PC-BSD: The Most Beginner Friendly OS

soniyea writes "OSWeekly.com reviews PC-BSD and considers it the most beginner friendly OS in the market. 'From PC-BSD's roadmap to their default installation, I honestly feel good about where these guys are headed with their take on FreeBSD. This operating system has it all: support both from the professional level as well as that of the community, the ability to install Linux software, thanks to the binary compatibility layer, and of course — speed. Understand for most people, the speed factor is more or less a matter of opinion. But I have found that in some areas, it felt faster at the core level. Maybe I just had too much coffee that day? Either way, I totally recommend PC-BSD for anyone wanting to take a step into the wild side. FreeBSD, it's not just for geeks anymore.'"

Comments

Screw you Netcraft!

[GejTOO]

It won't die, will it?

G.

PC-BSOD?

[nodnarb1978]

I *know* BSD is quite stable, I've used it in production environments in the past.

But...am I the only one that sees "BSD" and reads "BSOD"....every time??

Always nice to see serious efforts to bring *nix to the desktop, though. :)

Re:PC-BSOD?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're the only one.

Re:PC-BSOD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up! He is the only one.

Re:PC-BSOD?

[rizole]

I always see BDSM......probably just me.

Re:PC-BSOD?

[nodnarb1978]

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro.

:)

Re:PC-BSOD?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is now official. Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
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

Re:PC-BSOD?

[Drooling Iguana]

There can be only one!

Re:PC-BSOD?

[toadlife]

I thnik the fnidnigs of taht rseercah is coercrt. I had no trolbue raeding taht.

6502

[Anonymous Coward]

The most beginner friendly assembly language.

Re:6502

[spike1]

6502?

Rubbish. OK. Most computer users with 6502 based systems were FORCED to resort to assembler because their basic was so abominable (commode 64/vic20). But even the CPU's instruction set wasn't that "easy" or "good" for beginners.

What with all that zero page nonsense. Limited 8 bit registers. Etc.

Z80 and MC68000 were by far the nicer cpus.

Re:6502

[crull]

He only stated it was THE MOST beginner friendly assembly language, not that it would actually be beginner friendly.

Re:6502

[Anonymous Coward]

And Spike1 disagrees, stating that Z80 and MC68000 assemby is nicer.

Re:6502

[ajs318]

The 6502's "zero page" instructions were a timesaver. Most instructions had a "shorthand" form which accessed a byte in the address space $0000-$00FF, using only one byte for the operand address, so saving a clock cycle and a byte of RAM. You could use zero page memory as an extended register set. If you were very clever, you could pull stunts with mapping different 256-byte chunks of memory into that space. Or you could use those addresses for faster-than-usual I/O {like the Atari 2600}. {The 6502 did not have separate I/O and memory buses.}

The BBC microcomputer used the 6502 {actually the 65C102 in its later incarnations} and that had an absolutely amazing BASIC. Even ran faster than some rival computers' machine code {thanks mostly to the use of hardware rather than software to generate the bitmapped display, which required up to 20KB of the 32KB for the framebuffer}.

The 6502, and the way the BBC used it, was also the inspiration for the ARM processor. SWIs were based on the BBC's MOS {kind of a BIOS on steroids; a full abstraction layer}. Basically, in order to access the BBC's hardware, you would set up a parameter block in memory; load its address into the X and Y registers and an instruction code into the accumulator; and call a fixed address in ROM {which pointed to an indirect jump instruction deriving its address from RAM, allowing user code to intercept MOS calls if necessary. You could have hours of fun with this}. If you only needed to pass two bytes and an instruction code then you could use the X and Y registers and call a different address. {I know, nowadays we pass parameters on the stack. This was the 1980s. Also, the 6502's hardware stack can only ever be 256 bytes big due to the S register -- the stack pointer -- being only 8 bits wide.} The whole display subsystem {including text, graphics, user-defined characters, display windows and colour/palette selection} was controlled by non-printable characters {and the graphics display was organised as 1280x1024, even though in real life it was only 160/320/640x256}. There was, of course, a MOS call to print a character. Every other piece of hardware -- the sound system, the keyboard, the printer, the serial port, the A-to-D converter, the cassette and disc file systems -- could be accessed through MOS calls. You didn't have to touch the hardware directly at all; in fact, as long as you didn't, the same programs {in BASIC or machine code} would work without modification on a plain Model B, a B with a 6502 second processor, a Master Series or a RISC-based machine with 6502 emulation. BBC BASIC was merely a layer on top of the MOS. For instance, the Beeb's sound chip had a programmable envelope generator controlled by 14 parameters. There was a MOS call which took a block of 14 parameters and loaded these into the sound chip's registers. The ENVELOPE statement in BASIC took 14 parameters, and merely made the MOS call for you.

Re:6502

[skurk]

Hey, I couldn't agree more ;-) [hence the sig]

Re:6502

[1u3hr]

Well, it was good enough for The Terminator.

Re:6502

[Fogg]

The wonderful beginners' feature of the 6502 command set was that it was so limited. When you've never programmed anything before, that kind of simplicity helps a lot.

Re:6502

[cnettel]

Look up how the original IBM PC BIOS works/worked. Of course, the machine was in a somewhat different league, but the complete hooking of calls and the basic design of exposing all needed functionality through those calls were there. The biggest problem was, of course, that everyone discovered the simple fact that direct access to segment B000 or B800 was so much faster than a generic BIOS call with the operation "print string/print char" could ever be.

Re:6502

[iangoldby]

The wonderful beginners' feature of the 6502 command set was that it was so limited.

As AJS said, the 6502 was the inspiration for the ARM family, and RISC processors in general. The philosophy is why encumber a CPU with complex instructions that take several CPU cycles to execute, when a decent compiler can get the same work done with an optimised set of small instructions that execute in just one or two CPU cycles?

ARM was in fact an off-shoot from Acorn, the company that made the BBC Micro. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture It continues to amaze me that the first ARM prototype CPU back from the fabrication plant worked perfectly first time!

Re:6502

[MichaelSmith]

Well, it was good enough for The Terminator.

And Bender.

Re:6502

[MichaelSmith]

Thanks for posting. I taught myself 6502 machine code when I was 12 years old. My computer came with a photocopied sheet with the instruction set documented on it, one instruction per line.

The instruction set design made sense, and my first program was 16 bytes long. I can't imagine doing that with a Z80.

Re:6502

[Carrot007]

6502? ick ick ick.

680x0 all the way man! 68k rules!

Re:6502

[tomstdenis]

In terms of raw MIPS ARM is a loser to the "evil CISC" designs like the AMD64 and Conroe. Maybe in terms of MIPS/watt it wins though. I guess different problems. Of course it's hard to say if that's a result of CISC vs RISC or that most CISC processors are much larger.

Maybe if ARM had 9 pipelines like AMD64 it'd be hella fast too :-)

Tom

Re:6502

[wirelessbuzzers]

Z80 is a rather messy CISC machine. The whole 16-bit double registers thing is pretty confusing, and don't get me started on LDIR and similar instructions.

I'd say PIC is an easier assembly, even if it's more verbose.

Re:6502

[Spit]

The 6502's "zero page" instructions were a timesaver.

That's a feature that designer Chuck Peddle lifted from the 6809 (which he also worked on). The 6809 allows you to relocate this page as well as the stack.

Re:6502

[iangoldby]

I read somewhere (though I can't remember where) that most CPUs are now RISC designs under the skin. Even CPUs that have complex instruction sets only implement those as a thin layer on top of a fundamentally RISC architecture. Of course this raises the question of just how do you define RISC?

Anyone who knows more about this??

Re:6502

[Spit]

Maybe if ARM had 9 pipelines like AMD64 it'd be hella fast too :-)

Maybe if ARM had 1/10th the amount of money spent on it that the x86 arch has, things would be different.

Re:6502

[cowbutt]

The instruction set design made sense, and my first program was 16 bytes long. I can't imagine doing that with a Z80.

On the Spectrum, it was pretty easy to write a variant tape loader using parts of the ROM. I'm pretty sure a basic headerless loader was about 17 bytes.

Certainly, I remember my GCSE project was a 27 byte printer interface driver that fit into the designated space with 4 bytes to spare (I was hacking a pre-existing commercial word processor package for which no source code was available).

Re:6502

[tomstdenis]

Yes, they are but they also benefit from the CISC opcodes. I-Cache polution is a serious threat to inlining/unrolling and branch prediction.

With ARM style RISC opcodes operations heavy on memory [for example] are less dense than those of x86. e.g.

x86:
add eax,[ebx+ecx]

ARM: [map them to r0,r1,r2]
add r3,r1,r2 ; ebx + ecx
ldr r3,[r3] ; [ebx+ecx]
add r0,r0,r3

So the x86 world takes 3 bytes to do what ARM takes 12 [or 6 in THUMB mode]. Multiply this by a few hundred if not thousand for any given algorithm and you get the point.

Effectively the opcode decoders act like decompressors for x86 opcodes. Done on the fly for most opcodes. Of course in the case of AMD64 [and most likely the Core 2 stuff] most opcodes map to 1 or 2 RISC operations. The RISC engines are not as trivial as those in the ARM processor alone. So even if you scrapped the x86 side and exposed the internal engine it'd still be way cooler than ARM.

