Slashdot Mirror
Confessions of a Recovering NetBSD Zealot
debilo writes, "ONLamp.com is featuring a lengthy interview with Charles M. Hannum, to Slashdotters probably best known for his wake-up call aptly titled The Future of NetBSD that generated a rather vocal discussion. In the interview, Charles speaks about his role in and the beginning of The NetBSD Project, shares his thoughts on software licenses, discusses the popularity of Linux and its development model, and further addresses the problems that NetBSD is facing. Some notable quotes include: 'If I were doing it again, I might very well switch to the LGPL. I'll just note that it didn't exist at the time.' And: 'There was a lot of FUD around this issue — some of it from Linus, actually — and it did cause us some problems.'"
No, that wasn't a serious go at you but it was an attempt at world-weary commentary. I was around when Linux was launched. I was using Minix on an Atari ST before that happened. I was using Linux as a primary desktop in 1994. And once upon a time I had code in the standard Linux driver set (a Compaq SCSI controller, I believe long since factored out. At least, I hope so).
So. The answer is....yes. Geeks eat their young. I remember at the time knowing very vaguely about BSD, but 'knowing' equally that I should steer well clear of it due to ongoing and the future potential for lawsuits. As it turned out, this was utter junk - FUD so to speak. In fact, looking back at things with the artificial benefit of perfect hindsight I would have gone the BSD route rather than the Linux one. I still read amusing little pro-Linux rants that are actually just pro-open source Unix userland, not pro-Linux as they believe themselves to be. Don't get me wrong, there are definite differentiators between BSD, Linux, running GNU tools on Solaris, OS X etc. but that's not the point I'm interested in here. For this discussion, I'm interested in seeing many of Unix per-se's benefits being described as Linux benefits when they are nothing of the sort. Personally I feel a good deal of progress could have been made just following the BSD route instead of going the Linux kernel route. LGPL does seem to encompass the majority of the BSD way, so I find I have agree with the statements made in this article.
Cheers,
Ian
"We locked 10 BSD programmers in an IT room for one week with one distribution of BSD. When we came back, we found all the programmers dead with their hands around each others throats, and 12 new flavors of BSD."
So true...
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Why, oh why can more people not see this...
Linux is a kernel (as opposed to the BSDs which include a set of integrated userland tools - not just package a bunch of independently developed GNU tools), that really, these days is nothing particularly special, other than being "free". I mean sure, certain aspects of it may be cutting edge, but for the most part they're not "must have" features that will make or break it's usage in a particular application.
As much as I think RMS is a idealist nutjob, I can see his point regarding the whole "GNU/Linux" thing here (even though simply tacking "GNU" on the front isn't fair to other developers, without which the system would be useless for certain purposes, such as xfree.org).
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Free, sure. But I dont know about lean and mean.
The whole point of NetBSD is portability. If it weren't for portability, NetBSD might as well not exist. But the problem is Linux has taken over as the portability leader and has a huge margin.
Every 32-bit cpu out there has a corresponding Linux BSP or distro. At least ones with enough ram or external bus interface. To compete, NetBSD will have to do without MMUs in some cases, and allow the kernel to be configured to be really small. Linux can scale and has enough configuration options to be able to produce a 200kb kernel and boot in under 1MB on an ARM7TDMI.
Given its license and code cleanliness (and maturity) I'd prefer NetBSD if it was portable enough. Its not.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
A lot of people depended on NetBSD for embeded software development. What is going to replace it? It's kind of sad to see a standard die like this.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Base install for NetBSD is about 23MB, or 47MB with development tools, 55MB with manpages, and 112MB for all the above plus X.
I can get it installed on older hardware in less than 5 minutes, including the boot time for the floppies. I can get it installed on modern Opteron-based badass hardware in about half that. That's pretty cool.
And you're being very short-sighted about other architectures.
Are you kidding? BSD was the bigger boogie man, which is why those companies kept beating it even after it had been effectively "put down" due to fear of law suits. Linux was definitely seen as the lesser of two evils by the powers that existed at the time, and with good reason. The license makes BSD much more of a threat to them than Linux will ever be.
