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DragonFly BSD 3.0 Released
An anonymous reader writes with word of the release earlier this week, after eight months of development, of DragonFly BSD 3.0. The release includes improved scalability through finer-grained locking, improvements to the HAMMER file system in low-memory configurations, and a TrueCrypt-compatible disk encryption system. DragonFly is an installable system, but it can also be run live from CD, DVD, or USB key.
This release is interesting, but the rest of the year is dedicated to HAMMER2 and that will be the real story with DragonFly next. Most of the work on this release was incremental. Some interesting benchmarks were posted against FreeBSD in the last few months for PostgreSQL. There was some coverage on OSNews on this
http://www.osnews.com/story/25334/DragonFly_BSD_MP_Performance_Significantly_Improved
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Is there a torrent? My internet sucks - I prefer torrents, which I can throttle. When I'm downloading ISO's the wife bitches, the kids bitch, yada yada yada. Torrents are great, I set them at 20 k/s and no one complains - much.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Why not use one of the bazillion free download managers? I assume by your sig you don't use Windows but I assume Linux has similar software.
As for TFA, how does this compare to the other major OSes, like OSX, Win 7, Ubuntu, or even PC-BSD? What advantages does it give over the others? What are its best features? Why would you recommend this over other OSes? This is why i hate announcements like TFA because they don't give someone who doesn't use the OS a reason why we should care or try it.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Well - if I get it downloaded, I might answer some of your questions, LOL!
I guess I'll wait til the wife goes to bed tonight, and start the download running. Unless she goes to town later today. Whatever. I plan to run it in a virtual machine, just to play with. I could decide to install it on hardware, if it's really nice.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
wget --limit-rate=20k --continue http://mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org/iso-images/dfly-i386-3.0.1_REL.iso.bz2
If you don't have wget, get it. You can get it for pretty much anything. Linux. Other Unixes. Windows. OS/2 Warp. Macs. Android. 20 year old Amigas. Atari STs. Commodore 64s.
Matt Dillon's a fairly bright guy who made the mistake in the mid-'90s of trying to get involved with the bunch of elitist has-beens on the FreeBSD core team. The reason the BSDs have been festering for the past decade is that there is and never has been any interest in properly documenting and welcoming contributions - the only way you can really make a contribution is to play the sycophant to one of the core team and act as their personal ego stroker until they act as your mentor, moulding you into a lesser version of themselves.
Unfortunately, Dillon has therefore got stuck with an underlying project which isn't going to improve much as the resources involved in advancing the BSDs are mostly tied up and down by those involved in FreeBSD and OpeNBSD.
what about the filesystems? afaik there is no ext(2,3,4) support in the BSDs, is it? so my LUKS-Ext4 FS will still be useless on BSD.
I administer three UNIX servers, all FreeBSD, and here's what I can tell you about the differences between it and Linux and Windows Server (which are also decent server OSes):
YMMV, Im sure many people here maintain great Linux servers, but for my humble needs I really like my three FreeBSD servers.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
And......?
That silly semantic game is an advantage how exactly?
Obviously, if I had bothered with the man pages, I could have figured this out. Thank you, AC, for helping a lazy old man!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Linux allows a wide range of contributors with, at least for some distros, not much quality control. This allows rapid development.
Licence differences mean that *BSD is more likely to be used commercially - and provides a lot of infrastructure and embedded environments - so by definition it is the standard in many areas.
Linux is more contributor friendly, so has more contributors - some excellent - some not so much.
The main BSDs Open, Free, and Net each have their own speciality. While they share much code, they are not all suited to the same task.
Use OpenBSD for security (at the expense of limited peripheral support)
Use FreeBSD for stability (and wider range of supported peripherals)
Use NetBSD if you are porting so a new environment, or running some bizarre piece of vintage hardware.
The rest of the mob are basically desktop variants of FreeBSD for people with different tastes (KDE, Gnome, Xfce95) .
BSD is Real Unix - if you have been using it since 1978, you wont have to keep learning to look in new places for things which are not where you expect them - however, unless you have been using it since 1978, some things can be hard to find!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I am a scaly ant-eater, you insensitive clod!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
FreeBSD changes quite a lot between major releases, but usually doesn't break/remake what already exists. There are some few exceptions.