Tom

Re:6502

[tomstdenis]

The problem is there is no advantage to it. You'd spend a billion dollars beefing up an ARM processor only to learn that the backend is pretty much what you'd have in an x86 processor.

The niche for ARM is the MIPS/watt tradeoff. It can get you a couple hundred MIPS for FAR LESS power usage than any x86 processor [specially for the later ARM processors with internal caches].

Tom

Re:6502

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it's only 14 bytes to load a screen as a headeless block: 221,33,0,64,17,0,27,62,255,55,205,86,5,201

ld ix,16384
ld de,6912
ld a,255
scf
call 1366
ret

(written entirely from memory, and posted anonymously to avoid revealing my sad bastard identity)

Re:6502

[John Jamieson]

Crazieness I say.

My vote would say not the 6502, not the 68000 (which was powerful and nicely done), but the 6800(6809 maybe) was "The most beginner friendly assembly language." lol

I'm sure we all have our favorites.

Re:6502

[Raypeso]

Its good enough for Bender! Bender 6502

Re:6502

[Anonymous Coward]

Matthew Smith, is that you?

Re:6502

[Anonymous Coward]

On the Spectrum

and

word processor package

some people are just gluttons for punishment...

The article is a little too quick to praise

[insulanus_hailstorm]

From the article:

This is the single most flawless installation method for software that I have seen for software since, well, Windows to be completely honest.

Fine praise. Fine praise, indeed.

Beginner friendly?

[the_humeister]

In terms of what? Exposure to a unix-like system? The only thing they mention that would seem to be remotely beginner friendly is the installation of new software. Some screen shots would help in clarifying this.

Nowadays, does it really matter what type of unix-like system is being run for home use? Once a desktop management environment (KDE, GNOME, etc.) is installed there's really no difference to the casual user. Hell, with that pretty KDE interface, I can't tell the difference between Linux, BSD, Darwin, Solaris, etc until I open a terminal and type "uname -a"

Re:Beginner friendly?

[evilviper]

Reading the article before spouting off isn't so much to ask of you, is it? I mean, this wasn't some highly technical, 20-page review.

He explained his position, in no uncertain terms:

I see this as becoming a spectacular alternative to Windows for any Windows user. Why? Because the software management is so familiar for any semi-experienced Windows user.

Re:Beginner friendly?

[SanityInAnarchy]

an interface where you could 'change gears', so to speak, from 'beginner' to 'experienced' to 'advanced' to 'bloody-know-it-all'

It exists, but it's not as useful as you'd think. Try the Xine UI, go to preferences, they have settings from "Beginner" to "Master of the Known Universe". And I'm not making it up -- I mean, you actually hit a dropdown, and there is a "Master of the Known Universe" setting.

But once you figure out how to know what you know -- once you figure out how to know which settings you're safe changing, and what they do, and which ones to leave the hell alone -- it's usually easier to stay on "Master of the Known Universe".

What we really need is the kind of truly artful design which is immediately intuitive to beginners, without being limiting to experts. I've seen it done a couple of times...

Re:Beginner friendly?

[Eideewt]

I would love to see a desktop environment with helpful and everpresent cartoon-style documentation for beginners. Something that not only told you what widgets do, but gave you general advice about settings that might work well. There are plenty of people who could learn to use whatever wacky interface you throw at them, given good docs, but don't have the inclination to hunt down documentation and try to make sense of it. My ideal "n00b" environment would be a simple tiled window manager with a complete and actually helpful help menu. I'd love to have a Linux or BSD distro that I could just drop a beginner in front of, confident that it contained context-sensitive explanations as good as the ones I would give. When they advanced, it would be simple to switch to another desktop environment.

Re:Beginner friendly?

[westlake]

I see this as becoming a spectacular alternative to Windows for any Windows user. Why? Because the software management is so familiar for any semi-experienced Windows user.

You forgot to include his disclaimer: IF PC-BSD came pre-installed...THEN it becomes an alternative to Windows.

That's a mighty big IF right there. But there is little evidence that the semi-experienced Windows user has any interest in migration whatever.

Re:Beginner friendly?

[evilviper]

You forgot to include his disclaimer: IF PC-BSD came pre-installed...THEN it becomes an alternative to Windows.

True, but that was only because the installer currently isn't bug-free. When that's improved, the "if" will be gone.

But there is little evidence that the semi-experienced Windows user has any interest in migration whatever.

That's an entirely seperate subject, but I've seen enough incredibly frustrated Windows users to be sure there's a big market.

Re:Beginner friendly?

[Reziac]

Something I've suggested several times, but since IANAProgrammer, cannot implement myself:

A linux configuration tool that shows *both* the nice friendly GUI with checkboxes, radio buttons, etc., AND the raw config file that the GUI is actually editing, updated in realtime -- so you can SEE what the checkbox just altered in the config file, and have a chance to learn about the various settings on the fly.

And let the user pick if they want to see one, the other, or both configuration methods.

This system is how some HTML editors work (with simultaneous WYSIWYG and raw HTML modes) and that makes it very easy to learn what you're doing, without having to initially struggle with the syntax. Since even some rather primitive editors do this, the UI itself can't be rocket science.

Re:Beginner friendly?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Sounds cool, but fairly useless.

If you're going to be editing the raw config file at all, every config file I've seen supports comments of some sort, so you should be able to figure it out on your own. What you'd want to be seeing is the actual effect (which isn't always visible), not just some checkboxes.

There are some tools, though, which do this the full-on Mac way, where the GUI tools usually affect everything in realtime, and the config changes are saved without asking you -- all you get is a revert button, and a backup if you know where the config files live. Sometimes said config files are human-readable, usually not.

Re:Beginner friendly?

[Reziac]

The problem is, the beginner usually doesn't have a clue where to FIND the config files, so a config GUI that knows how to find them and how to read them would be a lifesaver.

As to comments in config files, they're too often written in programmerspeak, which is frequently backwards of how everyone else thinks, because of the nature of sourcecode-style yes/no statements. And very often they use terms that mean something to an experienced user, but nothing at all to a novice. Tho this does give me the idea that the GUI should be able to lift the comments and utilize them as quick-help, if they're consistently formatted.

As to *affecting* the file in realtime, it should exhibit the expected behaviour one sees in most editors -- you see the result onscreen, but it's not *saved to disk* til you TELL it Save. That makes an Ooops a matter of simply "exit and start over", a technique most novices intuitively grok.

Re:Beginner friendly?

[SanityInAnarchy]

All they really need is to understand what a comment is, and to have that link to the config file. A good example of that right now is the OpenVPN GUI for my Mac. It gives me a simple menu to connect/disconnect, and it shows me whether the VPN is disabled, trying to connect, or connected. In the connect/disconnect menu, there's an option for "edit config file", which opens the config file in TextEdit. The config file is extremely well documented.

I don't see why showing a checkbox that says "You said 'yes' here" without saving and trying it out is any more helpful. A better place to focus on would be how easy it is to understand what a particular option does, whether it's a checkbox or a line in a config file.

Good idea about the help, though. I think that would be something to implement in text editors -- they already recognize comments, and some comments already contain HTML, so put the two together and you get links to external help resources. But then, that's not hugely more newbie-friendly, if said newbie knows how to use Google. Making comments into tooltips? Is that really more helpful than just coloring them?

Well, maybe it is, I'm not a newbie anymore, so it's sometimes hard to think that way...

Re:Beginner friendly?

[Reziac]

"A better place to focus on would be how easy it is to understand what a particular option does, whether it's a checkbox or a line in a config file."

That's exactly the point I'm trying to make. If the GUI shows you the possible options, and *simultaneously* you can see what each option actually *does* to the config file itself, then you can "learn by doing" the syntax without trying to puzzle it out in the abstract (by RTFM'ing, which rarely works for newbies -- they simply don't have anything to relate the info to as yet. It's like studying a dictionary for a language you don't speak.)

Re:Beginner friendly?

[SanityInAnarchy]

The syntax is really not that hard. Maybe I just don't get most newbies, but it seems pretty intuitive to me to see

# Hi, I'm explaining the following
# option, and I'm in a different color.
# I don't look like code at all.
foo="bar"

That's pretty much it. And a good sample config file -- often used as a config file -- shows you all the possible options, and simultaneously explains what they do to the program itself. You can learn by doing and reading through the config file, although it helps a lot to understand comments first, so you know how to uncomment something.

I've been able to do this with some pretty tough software. Squid, for instance. Talk about a TON of options. And by the end of the sample config, I knew what each of them meant -- or at least, I understood it when I set the option; no way I'd remember it now. And when I started out, I only had a dim idea of what an HTTP proxy was. I just don't see how a GUI could make that any easier, except by having an explanation of what a proxy is, which could go in the comments -- they already practically explained most details of how a proxy works, anyway.

Re:Beginner friendly?

[Reziac]

You and I could read thru a config file and make sense of comments... but this isn't intended for "tough software", rather for newbies using any of the linux desktops, and just starting to dabble beneath the surface. As things now stand, you're either a n00b or an expert, and there's no good way to let n00bs learn-by-doing, the only method that really works.

I support and train enough new users (and I don't mean kids who are eager to dig thru the guts) to have become quite aware of this. They can RTFM all day long, or view comments for hours, and it just doesn't mean anything to them until they have something help them visualize it. And they don't want to remain ignorant, yet there's no intermediate step available to them, where they can see-and-learn.