Just look at what Apple did with OS X. Any company could do that, getting a huge head start by building on top of the rock solid BSD core (with no fear of being sued, as you would with the GPL). That is a very scary thought indeed for MS.
What free OS designers need to do is realize that Apple did something very right with OS X, and follow suit. Unix with X-Windows on top of it is not suitable for the average user. X-Windows needs to be replaced with something more light-weight (i.e. single-user with direct access to the multimedia hardware). X-Windows will always be around for the power users who want it, but the average joe just wants his games/videos/music to run smoothly without any hassles, and he wants to be able to be stupid when it comes to using the Internet without having to worry about viruses, spam, and all that.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
I am probably going to get flamed to a crisp for this, but what the heck, I have karma to burn...
If Linus continues to dig in and refuses to accept GPLV3 with its anti-DRM provisions, what is is for the linux developers who truly want to move to a GPL V3 model to contribute the fruits of their labour to a GPLV3 fork of the kernel. (Freenix anybody?) Note that they wouldn't have to stop contributing to Linux, they can dual licence as GPL V2/V3 for as long as they wish.
Actually the linux kernel could be forked from the existing code base licenced as GPLV2 with ongoing contributions to the new kernel licenced as GPLV3. Users would be bound by the terms of both licences, which would default to the more restrictive GPLV3 unless they took the time to strip out all of the newly contributed GPLV3 code. Support for DRMed media and hardware would done through clean room design, and hosted from servers in DMCA free countries. Does DVD Jon have some friends and a bit of spare bandwidth?
I really love linux, use it in my home servers and would use it on my desktop if I wasn't doing contract windows development as well. But I disagree with Linus's stand on DRM and the proposed GPLV3. RMS is an arrogant pain in the butt, but in this he is dead right. I like where GPLV3 is going, but we need to build a full featured OS around it.
My rights don't need management.
Hmmmm, what sort of blind insults should lay way at you with???? Well, lets skip that, but really, grow up. NetBSD has a very import role in supporting non-homogenios arrays of systems. I would note that for me, that has been the central strenght amonstg many other that have kept me on the netbsd trail. Twat.
You can't convert Linux. GPLv2 and GPLv3 both prohibit extra restrictions.
You could create a GPLv3 fork of NetBSD though. That might revive NetBSD. You might just take the kernel though, letting distributions form around it. Debian already supports Hurd and FreeBSD kernels; they could do a NetBSD one as well.
Of course you'd need to find a name other than "NetBSD".
Ideas: NetOS, NotBSD, Netix, Netrix, Netux, Nettle, WebBSD...
What you pointed out is exactly why "GNU/Linux" is ridiculous. The GNU utilities are very important, but many others are equally important to desktop linux. Are we going to call it Ubuntu Debian/GNOME/xorg/Mozilla/Trolltech/OO.o/apache/.. ./GNU/Linux? PHBs would fall asleep before IT had even finished naming it. Linux is a good name and easily imparts what kind of OS a distribution is. Beyond that, the name of a distribution indicates all of the parts other than Linux. You can't really have Debian Linux without GNU, etc. You can have it on a different kernel.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Unix is a trademark - you can't name things Unix (not even UNIX as it should be) willy-nilly. We just need a new term, and Linux seems to have become a blanket term for "libre Unix workalike or derivative" which is offensive to those who dislike Linux but, really, doesn't make even a tiny difference to the masses of clueless users who wouldn't even be able to tell the systems apart, as long as they're not Windows or OSX which everyone knows.
In fact, the end users wouldn't even care what base system it's on, with things like KDE and GNOME appearing and being nothing like real Unix, just happening to run on compatible systems. And a lot of the "Linux software" is being ported to even run on Windows, which is about as compatible with Linux and glibc as day and 1. Even MPlayer, originally called "The Media Player for Linux", now runs on practically everything (and crawls on everything else).
Sam ty sig.
DragonFly BSD is very well known in the BSD community. You'll probably hear far more about it soon, since it is completely clear today that we'll soon be dealing with multicore and multiprocessor systems in basically all PCs. DragonFly BSD is a redesign and reimplementation of the FreeBSD kernel and userland libraries from the bottom up, with the main goal being for it to scale very well on multicore and multiprocessor systems.
So while FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD will still be working on getting their kernel sufficiently threaded for many years to come, DragonFly BSD will have had that task completed for a while. And it will likely become apparent that it is the only one of the BSDs that will scale on the massively multicore and multiprocessor consumer-grade hardware of the near future. Reportedly, it has become better than Irix at many tasks, and is even beginning to rival Solaris. With Irix still trumping Linux in most cases, this goes to show how far ahead DragonFly BSD already is. Keep in mind that DragonFly BSD is still under very heavy development.
And no, OpenBSD is not famous because of Theo's attitude or reputation. OpenBSD is famous because it is one of the most secure operating systems out there for commodity hardware. OpenBSD is famouse because of the efforts of its developers to remove insecure and faulty code from not only the kernel and system utilities, but also from third-party software like Apache.
Good lord, the meme about X-Windows needing to be replaced is really obnoxious. I honestly thought that when Compiz, XGL and AIGLX startd to appear, fools parroting this tired meme would finally be put to rest.
X-Windows is in many ways archaic, but under the lead of the X.Org project there has been an astounding increase in the rate of development. The project has finally been modularized and the groundwork is in place for direct access to acceleration features. Honestly, the biggest thing holding back X-Windows from even faster modernization right now is the manufacturers of graphics hardware (NVIDIA and ATI) that are ridiculous enough to not even release programming specifications for their chips. Their "support" of the free operating systems is limited to shitty binary drivers, and so when the X-Windows and kernel communities want to introduce new APIs, they are largely at the whims of the moron companies that haven't gotten around to pulling their heads out of their asses yet.
If you believe that UNIX with X-Windows on top of it is not suitable for the average user, you should provide some facts to back up that opinion. Because as every day passes, I've seen all the arguments get displaced by proof of concept and running code.
Finally, what Apple did with OS X indicates just what is wrong with the BSD license. The coders and users that believe in the BSD license have been shown time and time again that the so-called benefits of the license are actually damaging to their projects. Charles Hannum from NetBSD recognized this recently when he talked about NetBSD's stagnation, and aptly characterized part of the problem as the BSD license that allowed companies to fork BSD and hire away all the important developers to work on their proprietary forks. Charles now says that he would have used the LGPL license if he were to do it again, which is exactly what the Wine project did after Transgaming and others ran off with their code and developers.
So this issue of licensing that you describe as making BSD the biggest threat to the proprietary interests is wrong. The BSD license's shortcomings in this area mean that BSD will continue to go nowhere fast. The reason that the BSD lawsuits were more scary was because the free BSDs actually had lineage leading back to the old proprietary (owned) code. The reason the SCO lawsuit is not scary, and rather actually hilarious, is because Linux was (a) developed in a vacuum and (b) is defended by the GPL.
The GPL is very important here, because it creates a safe haven for companies like IBM, SGI, Oracle, Red Hat, Novell, HP, Nortel and others to all cooperate on *one* core. When all of this engineering talent and financial power gets pooled into one project, that one project goes a long ways. And tossing its technical superiority totally aside, you're left with the actual *largest* threat to the proprietary interests - an entire cultural, economic, political and technical shift in thinking from proprietary development to Copyleft.
The BSD project and license followers have been operating with their heads in the sand for a very long time now. Even when the FOUNDER of one of the most significant free BSD efforts came out and said "We fucked up, and here's why," there were still a thousand BSD fans that chose to ignore the majority of the issues he raised, instead babbling on topics like "Theo is finally vindicated!". Given history, I don't expect this to change. There will always be BSD users with their heads buried in the sand, but their numbers are shrinking as they fail to see the train tracks being built directly in their path.
...but you may not like it. The replacement is and will continue to be Linux, which is already more portable than NetBSD, has far greater mindshare, performance, scalability and functionality.
Linus' leadership had nothing to do with making the GNU tools "happen". They happened all by themselves, and had happened before Linux was developed. What Linux did is actually give them a platform to be used on; before Linux they were really just open-source versions of stuff that other OSes often already had. Without Linux, the GNU tools were superfluous. Without the GNU tools, Linux was just a barebones kernel; you need tools to actually do anything useful with it.
That said, I think the constant attempt to change an already-entrenched name is futile. I can understand why someone would get irritated when people in ignorance assign all the hardwork they did to someone else.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Of course that will never happen, but you can make it safer for them to be blissfully ignorant. I was thinking more along the lines of not giving the average user root access to the core OS files (while still making sure he has direct exclusive access to the hardware). Make him have to do something relatively difficult (like change and recompile the kernel) to get root access if he really needs it. You could also make it an OS installation option for developers.
For the average user and PC, it's ok to make him install and run everything in his user folder. That means the worst that can happen is that he'll have to wipe his user folder and start over. Certain high-risk applications, like browsers and IM clients, can be quarantined so that getting a virus from one means you only have to reinstall that application.
X-Windows needs to be replaced with something more light-weight (i.e. single-user with direct access to the multimedia hardware).
Really? Can you please point me to some numbers that demonstrate this point?
X11 was invented in the bad old days, running on UNIX systems less powerful than today's PDAs. As I understand it, it's actually quite lightweight. Certainly the network transparency features don't cost much, because when you run the X server and the X client software on the same computer, they communicate by using domain sockets (which are very lightweight). Both Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X have abstraction layers that isolate the graphics hardware; do you have some numbers showing that X11 has significantly more overhead than those abstraction layers?
The latest versions coming out of X.org now have support for features similar to what OS X does: applications are rendered into offscreen buffers, and the buffers are composited together (with transparency effects, or other special effects if you desire). So, X11 is no barrier to cool eye-candy either.
The worst thing about X11 used to be way it was managed (under Xfree86). Now that the project has moved to X.org and has been revamped, progress has sped up a lot.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Linux has an huge base of open source device drivers taylored to run under it. This is what sets it aside from other kernels. No matter how spiffy the *BSD/minix/Solaris/Hurd or other open source kernels are, they will never catch up with linux as far as popularity, because of this simple issue. You can't use an OS if it doesn't support your devices.
If you ever watch the kernel compiling, most of the time is spent compiling device driver. And the legacy support is immense. Heck, you can shave a few minutes off the compile time just by disabling ISDN.
DesktopBSD and PC-BSD are not forks of FreeBSD, they are add-ons to FreeBSD releases, they are prepackaged versions of FreeBSD, similar to your Linux, "distros," mix KDE with random home-brewed tools and pour into release version 5, 6, or whatever of FreeBSD, serve. DragonFly BSD, while interesting, is not really the system one should be looking into for regular day-to-day use, major design alterations are still underway in the system and as Dillon has said, it's not going to really be ready for a while. NetBSD as you've recently noticed has some issues, it's had stability problems on it's vaunted umpteen jillion platforms for going on the better half of a decade and at best users and developers have been ignoring much of it, the developers focus on making things cross-compile rather than making sure they natively compile and actually run.
If you want to try a BSD, FreeBSD is the most Linux distribution-like of the BSDs, while OpenBSD is the most BSD-like of the BSDs, it's a matter of if you like the old Unix stuff or the newer Linux stuff. Generally speaking FreeBSD is the less GNU-style free, as in that whole freedom schtick, of the two, with better performance and more bells and whistles, while OpenBSD is the more secure, stable, conservative of the two. OpenBSD has better overall documentation, while FreeBSD has several really nice books, like the DAIOTFOS and the Handbook.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
In the linux dev. process, Linus is at the top of the org chart. He accepts or rejects patches that come to him. He trusts other people to maintain certain subsystems and architectures, but ultimately, he decides what goes in and what doesn't (even if he hasn't really looked at it much).
Difference #2: Linux is GPL'd. You can't profit from changes without sharing them. BSD is BSD'd. You can profit from your changes and keep them hidden.