The ports system is also available on Linux; The pkgsrc system (that is used by DragonFly and NetBSD) is available for both Linux and Solaris.
PF is an awesome user-friendly firewall, but it has its limitations on high traffic systems (pf isn't multi-core friendly). Probably NPF will be an option soon.
The documentation is existing, up-to-date and usually accurate.
For servers, there are 4 key awesome technology components ATM - Jails (Linux has namespaces, but I don't know if it's funcional yet), CARP (pf-based redundancy), ZFS and HAST (somewhat equivalent do DRDB).
If the filesystems themselves are different, why should they bother on standardizing device encryption? The kernel implementations are at this point so different, it is easier to provide reliable encryption within their own framework, than to cater to other's interests.
And, last I checked, TrueCrypt is very strong with Microsoft users (as probably BSD/Linux users have other strong alternatives already in the base system), so I really don't understand your problem.
BSD is very user friendly - its just kind of selective about who its friends are!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
FreeBSD changes quite a lot between major releases, but usually doesn't break/remake what already exists. There are some few exceptions.
There is work in the FreeBSD world fixing this. Hopefully by 9.2 or so we will see the fruits of the effort.
Unlike Linux, BSD has plenty of commercial apps available - no arguments about tainting the kernel as the BSD license allows for that, so support is available for that app. BSD Tends to be very stable between releases with a longer release cycle. This helps commercial software apps as they can target a specific version and Know it will work unlike linux where you have so many different versions of the LFSHS or even what's supposed to be installed by default. BSD is the Unix Standard - means that if you write to that standard, it will work. That's why Apple chose BSD as the base of OS X.
People tend to complain that BSD doesn't work well on a desktop and that's true because BSD is designed/optimized for Servers. PC-BSD is the desktop version. OpenBSD is geared towards security from the beginning and most of what they do (code audits and such) tend to find their way back into the regular BSD branches.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, et al, would have to go through an official and formal certification w/ the Open Group in order to be certified as Unix. I don't doubt that they'd pass, but then, I don't doubt that Linux would pass either. That too, every version would have to be certified separately. I doubt that any distro would want to go thru the expense of doing it, and so the only certified Unixes out there are the ones like Solaris, HP/UX, AIX and OS-X.
The licensing issue is also somewhat tangential here - if a BSD has something that Linux hasn't, a customer will have no issues working w/ BSD, since BSD code can be incorporated in and released as a part of anything from proprietary to GPL3 software. If Linux has something that BSD hasn't, customers who need it will work around it, like Google did w/ Android. On the Linux side, I can see it getting confusing, since Linux is not going to become GPL3, but the things it uses - glibc, gcc, etc have become GPL3, which is a source for potential confusion.
Aside from that, I agree w/ the others like kestasjk below - few will care about whether it's genuine Unix or genuinely free software.
One question - what does DragonFly BSD offer that FreeBSD doesn't? For instance, PC-BSD too is a FreeBSD derivative, fine-tuned for use as a desktop, w/ a choice of user interfaces, a new PBI packaging system, USB3 support and so on. So I can see a desktop BSD user prefering PC-BSD to FreeBSD. What sort of BSD users would want to use DragonFly over FreeBSD? Ones that have SMP systems?
One thing I understand about BSDs is that there are commands that are applicable across distros, and that the sticking to tradition means that something you learned years ago is still applicable. In RHEL, I would use commands like system-config-network and service network restart to get my network configuration going, but in Debian, those commands didn't seem to be recognized. I imagine that similar variations would be there w/ others like Gentoo and Slackware. I would think that that would be an advantage of using BSD over Linux.
But you are right - BSDs are not user-friendly, and I'd say, neither is Linux. If you want to configure anything in either of these environments, you have to go and edit files in /etc, and one thing that experienced admins say is that since that's where Unix looks for its settings, that's the reliable way of doing it. But that's precisely what feeds the reputation of user unfriendlyness - it should be possible to do anything using GUI utilities in whichever DE one is working - KDE, GNOME or whatever.