Re:Beginner friendly?

[SanityInAnarchy]

I learned by doing -- by reading manpages. But you don't have to RTFM -- reading comments is much different than TFM, because comments are right there next to the option.

And dabbling below the surface of a Linux desktop, just about anything that would be graphical at all is already handled. What's left boils down to whether it really makes a meaningful difference for people to have a GUI versus a config file, for a program which has no GUI. So, for instance, you're saying we need a GUI for fstab?

Actually, I kind of agree about fstab, but most of the other ones are at the point where if you gave them a toy GUI to mess with a toy config file for a toy program, and gave them 5 minutes with that, they should be able to read through most real config files and grok the comments. For most purposes, I really can't see this as being useful in everyday life, unless it's somehow more convenient (doubtful), or unless we have a situation of people who are terrified of text, or people who only very, very occasionally have to tweak a setting...

Maybe you make a good point though. Kids. Kids have reasonably flexible minds. Adults were raised on GUIs...

BSD's new signs of life

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps BSD's time has finally come? With Lunix Torvald's increasingly tyrannical stance regarding GPLv3, maybe it's time for a switch to a BSD. Real freedom, stability, and no binary blobs sounds pretty damn good.

Re:BSD's new signs of life

[Stellian]

With Lunix Torvald's increasingly tyrannical stance regarding GPLv3, maybe it's time for a switch to a BSD.That's a strange thing to say. If you want GPL v3, and want your work protected against some forms of commercial use, then you certainly don't want BSD, which allows all types of commercial use.

Re:BSD's new signs of life

[byolinux]

The GPL has nothing to do with preventing commercial usage. The GPL has everything to do with preventing proprietary usage. Big difference.

Re:BSD's new signs of life

[Anonymous Coward]

On the contrary, by allowing every user the freedom to distribute to anyone outside the current user community, the GPL devalues the creation and selling of software.

This explicitly encourages the "Worse is Better" approach to software development. Since "Worse is Better" is an unethical approach to developing software that real people are going to pay for and use, the GPL is incompatible with commercial ethics.

The GPL encourages proprietory software, in other words.

If RMS had followed the normal scientific model (aka the BSD model) in allowing research to be used by anyone, at any time, for the overall good of humanity, then proprietory software would be dead now.

Re:BSD's new signs of life

[orasio]

Troll.
BSD is exactly that: GNU + Linux, but without the GPL.
And it didn't kill propfejjklfdjkldfry software yet.

Re:BSD's new signs of life

[Ant P.]

Or maybe, having been involved in open source for the past 15 years, he knows what he's talking about a _little bit_ more than you.

Re:BSD's new signs of life

[tengwar]

If RMS had followed the normal scientific model (aka the BSD model) in allowing research to be used by anyone, at any time, for the overall good of humanity, then proprietory software would be dead now.

You do know that M$ used BSD-licenced code for their IP stack and Internet Explorer, don't you?

Re:BSD's new signs of life

[stonecypher]

commercial usage ... proprietary usage. Big difference.

Not as big as you imagine. In most cases, commercial products for public release must be proprietary, either through naïve stockholder beliefs about security or business positioning, or due to NDA with related parties. Remember the Matrox and NVidia driver gap? Those companies weren't refusing to vend to Linux to be obstinant, and both companies were willing to address even smaller markets, like the Macintosh (before the mac users get up in arms, please remember that very few Mac users upgrade their video cards; in terms of sales, video card upgrades to the Linux market are a far larger market.) They just weren't able to satisfy the Linux market, because the Linux market has completely hedged itself into its dogma, and refuses to play well with anyone who works differently.

Did you ever wonder why, if there are two products, one BSD or MIT licensed and one GPL licensed, and when the BSD or MIT licensed product is inferior, the BSD or MIT product has invariably won within two years? It's because corporations aren't these mysterious dark villains you imagine them to be, and they're not stupid. Corporations understand collaboration; it reduces costs dramatically. Corporations donate more source than individuals do, and if you're going to argue that, please remember that you're not running Hurd yet. I run a corporation which makes Nintendo DS games. There are a ton of libraries I'd love to use, but because of my NDAs with Nintendo and some appallingly bad choices of wording in the LGPL, I'm simply not able to. I've had to skip dozens of awesome interface toolkits because they're simply unavailable to me. There are nineteen web browsers I've been able to find which will compile on the Nintendo DS. Exactly one of them is commercially available: KHTML. It's nothing short of a miracle that it happens to be the best choice; that's rarely true.

Wish you had PicoGUI games? So do I. Nano-X's codebase is a mess, and wxUniversal has performance and feature problems. PicoGUI is faster, prettier and compiles without problems. It skins, it scales, and the default skin is just gorgeous.

It's also a dead project, because the author lost interest and it never gained enough momentum. If it wasn't LGPL, I would personally resurrect and dramatically extend it; it would be far less work than starting over. Unfortunately, it's LGPL. Nobody's touched it since mid-2003. It's a beautiful project. And, because of its choice of license, it's dead, probably forever, while the dramatically inferior Nano-X project continues happily along, because companies can put their weight behind it.

I stand by my opinion, which I continue to repeat openly: GPL/LGPL are the paired most destructive forces in open source software today. The unix way is interoperability and cross-usability. The specific purpose of the GPL is to destroy that, and the LGPL, though it wants to be different, fails to be different. Unix has always been a genuinely free product, available to anyone who wanted it. It was originally a commercial product, and was released by corporations to the public freely.

GPL is an abomination. It's a bunch of programmers who think that just because they have the ethical right to tell companies to screw off, that it's suddenly a good idea. What they fail to understand is that they're taking from the mouths of the people who gave it to them in the first place, and from the mouths of the people who do the vast bulk of software development today. Yes, it's your right to constrain your work however you want to, and I will honor that. I will not respect it, however, and I will call you small-minded to your face. I will leave your software in your hands because you refuse to share, all the while banging the open source drum. But you know what? Real open source is open to everyone, and has been for decades before GNU reared its ugly head.

GPL is a major lose, and i

Re:BSD's new signs of life

[Nevyn]

Did you ever wonder why, if there are two products, one BSD or MIT licensed and one GPL licensed, and when the BSD or MIT licensed product is inferior, the BSD or MIT product has invariably won within two years?

Linux vs. FreeBSD, in many many ways FreeBSD was obviously better at earlier points. I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that FreeBSD "won".

wuftpd vs. vsftpd, wuftpd is a custom BSD like license (pretty common with "BSD") ... again wuftpd failed and had decades unopposed.

Xt vs. gtk+, there's no way you can say Xt won and it also had decades unopposed.

bind and dhcpd, are OK examples ... except they are basically still unopposed (you could argue that bind has a few very small competitors). It's hardly an example of your theoretical argument though (they were both unopposed for _many_ years, and had well funded maintainers -- and even then many people are still waiting for a good bind replacement).

Re:BSD's new signs of life

[stonecypher]

Linux vs. FreeBSD, in many many ways FreeBSD was obviously better at earlier points. I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that FreeBSD "won".

Which branch of unix is in use in the most places right now? Remember Apple when you consider your answer. FreeBSD? No. BSD? Yes, actually I think it has. It's got the server market and it's got the end user market. The hobbyist market will come around.

wuftpd vs. vsftpd, wuftpd is a custom BSD like license (pretty common with "BSD") ... again wuftpd failed and had decades unopposed.

I would hardly call either of those the dominant FTP daemon. It's a bit like suggesting real free doesn't always win because Plan 9 isn't huge. Sure, there are real free things that didn't win. The germane thing to point out isn't real free things that didn't win, but GPL free things that did. You'll find that the list is remarkably short. Of the major projects, the office suites are the only things I'm aware of where GPL free is in significant lead among the free projects.

Xt vs. gtk+, there's no way you can say Xt won and it also had decades unopposed.

GTK+ is X-Windows. X is real free. Besides, I'm hard pressed to think of GTK+ as dominant. You'll notice that KDE has begun its path into the Macintosh and Win32 markets, both places where Gnome doesn't tread. KDE's license has a specific commercial exception. You'll note that's an alternative solution to the problem I annoted.

bind and dhcpd, are OK examples

I don't think they are. They're tiny and easily replaced. The only reason bind is still around is that there's no reason to gut it. I'm talking about the big stuff: operating systems, web servers, programming languages, compilers (check that gcc license again, folks, it's not pure gpl,) office suites, that sort of thing.

Like I said, as far as I know, office suites are the only place that GPL free is in the lead. I'd appreciate some counterexamples of significant size.

Re:BSD's new signs of life

[evilviper]

The GPL has nothing to do with preventing commercial usage. The GPL has everything to do with preventing proprietary usage. Big difference.

No, it's a small difference.

Most people recognize that companies very often need to be able to stop/restrict/limit the distribution of their changes, or will be effectively unable to use the software in the first place.

Even RMS (the most opinionated guy I've ever talked with) will usually acknowledge that is an issue, and suggest less restrictive licenses in some cases. Though, it's still his eventual goal with the GPL is to change the world, and make all closed software illegal in the end.

Re:BSD's new signs of life

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Besides, I'm hard pressed to think of GTK+ as dominant. You'll notice that KDE has begun its path into the Macintosh and Win32 markets, both places where Gnome doesn't tread.

