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OpenBSD Marches Toward 5.0 Release
badger.foo writes "OpenBSD-current just turned 5.0-beta, providing us a preview of what the upcoming release (slated for November 1st) will look like. Peter Hansteen takes us through the main new features and explains the development process that has consistently turned out high-quality releases on time, every six months for more than a decade."
It is official; Lennart Poettering now confirms: *BSD Isn't Relevant Anymore
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 close 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 Lennart Poettering 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 cockeyed miracle could save *BSD from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD Isn't Relevant Anymore
Not to be outdone by the big Linux 3.0 announcement, BSD races to announce a major version release of their own.
I thought BSD was dead Netcraft confirmed it.
Time to offend someone
*Post that makes a joke about the Firefox release schedule*
If it wasn't for the fact that most System Administrators are more comfortable with Linux or Windows (And many of the new ones are not too willing to expand that much on the command line). I would have all my servers running OpenBSD. You get it set it up to do the Job you want and let it work.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
He's "De Raadtical"!
That's why I use it! No one can piss all over a party on the listserv like Theo!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
That'll be 5 then. Wow, 5 users already. Good job Theo!
If your hardware is older, OpenBSD is a safer environment - if your CPU does not implement the NX bit, OpenBSD manages the same functionality with W^X. Many other memory-handling features make the system safer (malloc with mmap, rather than sbrk, for example), although there can be a performance penalty.
OpenBSD implements privilege separation in many of the daemons of the base system (ftpd, dhcpd, ntpd, sshd), so you can trust them more.
OpenBSD's alternate daemons for well-known protocols (ntpd, smtpd) give you some "security through obscurity," and you also gain flexibility.
There are also custom patches for well-known servers to improve security (apache chroot).
In a number of ways, OpenBSD is the "Reference UNIX Security implementation." Come see why.
for the last couple years, http://www.openbsd.org/i386.html#hardware very good, works with all the wireless and USB devices I've plugged into it including cameras, several types of wireless ethernet, usb to serial. Yes, it works on my Toshiba and Thinkpad laptops with all video and sound ok, admittedly as one of two alternate partitions for grand occassions with windows xp, and not my main Linux one.; A lot of the recent device additions of that is due to NetBSD and FreeBSD, the BSD license is great for spreading the device love around.
Sweet! Does it ship with Pulse Audio?
Some things that annoyed the hell out of me:
1. First install it wouldn't boot. Seems it didn't save the partitions correctly, so tried again. This time it booted.
2. Home and end keys don't send you to the end or beginning of the command line you're on. Mac also does this. It annoys the hell out of me. One thing windows and linux got right.
3. It comes with vi by default but trying to install vim was a hassle. And once you get it installed, it's not used by default. Instead you gotta create an alias on your shell login script. But even then I could not get that working. On linux, when you install vim, it replaces vi. If I use the command vi after I install vim, it'll use vim. On bsd it keeps both, leading to frustrations.
4. You need to install openssh server after and then go through hoops to allow users to login.
This really did remind me of linux back in 1995. It's archaic and you must remember work arounds. How hard is it to make these modifications be part of the standard install? Why weren't they done a long time ago? I'm sure if you started making stuff as "easy" as linux, you'll attract more users. But from trying it myself, I can see why it's used by so many few people.
However there are many people who try to seem smarter than they're, and they might deserve to be made fun of.
Leaving aside the moral debate of when a person deserves mistreatment, what is the value of abusively mocking someone in a public forum? It does not raise the level of discourse to something productive. At the least it's a kind of friction and so energy goes out the window as a kind of heat loss. Maybe it's a kind of turbulence that amplifies the original wobble of stupidity rather than smoothing things back into a laminar flow. Maybe it promotes a culture of antagonism, resulting in rampant friction and turbulence throughout, even in areas where there's small and meaningful/useful disagreement.
From what I can tell, it's an emotionally underdeveloped way of giving in to one's anger urges rather than a well-considered method for advancing discussion and making progress. You could say it retards progress. There are other, more sophisticated, and actually beneficial ways for handling disagreement and coping with people who are patently wrong.
but did you ever figure out why virtualization is a bad hack to prop up crappy software?
technical skill != social skill
The lack of professionalism you percieve is a lack of social skills. By some definitions profesionalism combines both social and technical skills. But technical brilliance and the ability to write good documentation can exist without interacting with people in a pleasant way. What they apparently lack in one aspect of professionalism they have in abundance in another aspect.
I've never used OpenBSD and haven't had first-hand experience with that community. But the "I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid" mentality (this is supposedly something Theo de Raadt said) was prevalent among IBM mainframe systems programmers when I started working in that environment in the 1980's: very good on a technical level, but rude and difficult to work with unless you had proven that you think for yourself in a way they can appreciate. And once they accepted you they actually were much easier to get along with, but you really had to prove yourself first.
Having no patience with people who distract you from the things you want to put your energy in is functional. It enables you to focus. Not putting too much energy in social skills may be a way to achieve brilliance on a technical level. While that may result in not so nice behaviour on a social level, I have difficulty thinking of that als unprofessional. It can be professional for a technical specialist whose main focus is on making a good product. It would be unprofessional for a salesperson.
It's not how I approach things, but I think it has its place.
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Jack: What if the applicant wants to discuss virtualization?
Theo: Hurl abuses at him, hit him with the broom, and then threaten to get a shovel.
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