Note that these comments I've made are regarding the desktop distros - in case of Linux, things like Mint, Fedora and so on, and in case of BSD, things like PC-BSD. I'm not talking here about things like Debian, RHEL, FreeBSD, OpenBSD or the others.
Short answer : GPL is liberalism . BSD is libertarianism .
So as the OP said, one isn't free and one is.
Advice: on VPS providers
The DFBSD Goals page is now empty. Hmm.
I seem to recall that at one point the goal was an OS that ran as a single OS image across multiple machines. Memory, processes, storage, etc. was unified into a single OS image. Is that still a DFBSD goal?
Advice: on VPS providers
One question - if NBSD is supposed to be this most portable BSD out there, how does one explain that FBSD has been available on the Itanium platform for a while, whereas only recently w/ 5.1 does NBSD have a port there, and that too, only in source code form, not binary downloads?
Also, would FBSD plus OpenSSH be a good substitute for OBSD should one want both the stability and performance of FBSD as well as the wide peripheral support? Maybe this is unrelated, but to what extent would Capsicum help FBSD improve its security wrt OBSD? Reason I ask is that there are too many good things in FreeBSD for one to not want to leave it for OBSD - things like them having the latest & greatest in IPv6 support, widest variety of supported platforms and peripherals, performance and stability, good application packages...
Also, are the performance lags in OBSD a result of their strict security policies, or something totally independent of that?
Obviously substitute the url for which ever one you decide to actually d/l, but the following ought to work:
wget --limit-rate=20k http://www.dragonflybsd.org/download/#index1h1
Looking @ their home page, it looks like this is a FreeBSD geared @ multiprocessing sytems, not your usual made for home users desktops or laptops. Since it's a FreeBSD derivative, if you are looking for a FreeBSD distro suitable towards home users, the only thing that comes to mind is PC-BSD, which was released I think a month or so ago.
Are ext3 & 4 under GPL3? Or any other reason why they're not available in BSD?
not ported, yet?
Sorry, my last information was, there is no ext3/4 support. For ext3 it would be possible to remove the journal, converting ext4 to ext3 seems to be harder. Anyway, for dualboot i do want to have at least ext3 on my linux, so the bsd would need to provide at least ext3, too.
Also - forgot to discuss this:
"
For instance, PC-BSD too is a FreeBSD derivative, fine-tuned for use as a desktop, w/ a choice of user interfaces, a new PBI packaging system, USB3 support and so on. So I can see a desktop BSD user prefering PC-BSD to FreeBSD. What sort of BSD users would want to use DragonFly over FreeBSD? Ones that have SMP systems?
"
This is not an 'apples to apples' comparison - PC-BSD is basically a FreeBSD 'distribution' -
FreeBSD base OS rebuilt with added user-friendly features that you mention - a FreeBSD binary will run on PC-BSD and vice-versa - and as I understand it you can update the base PC-BSD system by pulling
FreeBSD source and rebuilding/reinstalling as the PC-BSD stuff is 'added on' - you can still use FreeBSD ports with PC-BSD, etc.
DragonFlyBSD is a FreeBSD fork - so a totally different OS, with common heritage. DragonFlyBSD is no longer directly binary compatible with FreeBSD (without using the binary emulation layer for old FreeBSD 4 binaries), and the kernel architecture has diverged quite a bit w/r/t threading, various device driver api's, networking etc being quite different (but still close enough that code can be ported back and forth without too much trouble). People (myself included) who would prefer DragonFlyBSD share the same philosophy w/r/t the design of the system and related goals. Purpose wise the two are quite similar - general purpose for desktop/server on mainly/exclusively x86/x86-64 platform - but my personal take and alot of the community is that DragonFly has taken the 'right approach' to 'next gen' features such as SMP, etc, and focusing on clean internals for these features has left things more flexible for future work. The 'fruits' of this effort can be seen in similar performance for the initial lock-free SMP in the last release compared to FreeBSD despite a much much smaller amount of developer time - with more performance improvments likely as the changes leading to 3.0 are tuned further.
I got into DragonFlyBSD because at the time (~2006) I was quite interested in OS internals / design, and the SMP work design goals seemed to 'seem right' as compared to the FreeBSD5+ approach - the small DragonFly community made it easy to get involved and seems much more 'cosy', so I stuck with it, esp. because at the time the VKernel work was just taking shape which was very exiting to have a BSD derived OS with native, BSD licensed full system virtualization (if not hardware assisted) - which is still unique among the BSD derivatives.
Quite simply - because someone ported it to FreeBSD first. Doesn't at all 'prove' the portability question -
FreeBSD: 6 architectures - with support for alpha having been *dropped*
NetBSD: 8x 'tier 1 architectures' and 49 'tier 2' architectures -> 57 architectures. Its like freaking Heinz Ketchup -
57 varieties - goes on anything!
As for:
"
FBSD plus OpenSSH be a good substitute for OBSD should one want both the stability and performance of FBSD as well as the wide peripheral support?
"
OpenSSH runs on just about any unix-like os - so this is kind of a moot point. The security features of OpenBSD are much more than ssh with things like stack-smashing protection, randomized address loading, code audits, etc.
OpenBSD also has very good hardware support - between all the bsd-derived system this is really a matter of what particular hardware you want to run - often the first driver for hardware 'x' is added to one of the systems first (wherever whichever dev has that hardware and wants to make it work), and is then ported elsewhere. Quite a few of those drivers have first been added in OpenBSD, as well as NetBSD or FreeBSD, etc. For example, my eeepc901 laptop's wireless driver only works on OpenBSD last I checked but I'm planning on porting this driver to DragonFly so I can use it there.
For: "Also, are the performance lags in OBSD a result of their strict security policies, or something totally independent of that? "
While I'm not an openbsd dev and don't speak for the project -
OpenBSD is focused on "Our efforts emphasize portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptography. "
So, unlike popular conception, the focus is not just security, but all of the above, equally. A big focus is stability and making sure code changes are rock solid before committing, so things like SMP / threading, etc. have been less of a focus as the team doesn't want to make as radical changes which have the potential to negatively affect the above things - plus alot of the supported architectures weren't SMP architectures to begin with so the effort was not as important.
However, it will still run reasonably quick on most hardware, and there is SMP support nowadays, so for most tasks it will be fine. The extremely high stability and very high quality of releases / ease of binary maintenance would often be a good tradeoff for the performance in many scenarios. And high-end routing / firewalling (pfsync + carp, openospfd, openbgpd, etc) features make it the best choice for quite a few applications.
Both NetBSD's pkgsrc and OpenBSD's ports are also quite extensive with most important things being available.
IpV6 support, while different between the systems, is generally quite good.
Capisicum is a different kind of 'security' than what OpenBSD is focused on - more about fine grained multi user configuration of various roles, logging, etc. for high security corporate / govt type scenarios where you want auditing and a high level of specific process control (think SELinux), whereas OpenBSD's security focus has been more on 'can this program be exploited' / 'how to block a exploitable program from being sucessfully exploited' / 'has this code / protocol been audited for security holes' / 'lets priveledge separate this priveledged process in the system', 'lets replace this historically security lax daemon with another clean rewrite' etc. All related to security - but different aspects.
Personally I use DragonFlyBSD on my desktops primarily, with a linux box or two around to run things over X windows that I haven't gotten around to porting to DragonFly yet / for porting new stuff from, run OpenBSD on my routers, and have a NetBSD box for noodling with and testing netbsd compatibility for patches to pkgsrc (which DragonFly uses primarily but is maintained by the NetBSD team)
Try them all! Use them all! learn / read / etc. It will at expand your knowledge of system design and possibilities.
Both are free in cost and use, but only Linux is Free.
The GPL license, which the Linux kernel is under, limits the freedom of developers to limit the freedom of other developers to make use of changes from derived code. This is effectively done when Developer A takes GPL'd code from Developer B to benefit from Developer B's work. If distributing the derived work, Developer A must release any changes made to Developer B's work so that other developers, including Developer B, ARE also in turn Free to benefit the same way that Developer A benefited. This is called reciprocity, and is a form of cooperation (something which most parents hope their children learn). A GPL license by Developer B ensures Developer A behaves in a selfless or altruistic manner at the cost of not allowing Developer A the choice to be selfish to others, including to Developer B. For the convenience of Developer A, this requirement is only triggered when Developer A distributes the derived work originally based on Developer B's GPL'd work. The use of work already under the GPL is a completely voluntary choice for Developer A to make. The freedom of choice as to which type of licensed code to take is not limited, and Developer A can instead look for other work already under the BSD license to take for personal benefit while restricting the same benefit to others by closing the source of their changes.
The BSD license, which the BSD kernel is under, allows developers to limit the freedom of other developers to make use of changes by closing the source of a derived change, limiting the benefit of the change to only the initial closer of the derived source. This doesn't just stop the first generation of developers who could've benefited from the change, but it also stops any later developers from benefiting from and contributing to further generation of changes to the derived work. This is effectively done when Developer A takes BSD'd code from developer B to benefit from developer B's work. If Developer A distributes the derived work, and Developer A doesn't release any changes made to Developer B's work, then other developers, including Developer B, are NOT Free to benefit from the changes made by Developer A the way that Developer A benefited from Developer B's work. This is called selfishness, and is an example of non-cooperation. The BSD license allows the choice to be selfish at the cost of depriving the choice by others to utilize derived changes originally based on the work of others. The freedom of choice as to which type of licensed code to take is not limited, and Developer A can instead look for other work already under the GPL license to take for personal benefit without restricting the same benefit to others.
In either case, it is up to the original developer, Developer B, to decide which type of behavior to allow by choosing the license.
= 9J =
OpenBSD has a fanatical devotion to security, and a rather prickly-looking fish. But other than access to more hardware drivers, why would I want to run DragonFly instead of OpenBSD? Sure, a faster file system is nice, but basically anything these days is a lot faster than SunOS 4.3 (my last serious BSD use), and it sounds like it's friendlier to install. I can see why I might want to run NetBSD occasionally, because I might have a toaster or wristwatch that needs a better OS, but the big attraction of the BSDs for a while, other than licensing, has been OpenBSD's security.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
May I suggest that you test Filezilla http://filezilla-project.org/ Filezilla supports a download limit in transfer settings
I tell you what, the BSDs would be a lot more likely to pass than Linux, as they're directly descended from the AT&T unix code base, and continue to do things the "Unix way". Mac OS X (largely FreeBSD userland) has been certified as Unix. Linux is a clusterfuck of NIH syndrome and GPL software that is often different for the sake of being different.
And the GPL is NOT free. It contains restrictions on what others can do with the code you release (i.e., they can't close it). Just because you might not like the possibility of code being closed, restricting people from doing that is not more free than allowing people to do anything with it.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
9.0 is the first release I remember since 5.0 that actually broke things; I have some un-upgradeable servers with gmirror that will require a clean installation because of incompatibilities introduced. I'm shure that will happen again, as it is an evolving system.
Coming from a user of both Linux and both FreeBSD and NetBSD, I can't agree with the absolutes of your post.
BSDs are never easier than Linux. Linux is more modern, while BSDs stick to "tradition" and take pride in keeping things complicated. Just read their manuals/handbooks and you will have a pretty good idea.
An alternate wording: "Linux engages in constant superfluous redesign, while BSDs stick to conventional but consistent, stable interfaces that are well documented". The fact that up-to-date man pages and well-written manuals/guides exist says a lot by itself. Linux's myriad of ever-obsolete HOW-TOs is a poor substitute.
One good example of a painful process in Linux that is easy in (Net)BSD is developing for embedded architectures. I can be typing away on, say, a (PPC) Mac or a (Intel) Linux or a (Sparc) BSD box, and can cross-compile a NetBSD distribution for an ARM single-board-computer with one line: ./build.sh -u -m evbarm release. I could replace 'evbarm' with 'alpha' or 'sparc64' or 'i386' or even 'vax' (!) and I would magically get a system built for these very different architectures, constructed from whatever system I want, all built from the very same code! I didn't have to rely on some vendor to package the cross-compiler or (very painfully) do it myself -- it's just a part of the basic NetBSD system. They got a lot of stuff right!
While I do agree -- "Desktop BSD" is still not where it should be for the traditional BSDs, Linux has a long way to go here too. However, PC-BSD has done a pretty good job of doing the basic grunt work that is otherwise sorely lacking. "PC-BSD is to FreeBSD, what Ubuntu is to Debian".