Give me a break. Firstly, GTK+ is not the same thing as GNOME. Secondly, GTK+ is and has been available free for Win32 for years. I recently wrote a Python program that used GTK and Glade for a project I was working on. The program ran out of the box (with all the dependencies installed, of course) on Debian and Win32, and I chose this Python/Glade/GTK+ technology combination because I needed to get the entire program written in a weekend, I needed it to work on both Windows and Linux, and I knew that the technology was stable enough to Just Work (TM). It did.

Re:BSD's new signs of life

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Most people recognize that companies very often need to be able to stop/restrict/limit the distribution of their changes, or will be effectively unable to use the software in the first place.

No. Very few companies actually need to do this. Often managers will claim to "need" to do this, when in reality they're simply being more restrictive because it's slightly cheaper and sometimes less risky to do so than to pay people to do a proper release. These managers will prefer BSD-licensed software to GPL-licensed software when there is a choice, all other things being equal. However, when their options are between using expensive proprietary software, writing something from scratch, and using GPL-licensed software, then the same managers will choose the GPL-licensed software, because complying with the GPL is much more cost-effective and sometimes less risky than the alternatives.

The only companies for whom GPL-licensed software is actually detrimental are the ones who derive significant revenue from mass-market proprietary software that they produce. But competition in any industry always hurts some competitors' bottom lines; It's hardly news.

Though, it's still his eventual goal with the GPL is to change the world, and make all closed software illegal in the end.

Whether or not it's RMS' goal (I don't see it so much as a goal as "ideal world" wishful thinking), the more likely effect is to make mass-market proprietary software irrelevant, rather than illegal.

Re:BSD's new signs of life

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe it's time for a switch to a BSD. Real freedom, stability, and no binary blobs sounds pretty damn good.

Yup, this I was talking about to my fellow hax0rs. I shall grab FreeBSD, GPLv3'ize it and start my new "Linux" OS with real "freedom" in mind.

Re:BSD's new signs of life

[ivoras]

You do know that M$ used BSD-licenced code for their IP stack and Internet Explorer, don't you?

That's false, unfortunately. If it did things would have been much better for all.

Nitpick details: ftp.exe is not "IP stack". IE might use BSDL software like zlib & others, hardly an important design or security part. I used zlib as an example, don't stick to it.

The article is of very poor quality.

[Futurepower(R)]

The article is of very poor quality. It doesn't even provide a link to the PC-BSD website.

Re:The article is of very poor quality.

[johansalk]

In the age of Google and right-click searches, such linking is redundant.

Hardware Support

[rf0]

How well does it support hardware? Will my scanner work out of the box like Ubuntu? A "friendly" OS will just work with all your hardware without having to recompile the kernel. As others have said its not the worlds best article

Re:Hardware Support

[Kamineko]

Will my scanner work out of the box like Ubuntu?

I'd prefer it if it didn't work out of the box like when I use Ubuntu.

Re:Hardware Support

[Anonymous Coward]

A "friendly" OS will just work with all your hardware without having to recompile the kernel.

You mean, like windows?

Re:Hardware Support

[mrjb]

I use Ubuntu at home, and love it. But, the installer/live CD doesn't fully boot on the DELL machines at work. By your definition, this would disqualify Ubuntu as a 'friendly' OS. Also, my old 5.25" floppy drive doesn't work on Windows anymore. This is caused by the relevant BIOS calls being absent (FreeDOS doesn't read my floppy disks either, but under Linux I can read those old floppies just fine). So much for Windows as a 'friendly' OS.

My point is, don't blame the software for lacking hardware support. No OS supports *all* hardware anymore- manufacterers come and go, and if you change your OS, you risk losing support for your current hardware. Regardless of switching to Ubuntu, to FreeBSD, or upgrading to the next flavor of Windows. That said, I think the open source community is doing a tremendous job of supporting a wide range of hardware. The source code for the drivers used by Ubuntu is readily available to the FreeBSD developers, so chances are enough information is available to support your hardware under FreeBSD as well. This in contrast to your old windows-only undocumented proprietary hardware whose manufacterer has gone bankrupt years ago.

Re:Hardware Support

[Brandybuck]

I had Ubuntu on my laptop (T60), and NOTHING worked out of the box. Well, audio worked, but that was it. No video beyond vesa, no wifi, no suspend, no bluetooth. I didn't don't a scanner though, so I can't comment on that. Maybe scanners do work out of the box on Ubuntu.

I figured if I had to do everything by hand, I might as well do everything by hand on an operating system I'm familiar with. So I installed FreeBSD.

I'm not ragging on Ubuntu. I'm ragging on the damned manufacturers and their Windows only crap.

Re:Hardware Support

[evilviper]

How well does it support hardware?

You can expect FreeBSD to support 99% of the hardware that works under Linux. And actually, it will generally be more stable under FreeBSD than under Linux.

A "friendly" OS will just work with all your hardware without having to recompile the kernel.

The BSDs practically never even SUGGEST recompiling the kernel, even though it's quicker and easier than in Linux land. Everything is always compiled-in, and very much unlike Linux, the system is fully Plug-and-Play. Everything from hard drives to your soundcard and all necesarry setting are detected by the kernel on boot-up (not with something flaky like kudzu, after boot-up) and it will either automatically work, or just isn't supported. Almost never any manual twisting and tweaking of options, let alone hours of it, as Linux users are very accustomed to.

This is a bit over-simplistic, mind you, but basically true.

Re:Hardware Support

[paulmer2003]

BSD isnt like Linux - you shouldent *have* to recompile your kernel (for new hardware support).

Re:Hardware Support

[johansalk]

I'm amazed that your 5.25" floppies are still readable. When did you last manage to buy one? I thought you ought to keep them as antiques.

It is a very superficial article

[Budenny]

Yes, true. But if you look at PC BSD, its interesting, and the enthusiasm expressed is probably valid. There seem to be three distributions that are roughly comparable in terms of the end user experience, PCLinux, PCBSD and DesktopBSD. Its not a Windows look and feel experience, but it is Windows-like in the sense of shipping with a controlled set of applications. Not like say Mandriva, where the naive user will often stare in disbelief and wonder why they have abiword, KOffice and Open Office, not to mention half a dozen text editors.

If you're looking for a stable non-MS distribution for people who are basically looking for Office, photo management, Internet, one of these is probably the simplest fastest and most user friendly way to get there.

Re:It is a very superficial article

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD aren't 'distributions', they are operating systems. PC-BSD is a distribution of FreeBSD. Please stop speaking out of ignorance.

ummmm no?

[nukem996]

BSD may be very easy but Fedora, SUSE, Ubuntu, and Mandrake are all just as easy. Ive installed all of them and its pretty much insert the CD tell it what hard drive to parition ask, answer if you want to customize the installation(what packages you want) and finally setup users. I havnt installed PC-BSD but Im pretty sure its the same.

Re:ummmm no?

[stonecypher]

"Hi I'm going to claim it's the same thing about a guess about a product I've never used."

Man, won't you be embarrassed when you try it? Oh right, you won't bother to check. Nevermind.

Re:It's dead Jim

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for your insight, Netcraft.

Benefits of BSD?

[miyako]

I don't intend this to be a troll, I'm honestly curious. I've been using Linux since around 1998, and I've always found that it works well for me. I have a friend who swears by FreeBSD, but his zelotry makes it hard to get a strait answer about what's so great about BSD (hmm, now I know how all of my Windows using friends feel when I talk...).
So to all of you who might use this, or some other flavor of BSD as a desktop, what advantages does it offer over Linux? What are the disadvantages (other than the momentum that Linux has as a desktop OS compared to BSD)?

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[TheRaven64]

It's difficult to really explain. I used Linux for a few years, but bits of it always bugged me. I never found a Linux system that really felt like all the bits were designed to work together (in an abstract, hand waving, way). I tried using FreeBSD out of curiosity and was very impressed by the system as a whole. The thing that really persuaded me at the time was something quite small; the sound driver did mixing in software if the hardware didn't support it. This meant I could have KDE apps, GNOME apps, and apps that wrote to /dev/dsp all making noises without breaking each other, something that had bugged me about Linux for a while. I believe ALSA has this ability now.

One thing you will notice is that the BSD documentation is a lot better. When I am working on a Linux box, I usually have an SSH session open to a BSD box for checking man pages. OpenBSD tends to be the best in this regard; any code commit must include a documentation update if it changes anything user-visible, and any discrepancy between the code and the documentation is regarded as a bug in the code.

Overall, I think I prefer OpenBSD these days, but it doesn't support DRI yet so I'd recommend FreeBSD for the desktop (or SMP systems, since OpenBSD's SMP support is about where FreeBSD was with the 4.x series).

Basically, you should try it and see if you like it. Give it a while; I've seen Linux users give up on *BSD because 'it doesn't work right' meaning 'it isn't exactly the same as Linux.'

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[miyako]

You know, the sound mixing thing definitely would have had a chance at getting me to give BSD a try if I had known about that a while ago when that was a bigger problem for me than it is now. I can see how a more unified system would appeal to most people. It was never something that particularly bugged me, since I guess I'm still in the mindset of seeing a collection of utilities as opposed to a unified system (maybe that's just because I come from Linux, and I might change my mind if I used something else that was more unified).
Documentation is definitely a plus, it is really aggrevating when you are trying to find out some flag for a command, and the man page is useless or non-existant. I might try installing a couple of the BSDs in virtual machines and at least giving them a fair go.
Is there anything like "BSD From Scratch" that will tell you how to bootstrap a BSD install? I think doing a LFS install was probably the most informative experience I've ever had with Linux, and it would be a nice way to learn more about how BSD works so as to get aquainted with the system from the bottom up.

