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OpenBSD Fork Bitrig Announced

Posted by Unknown on from the netcraft-confirms-netbsd-developers-arming-for-war dept.

With the goal of bringing more experimental development to the OpenBSD code base, a few developers have announced a fork named Bitrig. According to their FAQ, Bitrig aims to build a small system targeting only modern hardware and "be a very commercially friendly code base by using non-viral licenses where possible." Their first step toward that goal was removing GCC in favor of LLVM/Clang. The project roadmap shows their future goals as adding FUSE support, improving multiprocessing, porting the system to ARM, and replacing the GNU C++ library with LLVM's.

3 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Theo is going to me sooooo mad by ArhcAngel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If they contribute back to the main trunk, then I think all is well.

    The double edged sword of the BSD License. I'm sure they will probably contribute back but unlike the GPL there is nothing legally to compel them to.

    --
    "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
  2. Re:No interest by Applekid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Freedom -- true freedom -- is about people having the ability to be assholes if they choose.

    --
    More Twoson than Cupertino
  3. Code reinvestment and positive feedback loops. by bmo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "be a very commercially friendly code base by using non-viral licenses where possible."

    The advantages to Linux over BSD licensed operating systems is that improvements are reinvested in the code base, by mandate. This accelerates development at a much faster rate than we've seen with any of the BSDs since it is a positive feedback loop. Contrary to this, companies take BSD code, improve it, and tend to release nothing back. Because they don't have to. Look at OSX.

    So now we have a project that is "focused on modern hardware and SMP" among other things. Compare and contrast to Linux which keeps up with modern hardware a lot better than any of the BSDs. I'm betting the goal of "keeping up with modern hardware" is going to fall by the wayside when they eventually discover how difficult it is when it's just them doing all the heavy lifting.

    I also take issue with the "commercially friendly" jab. Linux is GPL, and it's commercially friendly. Sensible companies are not afraid one bit of using Linux. The ones who are don't understand what they're missing when it comes to the code reinvestment cycle.

    --
    BMO Downmods coming in 3... 2 ... 1...