in a new area, I'd likely pick GPL for the license, with one exception. If I was building a core architectural feature, like a new form of networking or filesystem, and I wanted that to be as widely adopted as possible, I'd go with a BSD style license. Sometimes you want Apple and Microsoft to integrate your code, even if it means they will maintain their own closed source version. ZeroConf is a good example. By licensing their implementation with a FreeBSD style license, Apple got printer manufacturers on board and made it a killer feature. This is much more palatable than a GPL license to them and even MS will probably have to integrate the code eventually or suffer comparisons about how hard it is to setup LAN networking and device discovery compared to other OS's.
I've read about dtrace and wanted to try it for awhile, posts to BSDForums haven't helped me either. I don't have it in my ports tree, and it's not listed on Freshports: http://www.freshports.org/search.php?query=dtrace& search=go&num=10&stype=name&method=match&deleted=e xcludedeleted&start=1&casesensitivity=caseinsensit ive
Anyone know how to get ahold of a copy? I've created ports before so I'm not afraid to try some 'testing' version.
Thanks
fak3r.com
No shit, I am officially moderated to troll now... :(
Next time YOU, MODERATOR read PARENT post and THINK!!!
slashdot is sick place...I'm leaving...
Three guesses who is being annoying and acting like a fanatical idiot, and it's not him.
You
You
You
Now.. what do I win?
http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/ 6/19/05641/7357
Intimates that the BSD was used as the basis, if not copy & pasted.
But thanks, it made me look up the subject for real.
As I said, not "all their own work".
If you re-read my post without your angry glasses on, you'll see it doesn't say what you think it does.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter