New Sidekick Will Run NetBSD, Not Windows CE

jschauma writes "Many sites are reporting that the next Sidekick LX 2009/Blade, from Danger (acquired by Microsoft early in 2008), is going to run NetBSD as their operating system, causing Microsoft's recruiters to look for NetBSD developers."

Comments

Embrace.

[palegray.net]

This isn't exactly the first time Microsoft has leveraged BSD code in a product... cough, TCP stack, cough...

Re:Embrace.

[amirulbahr]

NetBSD is not less free. The drivers that they have written are. I don't understand why people try to confuse matters.

The BSD license is more free for users and distributors. Derived works /may or may not/ be released under a BSD license. This has NO BEARING on the original work.

Re:Embrace.

[Renegade88]

Why should you have access to the playground? You still have your shovel. Nobody took that from you.

Straight up, anybody that declares a BSD-licensed project to be "less free" than a GPL-licenses project is either intellectually dishonest, confused, or an imbecile. (I apologize in advance if anybody falls into category 1 or 3)

Re:Embrace.

[TheRaven64]

I'm not sure why you think that it's better for corporations to be able to profit from someone's work without giving back, but that's up to the authors anyway

Who said anything about not giving back? Apple have made a lot of improvements to GCC and to a number of other projects, including several BSDL ones where they were not required to release their changes. They have released a number of new projects under permissive licenses, such as Launchd and the clang front end to LLVM.

People who actually create things and genuinely give back have overwhelmingly voted for a model in which someone else can't just grab your code and run.

Did they? Most of the code on my system is not GPL'd. A fair bit is LGPL'd, but huge amounts are under BSD, Apache, and similar licenses. This includes a lot of well-known projects, like *BSD, Perl, LLVM, subversion, PostgreSQL, Lighttpd (or Apache, if you prefer), Squeak, X.org, and so on. The only bits of GPL'd software I use regularly are bash, gcc, and vim. Of these, gcc is slowly being replaced by llvm/clang and the others are hardly the 'overwhelming' majority of the code I run.

According to Ohloh.net, I have released around 150,000 lines of code, putting me well into the top 2000 open source developers, and all of this has been under BSD-style licenses. I wonder where you are on this list.

Are you an anti-GPL zealot, or an Apple fanboy?

No, I'm a pragmatist. I want contributions from companies and from individuals. I'm more interested in the contributions companies do make than they don't. If Apple, Sun, IBM, or Google releases something under an open license, I prefer to count this as a positive, rather than count the number of lines of code in products they didn't release. I look at gcc and llvm/clang (which, by the way, I've contributed a fair bit of code to that isn't counted by Ohloh since I don't have commit access there) and I see a lot of the companies that used to contribute code to gcc are now backing llvm because of the license.

When Apple released a new ARM back end for LLVM to use as the iPhone compiler, I chose to be happy that LLVM had been improved, rather than complain that the iPhone was not open. I can choose not to buy an iPhone because it is not open (and did) and still benefit from the improvements in LLVM for other ARM-based devices I own.

The same is true of a lot of corporate contributions. When Yahoo! releases improvements to FreeBSD, I am happy that the operating system on my ThinkPad gets better, I don't complain that they didn't also open source their search engine.

In the modern world of interconnected systems, the GPL's distinction between what code you do need to release and what you don't is quite arbitrary.

Re:I never thought I'd see the day.

[flyingfsck]

BSD is the only licence that is compatible with MS business practice.

MS is no stranger to Unix, they wrote Xenix long ago.

Re:Is a 'Holy Fuck' in order?

[carlzum]

That was always one of my favorite MS facts, unfortunately they switched to IIS a few years ago. Netcraft confirmed it :)

Re:Is a 'Holy Fuck' in order?

[hhw]

You mean, Hotmail used to run FreeBSD before Microsoft bought it, and for the 4+ years it took them to migrate it over to Windows without failing?

Hotmail itself has never run on Linux. It may however have some of its content delivered by Akamai's CDN, which does run Linux (but not Apache).

Re:Is a 'Holy Fuck' in order?

[Snowblindeye]

Of course no. Hotmail run Apache on Linux :)

Hotmail never ran on Linux. Originally, before Microsoft bought it, it was running on FreeBSD with Apache, with some backend servers running Solaris.

Microsoft had a lot of trouble switching to Windows, and even after they claimed they had migrated, they had to admit that some things were still running on BSD.

However, by now I'm sure they've had enough time to finish that switch.

Re:Is a 'Holy Fuck' in order?

[cbhacking]

Incorrect; Hotmail never ran on Linux. It did continue to use Apache for some time, however.

Hotmail, when originally purchased, ran on FreeBSD and Solaris. Portions of it were moved to NT, running on Apache in the POSIX subsystem of the NT kernel (at the time, Apache for Win32 was not available, and Apache was miles ahead of IIS). This is one of the few cases I know of where the POSIX subsystem was used internally by Microsoft, although it is still under development and available in recent NT-based operating systems (some editions of Vista and Win7, and their server equivalents).

wow! Does this mean that there might be...

[rivaldufus]

more than one open source operating system out there? Will Slashdot survive? It cracks me up that a bunch of posts talked about how hotmail once ran on "linux" and qmail. Can't even say the name, "FreeBSD."

Seriously, this isn't surprising... NetBSD runs on everything. The NetBSD team spends a significant amount of time supporting a large number of platforms - be it a modern X86 server or a sun pizza box.
You'll notice that commercial entities like the BSD license (see: OS X) And, I don't think that the NetBSD developers will suddenly panic: "Someone's going to steal our code!" Contrary to what some here might feel, there is room for more than one open source operating system and, believe it or not, more than one license.
Back in the old days, slashdot had the BSD link right on the front page.

Re:wow! Does this mean that there might be...

[TheRaven64]

The NetBSD team spends a significant amount of time supporting a large number of platforms

Actually, they don't anymore. What they do spend a lot of time doing is ensuring that there are very clean abstraction layers throughout the kernel so that porting to a new platform can be as little as a weekend's work if the compiler already exists. You need to initialize the CPU and provide MMU functions, which is typically a few hundred lines of code, and write a driver for the bus controller. From then on you can use all of the existing drivers unmodified.

Re:Is a 'Holy Fuck' in order?

[Architect_sasyr]

My tests are quick and dirty and I don't have a full environment to work with, but I think you might be right:

lg:~ root# nmap -sV -O -p 25,80,443 -PN -n www.hotmail.com

Starting Nmap 4.76 ( http://nmap.org/ ) at 2009-02-[snip]
Warning: Hostname www.hotmail.com resolves to 12 IPs. Using 64.4.38.249.
Interesting ports on 64.4.38.249:
PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
25/tcp filtered smtp
80/tcp open http Microsoft IIS webserver 6.0
443/tcp filtered https
Warning: OSScan results may be unreliable because we could not find at least 1 open and 1 closed port
Device type: general purpose
Running (JUST GUESSING) : FreeBSD 6.X (85%)
Aggressive OS guesses: FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE (85%)
No exact OS matches for host (test conditions non-ideal).
Service Info: OS: Windows

OS and Service detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at http://nmap.org/submit/ .
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 15.76 seconds
lg:~ root# nmap -sV -O -p 80 -PN -n xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Starting Nmap 4.76 ( http://nmap.org/ ) at 2009-02-[snip]
Interesting ports on xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:
PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
80/tcp open http Microsoft IIS webserver 6.0
Warning: OSScan results may be unreliable because we could not find at least 1 open and 1 closed port
Device type: general purpose
Running: Microsoft Windows 2003
OS details: Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SP1 or SP2
Service Info: OS: Windows

OS and Service detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at http://nmap.org/submit/ .
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 8.46 seconds
lg:~ root#

The second server is obviously a known IIS/Win2003 box.

Re:I never thought I'd see the day.

[SL Baur]

MS is no stranger to Unix, they wrote Xenix long ago.

True except that they did not "write" Xenix. Xenix was a licensed fork from AT & T source code.

In another lifetime I once thought Microsoft was showing promise by bringing a Unix-like interface to PC DOS 2.0. Most of the code was half-assed and broken and I guess they kind of just left it that way.

Oh and for the folks whining about 6.1 aka Microsoft Windows 7 being a paid-for bug fix release over the previous one, that's really old news because PC DOS 2.1 was the same thing over 20 years ago. That was as much abuse as I could take from a company, but I guess others have different tolerances for pain.

Re:Is a 'Holy Fuck' in order?

[jggimi]

Most users will never know that Hotmail and Apache are running on Linux.

BSD is not Linux.

Re:Is a 'Holy Fuck' in order?

[claytonjr]

Hotmail is/was powered by a mixture of FreeBSD and Solaris. NOT Linux. Get it right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail

Re:I never thought I'd see the day.

[richlv]

"I've shown you the code, if you use it, show your code to anyone who wants it".
a bit wrong.
if you use it, nobody cares. if you modify and then give somebody else, you have to give them code of the modfications as well.
distribution, as opposed to use.

Re:Just a minor note

[Dibblah]

Really? http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc758834.aspx