Your third partition on Linux will be /dev/sda3, but on BSD it will be /dev/ad0s3e (note that it numbers disks from 0 but slices from 1, and there is still the letter "e" for the partition inside the slice - isn't that simple?)
This is a red herring. (1) On my NetBSD system, the first disk is /dev/wd0a. That's not any different than Linux's /dev/sda0. (2) Who cares? Mac OS X shows my root file system as /dev/disk0s2, and you don't see everyone complaining that OS X isn't ready for the desktop! And sometimes the extra information can save your butt. Example: I have an old Sun workstation with 3 SCSI disks that has run Linux, BSD and Solaris at different points in its life. One of the more painful moments I experienced w/ this box was under Linux, when I removed a nonessential disk (mounted as /data) after removing its entry in /etc/fstab and unplugging it. I restarted the system -- and it would no longer boot -- because the /dev entries (/dev/sda, sdb, sdc, etc.) are enumerated in ad-hoc fashion, had reordered themselves, and the root drive was no longer where init thought it should be. In BSD and Solaris, the verbose naming corresponded to their physical locations on the SCSI bus, so you could pull a nonessential disk and it would still 'just work'. That prevented a ton of headaches.
These issues have been solved in Linux with unique UUID's, but now your entry for /dev/sda3 might instead say something like "UUID=1924d0d6-496d-4bbf-8fd1-aaaac6764bc5" in /etc/fstab. Good luck parsing the UUID to mean "3rd partition" unless your fstab file is well-commented! That makes BSD look positively friendly by comparison.
FreeBSD advocates spent a good portion of their time claiming that FreeBSD is faster than Linux. Maybe on servers under very heavy load. In all the tests I have made on a simple desktop, FreeBSD always felt a little bit slow, jerky, worse than Linux with a lightweight window manager such as LXDE (but not worse than Linux with KDE 4, for example).
....... and so the only certified Unixes out there are the ones like Solaris, HP/UX, AIX and OS-X.
And Tru64 UNIX. IIRC it received the branding ahead of the others mentioned above.
The plural of anecdote is not evidence.
Looks like you're right on cpu families- however:
And how many of those m68k / mips / arm / etc. sub architectures that you so smoothly dismissed run on Linux?
they are separate 'ports' for a reason in netbsd . Personally, I'd think the important factor in 'counting' these is 'platforms' supported rather than CPU's
also r.e portability:
can you cross compile one from another, or even from another os simply from a checkout of the codebase without manually bootstrapping a toolchain?
r.e 'hack' - last I checked the linux code is much less modular w/r/t cpu platforms with more being duplicated in the subplatform code which is why I think this has a reputation for being 'hackish' - though I'm absolutely not knowledgable on linux portability.
anyhow - not trying to start a flamewar - more free OS's on more hardware is better all around no doubt
Looking @ their home page, it looks like this is a FreeBSD geared @ multiprocessing sytems, not your usual made for home users desktops or laptops.
It's a funny thing though, isn't it? When Matt Dillon began the fork, multi-core technology was only just getting started. If you had multiple cores or multiple CPUs, it was in a server. These days, just about every laptop or home desktop has more than one core. An OS written to scale across multiple CPUs certainly has an advantage on those platforms.
Sure, you can. But UUIDs are the default behavior in many distributions (fortunately, 'blkid' will tell you the mapping between /dev entry and UUID). I'm not saying it's a bad system. My point is that the parent's complaint about naming conventions in /dev is silly -- there are generally good reasons for each system's behavior. The complaint distracts the discussion from what's actually important.
wget has a speed limit option that works well.
More than that, you should look into prioritizing ACKs or changing the queuing method on your router and never have the problem again.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
GPL'd software is...
"Free software, software libre or libre software [...] that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients have the same rights under which it was obtained and that manufacturers of consumer products incorporating free software provide the software as source code. The word free in the term free software refers to freedom (liberty) and is not at all related to monetary cost."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
That is correct. The GPL and the BSD each allow an option to restrict freedom.
