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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".'
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.
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.
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)