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[mobby_6kl]

>what's so great about BSD

You don't have to deal with the linux fans ;-)

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[Neil]

So to all of you who might use this, or some other flavor of BSD as a desktop, what advantages does it offer over Linux?

• Unity and coherence of the system: A "Linux" distribution is an integration of many different packages from different groups of developers (the Linux kernel itself, glibc, numerous GNU utilities, and potentially thousands of end user applications - web browsers, mail programs, editors, office suites, etc). The creators of distributions generally do a fine job of this integration but occasionally the fact that it doesn't all fit together perfectly is exposed (particularly if things aren't working properly and one is trying to fault-find, or perhaps upgrade or change particular bits of the system). The FreeBSD developers aren't (primarily) integrators. Most of the bits of the core system have no "upstream", the developers are working directly on a single project source tree for a complete, minimalist Unix-like system. This system a kernel, libc and the various other system libraries, all the command-line utilites you expect from a POSIX system, documentation (a man page for each program and system call), etc. If, for example, you run a /bin/sh script which contains a find command then the entire software stack up and down (sh, find, libc, kernel) comes from a single set of developers with a unified plan and architecture.
• Size of the default install: the core system is relatively small, uncluttered, yet highly functional. The PC-BSD review mentions Linux distributions where the default install contains enormous amounts of sofware (several different office suits and numerous text editors). Conversely "minimal" installs in the Linux distribution world often really are minimal - lacking lots of basic stuff that I'd expect from a Unix system (vi, C compiler, man pages, etc). The FreeBSD default install is in many ways like a "complete install" of a late 80s commercial Unix distribution such as SunOS or Ultrix - the basic Unix toolset (vi, sh, csh, ls, awk, sed, grep, find, mail, man, make, cc, ...) is all there, but without much in the way of optional 3rd party free software. The whole thing, including sources and documentation fits in 500-ish Mbytes. The sysadmin can use the Ports mechanism to easily add any of about 15000 free software packages later, customizing the system applications to taste.
• Advantages of source based distribution: I have always found it strange that Linux culture is strongly free software / open source based, but other than Gentoo users, the vast majority of Linux people never actually use source code: 99% systems seem to be installed entirely from binary RPMs or DEBs or whatever provided by the distribution makers. I use a FreeBSD CD set to do an initial install, then I track the STABLE source branch in the project source repository. Every couple of weeks I resync /usr/src and rebuild the entire core system from source code to make sure that I'm up to date with security fixes, bug fixes, new drivers, etc. I know that the contents of /usr/src match the kernel, the libraries, the daemons and the POSIX utilities that I'm currently running, compiled with the options that I wanted. If I come across something that appears to be buggy behaviour I can load up the relevent part of the source tree in Emacs, run the binary under gdb and actually try to figure out what is going on. If some bit of behaviour niggles me I can try changing the sources and building a custom version (and easily diff the source tree and attempt to contribute back changes to the project if I think my hack is of some interest to others). Such an approach is not for everyone, but any means, but if you do have the hacker mind-set then it can be tremendously empowering.
• Familiarity: my first serious Unix experience was using commercial Unixes derived from 4BSD (SunOS 4, etc). I've admined and us

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[Dystopian Rebel]

I have tried PC-BSD and I think it's the Ubuntu of BSD distributions, i.e. a boon to the home user. It's easy to install and the PBI packaging system for applications is tidy and is documented so the community can participate in creating PBIs. In my opinion, PBIs are an advantage over Linux.

But I like Gnome more than KDE. (Yes, I know that Linus T. despises me now.) PC-BSD is a KDE-based distribution.

There's enough buggy software in the world to waste your whole life. :o) So I give you this advice: virtualization is your friend. Get the free VMWare Server and install PC-BSD for yourself to see how you like it.

I liked it very much, but I switched to Ubuntu after suffering FreeBSD 5.x for a couple of years. If Ubuntu ever lets me down, I'd give PC-BSD a try.

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[Epsillon]

Yes, there is. http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200302/fbsdscratch.htm l

First and foremost, read the handbook. This cannot be overstated. http://www1.uk.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/boo ks/handbook/

Bear in mind that, for a Linux user, FreeBSD will appear to behave most like Gentoo, particularly when building applications from ports. The actual inheritance was the other way around, but that hardly matters to this discussion.

The kernel config file is flat text, with the various options described in detail in the ${SRC}/sys/conf/NOTES and ${SRC}/sys/${ARCH}/NOTES files. Once you get used to it, nothing ever comes close to the ease of compiling new kernels IMHO. Just watch what depends on what, especially the COMPAT_??? options. Also, try not to use "custom" compiler flags like -ffast-math and -funroll-loops as you can end up with hard to diagnose problems when building from source.

Oh, and for anyone reading this thread who is saying "I only have one dsp device that gets locked and nothing else can use it," there is a sysctl knob which needs setting: hw.snd.pcm?.vchans which I usually set to 4 in /etc/sysctl.conf.

There's a lot of help to be had on the Usenet group comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc, too.

My last word on the subject is this: If you have an amd64 machine, for now I would use the i386 port (CPUTYPE=athlon64 in /etc/make.conf which will compile everything with -march=athlon-mp), especially if you use Firefox or you may end up rather frustrated. OpenOffice now works perfectly on amd64, as does JDK15 (albeit without the browser plugin) but native Firefox still has "issues" (startup hangs on a machine with an NFS mounted /home, hard locks, crashes to name but a few problems I have encountered) and plugins are rather flaky. I tend to use the 32bit Linux version on amd64, but the native i386 version has the most plugins available for it (win32codecs, Flash - you need a patch to make Flash7 work with the linuxpluginwrapper and native Firefox, see the message displayed when you install the port - et al). Also, there are no proprietary nVidia drivers for amd64 yet, which is not true for i386. This is being addressed in -CURRENT as nVidia have intimated that a key function they require is not present in the amd64 port and the devs are working on it, so the situation is set to change in the near future.

By the way, ports count at present is ~15500. That's 15.5 thousand services, applications, libraries and utilities available for the cost of typing "make install clean".

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with this answer is that the question was about using BSD as a desktop OS. Reread comment #1 (and #2 for that matter) in the context of KDE or GNOME being an integral part of the user's desktop experience. Reread comments #3 and #4 in terms of using normal desktop applications (e.g. OpenOffice) rather than using gdb in Emacs to tweak your source code. If anything, you've just explained why BSD isn't so great as a desktop OS -- because that's not what its users are going for.

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[TheRaven64]

You know, the sound mixing thing definitely would have had a chance at getting me to give BSD a try if I had known about that a while ago when that was a bigger problem for me than it is now.

Indeed. I wouldn't expect it to be such a draw now, but it is just a concrete example of the attention to detail of the BSD teams.

I can see how a more unified system would appeal to most people. It was never something that particularly bugged me, since I guess I'm still in the mindset of seeing a collection of utilities as opposed to a unified system

For the most part, it's little things. A good example is network configuration. On OpenBSD, everything to do with configuring network interfaces is done through ifconfig. On Linux (and, sadly, FreeBSD) you have a separate utility to control WiFi settings. One Linux user recently told me that ifconfig was now deprecated in favour of something else (I can't remember what) on Linux systems, although the man page makes no mention of this.

I might try installing a couple of the BSDs in virtual machines and at least giving them a fair go.

If you're running in a VM, I would suggest OpenBSD. I find the userland cleaner, and the lack of 3D support isn't going to be an issue in a VM. The install process can be a bit daunting; it's not actually that hard, but it doesn't do much by way of hand-holding so make sure you have the manual open.

Is there anything like "BSD From Scratch" that will tell you how to bootstrap a BSD install?

Not really. The concept isn't so important in the BSD world. A BSD is an operating system; a kernel and a basic userland (including compiler tool chain). Once you have installed *BSD, you have what is known as the base system. This is everything that is maintained by the BSD team (including a few third party utilities that have patch branches maintained by the team). This might include X, but won't include something like GNOME.

Once you have the base system installed, you then add ports or packages. On FreeBSD and OpenBSD, a port is a framework for building a third party application (including dependency resolution and applying OS-specific patches), while a package is the binary version of a port. You can create a package by running 'make package' in the port's directory. On FreeBSD, ports are the usual way of installing applications, and binary packages sometimes lag behind the ports (you can use them interchangeably, since a package is just a precompiled port; the portupgrade utility has an option to try installing the package if it exists, or to build the port if it doesn't). On OpenBSD, the pre-built packages are much more heavily tested than the ports (although they are only released every six months with a release of the base system and so are often slightly out-of-date) and are the recommended way of installing software.

If you really want to do something a bit more manually, there is a tutorial on Ping Wales about installing OpenBSD without using the OpenBSD installer. It's focussed on using an existing system to create a bootable flash image, but you can probably adapt it to a real system. I wouldn't recommend actually doing this, but you might find it informative.