So the sturcture of the Linux license enforces sharing and the structure of the development process enforces a set of standards (each upstream guy's own standards) on the quality (or lack thereof) of the code. The BSD license and the BSD development structure both require social contracts and continuous communication and agreement among the developers to keep things together and quality consistently high.
So in the BSD world there are forks because developers encounter both technical and personal disagreements. In the Linux world, the devs don't really have to get along as much, because the structure of the project is more forceful than the BSD cooperation regime.
All of the problems that this NetBSD guy have described seem to be mitigated more-or-less automatically in the Linux structure and with the GPL. Linux development is not perfect. Nor is the GPL. However, it sure looks like they're better approaches. Linux certainly isn't less successsful than any of the BSDs.
As for Charles Hannum, he's pretty much a troll. Talking to a few of the NetBSD core developers, he's upset that he was marginalised five or so years ago, and has been tolling the project since then. It's also worth noting that he was one of the people primarily responsible for throwing Theo De Raadt (another of the NetBSD co-founders) out, leading him to found OpenBSD (interestingly, Theo named both NetBSD and OpenBSD). Last survey I saw showed OpenBSD having about twice the market share of NetBSD. It's a shame they kicked Theo, and not Charles, out back then.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
if you think a 1.3ghz is ancient hardware you are really out of touch with reality.
Forking a project is not a walk in the park, it takes a huge multi-year commitment in time and effort and it does not necessarily follow that the solution to a disagreement, even a huge disagreement, is to fork a project. It just so happens that I had all the pieces necessary to fork DragonFly (particularly the time available to do so and the ability to self-fund the effort). Theo I believe had similar time availability and the ability to obtain funding (stressful as it probably is at times) to support the effort. Probably one of the biggest reasons why FreeBSD has fragmented leadership now is a lack of time on the part of its leaders verses other life events.
Forking a project is NOT necessarily detrimental. In fact, I would consider it more an evolutionary inevitability. The plain fact of the matter is that most Open Source projects are a confluence of like minded individuals which is at best ephermal in nature. People age, people's interests change, people's life situations change, new people coming in have a different take on things... to assume that a project can keep the same face forever and that such evolutionary changes as a fork in the road is detrimental can only lead to one result: stagnation.
I wouldn't hold Linux up as a poster child, either. Linux is one of the most commercialized projects in existance compared to the BSDs. Just because the core is free doesn't mean the product is. Every time I turn around yet another GPL'd project is being commercialized by its developers, or using tag-ons to the license that require the author to sign over his copyright to the project. The GPL license no more protects against proprietization and commercialization then the BSD license. Nor does it protect against fragmentation... Linux is far more fragmented then all the BSDs put together, and that has seriously hurt its ability to compete against Microsoft. It's nice to day dream, I guess, but the reality is very different.
-Matt (Dillon)
Freedom is about letting people do what they will
Yes, and we have laws against illegal confinement, slavery, and the like to discourage people from preventing others doing what they will. The GPL is like that.
The GPL doesn't prevent anyone from getting hold of Nvidia's drivers if they want them. It does prevent NVidia from benefitting from somebody else distributing NV's proprietary drivers with free code. In other words, the intent is to discourage NVidia, but the only legal method is to discourage NVidia's unwitting accomplices.
As for lawsuits, what do you supposed FreeBSD would do about a distribution that stripped out the BSD copyright notices and disclaimers?
-- Alastair
If your hardware is new and relatively common, linux kernel will most likely have a current working port.
Move off the path well travelled and you are in for a lot of strife.
My favorite 2 examples to bring up, mainly due to the massive number of units still in existence are
- mac-m68k - last worked kernel 2.2 series, broken 2.4 and 2.6 (ADB broken, serial console broken)
- sparc32 sun4m - currently SMP support broken in 2.6 kernels for supersparc, hypersparc just broken.
At least sun4m looks like it will get fixed, dont hold your breath for the m68k macs.Dont get me wrong, I am a linux zealot, but linux' rate of change pretty much ensures that older architectures will drop out of the tree due to lack of maintenance, be it in kernel or glibc.
NetBSD still runs, and you can be pretty assured will continue to run, on most hardware you point it at (including your old vaxen