For GPL:
If the developer who freely chooses to modify someone else's GPL'd work takes the option to distribute the derived work, then that developer is restricted from restricting other developers from the same freedom to freely choose to access and modify his derived work so that they and everyone else, including the original developer and the modifier, may contribute to and benefit from generations of evolving code changes.
For BSD:
If the developer who freely chooses to modify someone else's BSD'd work takes the option to restrict the freedom of other developers to access and modify his derivation of the existing code, even if he takes the option to distribute the derived work, then those other developers don't have the freedom of choice to access or freedom of choice to modify his derived changes and are restricted from contributing to and benefiting from generations of evolving code changes from that derived work.
It is up to the original developer to decide which behavior to allow by choosing which type of restriction to allow based on the license.
= 9J =
The original code released is still free for anyone to do anything with. Derived works are not free, that is up to the author of the derived works. Even if they close THEIR works, the originals they leverage are still available for others.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
This is true for GPL and BSD.
This is true for the BSD in that it allows the developer who modifies someone else's work to restrict the freedom of other developers, including the original developer, to access and modify to the derived work even if it is distributed.
The GPL would restrict the freedom of the developer from restricting the freedom of other developers to access and modify the derived work for further evolution if the derived work is distributed.
Both the BSD and the GPL allow the freedom to access and modify the original work assuming it is still available for access in its original form somewhere. Yes, the BSD does allow a developer to restrict the freedom of other developers, including the original developer, to access and modify the derived work that was originally BSD'd even if the derived work is distributed.
= 9J =
And thats the point. Why should derived work have limitations placed on the owner of the derived works? It stifles the ability of people to take well tested code and build commercial applications with it. Contrary to GPL zealot indoctrination, not ALL software will be developed for free. BSD people get this, and would rather that commercial software use well tested, robust code for the parts of the software that are non-industry specific, and spend their time focused writing on software that DOESN'T already exist.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
It's up to developer of the original work to decide which type of behavior to allow based on the license.
The GPL only limits the freedom of the developer borrowing the original work if they decide to take the option of distributing the work, whether it was modified or not.
Another question would be, why should the developer who borrowed someone else's work consider himself the owner if he simply modifies it?
Or, another way to state it, why should a developer allow another developer to take ownership of his work when he's already allowed that other developer to benefit from it by allowing that other developer to access the work, to study the work, to use the work, and to modify the work to fit a need? Now, the other developer also wants ownership of it because of a modification that he was allowed to make? For the original developer's openness, in reciprocation the other developer wants to lock out the original developer, and all other developers, from modifications to the work that the original developer might find useful?
It all depends on the type of behavior the original developer wants to allow by the license he chooses. If he wants to encourage selfishness, he can choose the BSD, if wants to encourage reciprocity he can choose the GPL.
I suspect this is an unfounded belief. I do find examples of GPL'd works successfully being built as commercial applications while continuing under the GPL. Please cite actual examples of how this supposed stifling process has affected actual applications if the license requires that the freedom to access modified changes continue to be passed on to later developers as under the GPL. Otherwise, your assertion remains a myth.
If a developer prefers to close source code that they take so that it will now have a Proprietary license, they only have to find another developer willing to provide the code to them on a charity basis, such as under the BSD, where there is no requirement for reciprocity and the charity recipient can treat the code given to them as their own by locking out the original developer and later developers from evolving their modifications. Of course, now that the code is closed, the benefits of Open Source can no longer be applied to the closed modifications since other Open Source developers cannot view, test, or improve the modified code any longer.
I haven't heard or read that claim and couldn't find examples. Is this further myth making? Please provide examples, as I would be interested to read their reasoning on why they expect that all software will be developed for free. I may respond back to them with additional queries on the logic of that position.
I'm not sure as to why commercial software is being discussed on a topic regarding the characteristics of Open Source and Free Software licenses, since commercial applications can be of just about any license, whether BSD, GPL or Proprietary.
Is the assumption that commercial software should always be under a Proprietary license? And, is a Proprietary licensed commercial software supposed to be in some way a superior product? If that is the case, then shouldn't commercial software always rely on Proprietary licensed commercial software components to make the best product?
I don't follow that assumption myself since my belief is that Proprietary licensed code, if closed source, is les