The BSD community has a reputation for being slightly newbie-hostile. For the most part, this comes from two things:

1. People posting newbie questions on development lists. There are lists for newbie questions, and if you post to the wrong list you might well get flamed.
2. People asking questions that are answered in the documentation. People put a lot of effort into writing BSD documentation - I wrote a small section of the FreeBSD Handbook - and it is very irritating to have people asking questions that you have already answered.

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[SanityInAnarchy]

See, I've always had all kinds of annoying little problems with BSD, as seen in OS X. The sound thing you mention is neat, except that sound frequently stops working in Firefox until you open Garage Band and close it, which, for no apparent reason, fixes the problem.

Commandline utilities generally work, but they're a lot pickier than Linux ones. For instance, I'll often type 'rm foo', and then remember that foo is a directory, and tack a '-rf' onto the end of it -- except that this rm insists on having its options at the beginning of the command. That is, 'rm -rf foo' works, but 'rm foo -rf' is the equivalent of 'rm foo -- -rf'.

And that's assuming the utilities I want are there. I have tried Fink, but the whole separate /sw tree was confusing, and while it did give me more recent versions of things like Perl, and a few tools OS X didn't have to begin with, it also gave me different, less patched, and sometimes older versions of other binaries. So, should /sw/bin go before /bin, or the other way around? I gave up.

My experience hasn't been that BSD documentation is better, as in both cases, I found myself going to Google anyway.

I hear what you're saying about us not liking it because it's not exactly the same as Linux, but when I see a drop in functionality, and less chance of finding working drivers, or getting software to work, plus it's weird and I have to learn it all over again, I really have to wonder what the upside is.

At least with Linux, there was an increase in functionality to go with the loss of drivers/apps.

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Unity and coherence smacks of Redmond-like "integration". I understand what you're saying, but I consider it a feature, not a bug, for my software to come from all sorts of different places, tied together by the distro. It means that all software on Linux is third-party, but all the third-party software in the distro is better integrated than anywhere else.

Now, I'm using OS X as a desktop BSD, so this may not reflect other BSDs, but:

I've found that third-party software on OS X doesn't necessarily integrate as well as native. Native software is managed by Software Update, all works together flawlessly, and so on. Third-party software, at least of the commandline sort, is hit or miss, compared with the flawless experience I've had with Linux.

Ubuntu seems to be about the right size for me, but if you really want a good-sized Linux install, you can start with a base Gentoo system or an Ubuntu-server install, then add packages to suit. My OS X didn't exactly come with a package management system to make it easy to add software to the base install.

Source-based is good, and I love Gentoo's ebuild system, but when I'm not creating/tweaking/hacking packages, I get really sick of waiting for every little thing to compile from source. Ubuntu is nice that way -- just download and install. There are other killer features keeping me tied to Gentoo, though, and OS X is certainly not source-based (Software Update is binary), so source-based isn't a deal-breaker for a BSD.

I'm much more familiar with Linux than I am with anything else, so my personal preference leans towards Linux. I'm not picking a fight either, just expressing some views. It does sound like you might like Gentoo, though.

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[annakin]

Here's an example. "top" on Linux takes a couple seconds to come up. "top" on BSD comes up instantly. You can tell BSD has been optimized.

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[Budenny]

The point of PCBSD is probably not that it is BSD as opposed to Linux. For the average user who is in the market for this sort of OS, whether he uses PCLinux or PCBSD is probably going to make little difference to him. KDE is going to work pretty much the same on both. The interesting thing is more whether PCBSD is suitable for a fairly new user, and it is, very much so. Wouldn't waste much time debating about whether it is better or worse than PCLinux. The differences from a user point of view, such as they are, are not really about whether one is Linux and the other BSD, but more about how they've been configured.

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[NuShrike]

What suffering was there for FreeBSD 5.x unless you were an early adoptor in the pre-5.3 days. Pre-5.3 days were alpha/beta days, so suffering was expected and self-inflicted.

After 5.4 on, and 6.0 on are quite dandy.

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[Eideewt]

"Ubuntu seems to be about the right size for me, but if you really want a good-sized Linux install, you can start with a base Gentoo system or an Ubuntu-server install, then add packages to suit."

Anyone who wants a minimal Linux install should take a look at Arch Linux. It's an i686 distro with a KISS philosophy. The base install size is around 300 MB iirc (similar to a basic BSD installation, I gather) and includes only what you need to get up and running: a kernel and basic userland, including an excellent package manager called Pacman.

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unity and coherence smacks of Redmond-like "integration". I understand what you're saying, but I consider it a feature, not a bug, for my software to come from all sorts of different places, tied together by the distro. It means that all software on Linux is third-party, but all the third-party software in the distro is better integrated than anywhere else.

Unity and coherence with the actual OS, not window managers, web browsers, multimedia, etc. Comparisons to Microsoft are ignorant.

We're not talking about the FreeBSD team authoring web browsers or rewriting KDE, we're talking about some of the kernel folks who likely wrote ps, ls, vmstat, file system drivers, etc. This is not a bad thing.

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[Dystopian Rebel]

What suffering was there for FreeBSD 5.x unless you were an early adoptor

Amigo, I was using 5.2 Release, 5.3 Release, and 5.4 Release. Is that what you call "early adoption"?

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[Neil]

Amigo, I was using 5.2 Release, 5.3 Release, and 5.4 Release. Is that what you call "early adoption"?

In part, yes. 5.2-RELEASE was cut from the development branch (as were 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2.1). The release announcement mentions that it is "a 'New Technology' release and might not be suitable for all users", and includes a link to the Early Adopter's Guide.

FreeBSD 5 only became "mainstream" with 5.3-RELEASE - and still had some rough edges. For anyone who's only experience has been with FreeBSD 5.X releases then I can sympathise if they have come away with a less than rosy view. The amount of development and change that went on between 4.X and 5.X is now widely accepted to have been a bad idea. If you give 6.2 a spin when it comes out then you might be pleasently suprised. A lot of the disruptive changes introduced during 5-CURRENT development have finally settled down and are paying dividends.

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[johansalk]

The best answer I found on this topic; it compares Debian, the best of Linux, to FreeBSD http://tinyurl.com/s74ws

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[NuShrike]

So what suffering? Answer the question. As said, 5.2.x && 5.3 was early adoption.

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Yes, I understand the difference. It also means that some of those tools become more platform-specific than they should. For instance, GNU rm lets me do this:

rm /foo -rf

But on BSD, it has to be this:

rm -rf /foo

This is a bad thing.

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[SanityInAnarchy]

The point I was making about Gentoo and Ubuntu is that once you get it, there are hundreds of thousands of packages you can install, one at a time, when you need them. The base distro is small, but it's got enough (just enough) for the package manager to work. You can still build a full-fledged Ubuntu-like install out of Gentoo, or out of Ubuntu-server.

Can Arch do that? I mean, I'm sure it's got desktop stuff, but how many apps does pacman really have?

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[Eideewt]

Wow, do Gentoo and Ubuntu really have that many packages? I thought Ubuntu had around 18,000.

I think there are around 7000 packages in Arch's repos, not including unsupported user-submitted packages in what's called the AUR. Arch's repos are pretty good, meaning that most of the things I want are in there. Certainly enough to build a solid system. I'm not suggesting that Arch is a perfect fit for everyone, but since we were talking about minimal base installations, I thought it was worth mentioning. I suppose it depends on what you want to do with the system. I think most Arch users use it on the desktop, but I don't see any reason that you couldn't build a server on it either, since programs like Apache and the SQLs are in the repos (I don't know exactly what goes into a server though). This would probably be a Bad Idea anyway, due to Arch's frequent updates.

You say "full-fledged Ubuntu-like", and you also say "I'm sure it's got desktop stuff, but how many apps does [it] really have?" referring to Arch. I'm not sure what distinction you're making here. Isn't Ubuntu a desktop distro? Arch has fewer apps than Ubuntu in its repos, but I don't know exactly what it is that Arch lacks. I can't make a comparison.

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[Dystopian Rebel]

So what suffering? Answer the question.

Suffering because of "early adoption", apparently... but that's my own fault in your esteemed opinion. It was my first experience with FreeBSD and I didn't know that 5.x release versions were bad news. Here's a quotation from elsewhere in this thread:

"The amount of development and change that went on between 4.X and 5.X is now widely accepted to have been a bad idea."

I'm willing to believe that 6.x is much better. But I'm also not going to be rebuilding my server anytime soon.

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

"A good example is network configuration. On OpenBSD, everything to do with configuring network interfaces is done through ifconfig. On Linux (and, sadly, FreeBSD) you have a separate utility to control WiFi settings."

Uh... last time I checked, you could configure all of your wireless setting in FreeBSD through ifconfig. That includes scanning for aps, setting up encryption, authentication, etc. Correct me if I'm wrong

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ifconfig& sektion=8

Beginner friendly is...

[s0l3d4d]

... when you plug in your scanner, printer, digital camera, mobile phone, PDA, dvcam .. and it just works. When you don't need to even figure what program would possibly deal with such devices to start with.
Maybe they should do a test... 20 beginners with no computer experience or familiarity, that would use this operating system, and e.g. Mac OS X, plain installed FreeBSD and XP, and see what they think is really the easiest to use. The beginners would be way better to tell this than someone who makes their living writing computer related articles.

Re:Beginner friendly is...

[rtaylor]

when you plug in your

If you've watched a beginner with no computer experience, you will quickly find that requirng them to plug things into it is a challenge in itself.

