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Lennart Poettering: BSD Isn't Relevant Anymore

Posted by timothy on from the fightin'-words dept.

halfaperson writes "In an interview with LinuxFr.org, Lennart Poettering speaks freely about his creations, PulseAudio, Avahi and systemd among other things. Naturally, what has stirred up most of the discussions online is Lennart's opinions on BSD. Following the recent proposal to make Gnome a Linux-exclusive desktop, Lennart explains that he thinks BSD support is holding back a lot of Free Software development. He says this while also taking a stab at Debian kFreeBSD: 'Debian kFreeBSD is a toy OS, people really shouldn't misunderstand that.'"

4 of 460 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Holding back? by mevets · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Too bad they didn't port the FreeBSD audio. It actually works.

  2. always wondered why PulseAudio sucked by decora · · Score: 5, Insightful

    now we know.

    the developer lacks humility.

  3. Re:PulseAudio? by fnj · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Word. Systemd. What a pointless masturbatory waste of effort. That's just one area where BSD, far from not being relevant, is right. They don't fuck with what works fine.

  4. Re:In related news by kc8apf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's interesting that the question implies that Linux is leading the charge in defining new APIs. Everything listed has a FreeBSD equivalent that predates the linux version:

    cgroups -> jails
    udev -> devfs
    fanotify, timerfd, signalfd -> kqueue

    Of course, the Linux developers decided to reinvent them all making compatibility impossible. I guess you could argue that the Linux versions offer some extra features over the FreeBSD versions, but from a user and developer perspective, the FreeBSD versions seem more complete and stable (see jails vs cgroups).

    --
    kc8apf