It is possible for somebody knowledgeable to setup a BSD, and presumably Linux, based computer to kick off various programs when a USB device is attached and stop the program when the device is detached (usbd.conf). Watching for the lid opening on a scanner would require something special.

Re:Beginner friendly is...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is possible for somebody knowledgeable to setup a BSD, and presumably Linux, based computer to kick off various programs when a USB device is attached and stop the program when the device is detached (usbd.conf). Watching for the lid opening on a scanner would require something special.

Why not watch for certain button presses on the scanner? I've seen some scanners with a big "scan" button and other specialized buttons like "scan to email", "scan to file", "scan to fax" that load the appropriate program based on which button the user pressed (in Windows). I have only used a few scanners, but are there some scanners out there now that actually load software when you open/close the lid now?

Re:Beginner friendly is...

[SanityInAnarchy]

I would be very curious to see the results of this. My guesses:

Left entirely on their own, probably OS X beats Kubuntu by a hair.

With people coaching them, obviously it depends on the quality of the coaches, but I suspect it would be between Ubuntu, Gentoo, and OS X. Gentoo has by far the best community to help you, OS X is definitely the easiest to start with, but Ubuntu will probably be both easy to set up and easy to maintain -- OS X becomes a maintenance nightmare without a package manager.

If these people had previously used any computers -- if these were "computer newbies" who had used Windows -- then it'll be XP, but not by as much as you'd think. MS has a way of screwing up their interface, while other people actually improve the interface in other ways than making it like Windows. Besides, KDE and IceWM look quite a bit like Windows.

Or take a bunch of power users from various platforms, study them for awhile to figure out how much experience they had with each platform (how much time do they spend on one platform vs another), then force each of them to use another platform as their desktop OS, exclusively, for some very long time -- a few months or a year. This would probably show which OS is ultimately the most usable. My guess: inconclusive, really. Everyone will find a way to not only live with a given OS, but to thrive on it, and the only thing we'd be able to measure with any reasonable degree of accuracy would be the learning curve. But people don't switch OSes because of a learning curve.

But it would be very interesting, no matter what the results or how trustworthy they were. It would be especially nice if we could find some funding for this from somewhere other than Microsoft.

Re:Beginner friendly is...

[ratboy666]

Sure... I'll take your challenge...

Mac OS X - doesn't install at all (no Apple hardware).
XP - installs, no sound, network, or CD access.
FreeBSD - actually installs and does something.

Don't need the other 19 people, I guess. And, why IS installing taken to be a Rosetta Stone, anyway?

Ratboy

Re:Beginner friendly is...

[Brandybuck]

And, why IS installing taken to be a Rosetta Stone, anyway?

Because in the Windows world it's the single most frequent task. :-)

the problem is the BSD license, not GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should Linux's adoption of GPLv3 help BSD? Looks to me like the BSD license has been a big problem for the adoption of BSD.

The mistake is KDE as window manager

[Anonymous Coward]

PCBSD is a good product that deserves some recognition. Their big mistake is to have KDE as window manager rather than Gnome. Technically KDE is certainly a good software but its look and feel and behaviors makes it too close to Windows. Feel like being in a fancy restaurant and still smell the grease of a Taco Bell.

Re:The mistake is KDE as window manager

[binary paladin]

Whereas they could go with Gnome which is like Taco Bell (and you can still smell the grease of Taco Bell).

Limits to the Compatiblity Layer

[X43B]

"the ability to install Linux software, thanks to the binary compatibility layer" I tried FreeBSD once. I actually really liked it but it had one show stopper for me that led me back to FC. I was amazed that theLinux compatibilty layer was able to install Matlab, a closed source program. It worked, however, not all features worked. In my Matlab scripts I tend to make lots calls to the command line of the OS. This did not work and thus many of my scripts were rendered broken. Another strange quirk is the "exit" command did not work. I t was rather amusing that I could run all types of complicated operations and plotting routintes but it would return an error when trying to quit the program. I had to kill it from a shell.

Re:Limits to the Compatiblity Layer

[bytesex]

Completely OT (especially for a beginner's OS), but can one run Oracle inside this compatibility layer ? If so, what are the experiemces ?

Re:Limits to the Compatiblity Layer

[CastrTroy]

Which is all nice and fine to say you can run linux software, but for the majority of users it's not easy unless you can go to the store, buy a program, stick the disk in, click next a couple times and have it run. That's about what most people can handle. Even if they are able to install any linux package available at the click of a button, it will still be too hard, because most users would be unaware of what application to use. They would probably look for a web browser, find lynx, and install that, being totally mystified when it comes up as a text based program, or end up installing emacs as a text editor. There are better text editors, and web browsers to choose from, but most users would be unable to make a good decision, and end up installing 3 or 4 different apps that didn't fit their needs. I do it all the time. You search on sourceforge for something you want, and end up installing 5 different programs before you find one that actually works, and does what it says it does. Are there any linux sites that just index the best of the best. I'm tired of installing Kxy, only to find out that it's only a half implemented piece of garbage software.

Re:Limits to the Compatiblity Layer

[Anonymous Coward]

In my Matlab scripts I tend to make lots calls to the command line of the OS.

Did you try installing GNU shells and utilities and calling those?

Re:Limits to the Compatiblity Layer

[SanityInAnarchy]

Ok, stop with the "next" bullshit. This is only the easiest way to install a program because people are trained this way. The easiest way to install a program is to use a package manager -- and no, it doesn't have to be a commandline. It also does help with installing the 3 or 4 different apps, and finding the one that actually works, if you end up having to go through that -- for whatever reason, I don't often have this problem.

Re:Limits to the Compatiblity Layer

[Anonymous Coward]

It's most likely due to some missing syscalls. FreeBSD's compat layer uses the 2.4 kernel and doesn't implement all of the syscalls. There's currently a Google summer of code project to update the compat layer to use the 2.6 kernel and to try and support all syscalls. Once that's done most programs should work rather well

Re:Limits to the Compatiblity Layer

[iggymanz]

Done't know about this PC-BSD flavor of FreeBSD, but FreeBSD+Oracle has been done at version 5.x and before with Oracle 9i and before; http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200402/oracle.html http://www.scc.nl/~marcel/howto-oracle.html http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=2143+6 531+/usr/local/www/db/text/2003/freebsd-database/2 0030309.freebsd-database I'd like to hear about Oracle 10g on FreeBSD or PC-BSD, any versions of the OS

PCBSD is good

[FudRucker]

i tried it, PCBSD makes a decent KDE desktop, i noticed KDE's kooka was broken - i am guessing it was broken because sane was not installed, i did a little google search and noticed FBSD considers sane/xsane a vulnerability because the temp files it creates while running can be exployted, and when i tried to compile sane-backends it complained about no USB , so i get libusb and compiled it and still sane-backends complained about nousb, i did not bother with libgphoto2 since sane was not wanting to work, other than this minor annoyence PCBSD is a decent KDE desktop, it just needs to shed some of the FreeBSD strict access control (server security?) to make better headway in the desktop/workstation arena. as a faithful Linux user i am glad to see PCBSD as an alternative, and i see MidnightBSD is a BSD desktop too...

BSD = i am not dead :)

Re:PCBSD is good

[icydog]

That was the single most ridiculous run-on I've ever read in my life.

Next Gen OS

[jeriqo]

Just seen a screenshot, is this a competitor for Windows 95?

Beginner friendly?

[jandersen]

Unfortunately 'beginner friendly' normally also means 'hostile to non-beginners'. I don't this has to be the case always, but that is one of the BIG problems with Windows and GNOME: they try to be 'beginner friendly' or just 'user friendly' and end up being dumbed down (or even infantile like the 'Fisher-Price Interface' in XP).

What I would like to see - though perhaps it is too much to hope for - is an interface where you could 'change gears', so to speak, from 'beginner' to 'experienced' to 'advanced' to 'bloody-know-it-all'; the beginner mode should have wizards, few options, easy, catoon-style documentation and bright, but calming colours, whereas the most advanced level would have none of the dumbing-down and would have complete, technical documentation of absolutely all features, options and parameters - no wizards, just vi and text-based parameter files.

Yes, I know, Linux is not too far from this by now, but technical documentation is still severely lacking in some areas, most notoriously when it comes to the GNOME desktop. In fact, it is so bad that I think the GNOME developers should freeze their development until they have produced proper, technical documentation of their SW.

BSD facilitates forking

[mangu]

If RMS had followed the normal scientific model (aka the BSD model) in allowing research to be used by anyone, at any time, for the overall good of humanity, then proprietary software would be dead now.

If Linux was licenced under the BSD, we would have as many versions of the kernel as we have distributions. If the BSD licence is so great, then why the (multiple forks) of BSD haven't killed proprietary software by now? What killed commercial versions of Unix was the fragmentation, what makes Linux so strong is the union forced by the GPL.

Forking a project with the GPL usually doesn't cause a lasting division, eventually everyone will come back together under the branch that the majority considers "best". Ironically, the BSD licence, despite allowing more freedom for commercial companies, hasn't produced the best results commercially. Where is the commercial Unix based on the BSD? Other than specialized embedded OSes, general purpose commercial Unix based on BSD is the closest thing to dead that exists in the market today.

Re:BSD facilitates forking

[Anonymous Coward]

The GPL is one of Linux's biggest problems. Linux is horribly fragmented, and the community seems to be made of people endlessly jumping from distribution to distribution for the next shiny interface or pretty new feature. The *BSD world, up until recently was made up of loyal life-long users. Now, the "success" of Linux has adversely affected us, and the splintering "everyone-create-their-own-distro" mentality has leaked into our community. All those point-and-click-solution hungry users are using FreeBSD, and the rest of us have to deal with it.

In the BSD-world we dislike "proprietary", but are not hostile to it.

Ironically, the BSD licence, despite allowing more freedom for commercial companies, hasn't produced the best results commercially.

I disagree. There are plenty of major companies using bits of BSD code in their project. Code is shared around, and we all benefit in one way or another. I don't particularly care that some of it never gets back to the average user; the fact that it is used is great.

Re:BSD facilitates forking

[laffer1]

That's why I decided to fork FreeBSD for MidnightBSD. I could build a distro like PC-BSD or DesktopBSD, but I found the idea linuxish. FreeBSD is after all the "Power to server". The desktop isn't a target for optimization or improvement. If a major change would help desktop users at the cost of minor server performance degredation, FreeBSD would not do it. Increasingly, the mailing lists are focusing on micro benchmarks.

Linus wrote the linux kernel for desktop use. Instead its used on servers and slowly creeping into the mainstream. There are countless distros and no clear solution. PC-BSD and DesktopBSD are both great ideas and they have a big head start on me. Unfortunetely they would be best served by merging. Both use KDE. Someone will eventually throw up a gnome distro as well. Hell I thought about it.

In the end, the open source community needs a unqiue desktop environment that runs on one kernel with a userland designed around the user. This could be a future linux project, a BSD based OS or something completely different. In my opinion, the BSD community benefits from having a unique kernel. We can all try new things and build unique operating environments that fit our users habits. DragonFlyBSD is a great example. They forked off of FreeBSD and now have a message passing based approach that looks quite interesting. OpenBSD forked off of NetBSD and now they have one of the most secure systems with software we all use everyday like openssh coming out of the project.

On a certain level, open source encourages forking. We're always told to change something if we don't like it. Patch, patch, patch. What do you do if FreeBSD won't take your patches?

The real problem is that everyone is copying Windows to compete. Apple at least has iApps to draw in users. They offer something original to consumers and its attractive. The linux and BSD communities need to do the same.

Please

[tomstdenis]

stop [next] posting [next] articles [next] which [next] are [next] nothing [next] but [next] ad [next] impression [next] generators [next].

The dude put like 3 sentences per "page" and doesn't let you skip far into the article [hint, the dropdown says "...continue" so you can't just jump ahead to the conclusions and what not]. I stopped reading it after the 2nd page.

If [next] this [next] is [next] the [next] future [next] of [next] journalism [next] then [next] I [next] fear [next] for [next] our [next] future.

Tom

Re:Please

[OldManAndTheC]

Try the repaginator extension for Firefox

Re:Please

[evilviper]

stop [next] posting [next] articles [next] which [next] are [next] nothing [next] but [next] ad [next] impression [next] generators [next].

I agree with you in general (Tom's Hardware is the worst), but this one really wasn't very bad. About a screen and a half full of text per page (a LOT more than 3 sentences) and only split over 4 pages.

The 10+ page hardware review sites are the real nightmare.

Caffeine

[Badfysh]

>But I have found that in some areas, it felt faster at the core level. Maybe I just had too much coffee that day?

Wouldn't it feel slower? Like Fry running around that museum?

Re:The article is a little too quick

[krog]

This article is written more like a 4th grade book report than a technical analysis. It represents about twenty seconds I will never, ever get back.

Re:The article is a little too quick

[AKAImBatman]

Finally, someone who actually read the article. The entire review was, "Like totally seriously, this is like SOOOO seriously slick!"

Since I've been having fun with Latin lately, here's my review of the article: Like, fac me cocleario vomere!

Grammar?

[jonathansizz]

Understand for most people, the speed factor is more or less a matter of opinion. But I have found that in some areas, it felt faster at the core level. Maybe I just had too much coffee that day? Either way, I totally recommend PC-BSD for anyone wanting to take a step into the wild side.

And I, like, totally recommend that you take a few classes in English. Dude! Your loosing my respect writing like dat ROTFL!!11!

So I skipped the article and went straight...

[neo]

to the website. It looks like they have a windows like enviroment, but the real advantage is that they created an installer that doesn't rely on dependencies. Each application installs with all dependencies self contained, and with an installer that looks like a regular window/mac installer.

So it might be worth an install just to check out the system. Looks clean, they tout that it's fast, but I want to look for it myself. Will install this weekend on my Laptop and see if it really detects hardware like they say.

Skip the article, go to the website.

http://www.pcbsd.org/

'Linux' Should Be Banned From Discussions Of OS's

[jonathansizz]

An infuriating thing about Linux is the ambiguity of the term 'Linux'.

Linux often has an unfair advantage in comparisons with other operating systems, since Linux is actually just the kernel, so if I mention a particular feature, someone only has to name one OS based on Linux that has said feature. Likewise, if I mention a flaw, there's probably an OS based on Linux out there that this criticism doesn't apply to.

This makes 'Linux' somewhat of a slippery customer, as it is unfair to compare another OS with all the best features and none of the worst features of all the 'Linux' distros out there combined.

So, if you want me to discuss the advantages & disadvantages that a particular version of BSD (for instance) has, please tell me the particular version of Linux I am supposed to use in the comparision.

Re:The article is a little too quick

[gaveawaymyname]

Thanks for saving me that time. I would have thought twenty seconds wasted on an article would have been a drop in the bucket for someone with your uid.

65816

[NuShrike]

The 16-bit descendant of ...

The best part for me was mapping the zero-page onto the framebuffer (it was in bank 1), and then using the stack as my blitter.

Compile sprites into asm code, and then push push push #immediate all day baby!

Where's the torrent?

[WhiteDragon]

Where's the link to download a torrent of the CD? I downloaded the iso from their servers but I would rather download by torrent.

Re:Where's the torrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unofficial torrent

Netcraft Confirms

[jonathansizz]

Netcraft runs FreeBSD!

(And so does Distrowatch!)

Oh, The Irony!

Your sig

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

They can make "new car smell", why not "new electronics smell"? I'd buy it.

When your electronics smell, it's usually not a good thing.

Developer Laments: What Killed FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

The End of FreeBSD

[Note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]

When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.

Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.

FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.

It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.

So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.

Discussion

I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.

From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.

There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.

Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.

Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?

Shouts

To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.

To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It's

GPL as capitalist weapon

[alienmole]

First, let me say I'm not a blind GPL fan, but I've published some stuff under the GPL for the opposite reason of what you suggest: if someone wants to use my code unencumbered, they can pay me a license fee. You can't call me small-minded without contradicting your own premise: if I were to release under BSD, it would be "taking from the mouths of the people who...", i.e. from my mouth.

My own work is pretty small-scale (a handful of licensees), but there are bigger companies that do this. Another scenario is that companies contributing to open source often like the fact that their contribution can't be easily profited from by some other company, so it's not just the bearded FSF-loving hippies that like this feature of the GPL. Which brings me to a point which doesn't get talked about much, but which you seem to be touching on: the GPL is absolutely about competition - it's a weapon, which can be used by corporations as well as individuals. The GPL fans of the hippy persuasion think of it as a weapon in a fight against capitalism, or something like that, but capitalists use it as a weapon in the fight against their competition (think about why Sun supports a LGPL office suite, for example). So your complaints at the GPL are really complaints about competition: you may as well complain that the guy down the road is undercutting your prices. That's life & business, get used to it.

BTW, your potted history of Unix is also pretty strange: Unix hasn't "always been a genuinely free product", nor was it "released by corporations to the public freely". If that were really the case, the whole SCO affair could never have happened. Unix became free much more in a kind of "information wants to be free" way, than because corporations explicitly decided to relinquish their intellectual property rights.

Re:OSWEEKLY can suck it

[demo9orgon]

How in the world is that flamebait?!
It's the truth.

OSWEEKLY blows a fierce Microsoft wind up readers asses.

They are a mewling new eyeball lamprey.

Their assumed impartiality is that they review operating systems, hopefully without bias.

The article I pointed out is a clarion call to their true charter, and it's worthy of mentioning to others who, like me, browse technical sites and have started seeing OSWEEKLY showing up.

So just to be clear here, any website which outright dismisses the attention and the work and the excellence of so many people that's gone into Linux in favor of Windows IS A WINDOWS FLUFFER/TURFING SITE.

Are we supposed to forgive them for wanting to accept the bread and wine of Microsoft?

HELL NO. And I wouldn't be browsing slashdot if I had to look at it dripping with Microsoft ads.

Can we empathise with them for wanting to kick the Strawman Penguin and make fierce in order to impress Microsoft?

NO. Because they're clearly not interested in being a technical site for the long-term, I think they're in it for the money.
They're punking their own creditbility. Sucks to the turfmasters and sucks to Microsoft for enabling them.

Once upon a time I would have been forgiving...back in 1997 or something, however, this far along in the game synergistic hand-job crap is contemptible.

Kids should try having a real job before they act like they're authorities and save their bullshitting for when they're walking around in parking lots asking people if they know Jesus loves them.