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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.

4 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. Re:wtf is a bitrig? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    A bitrig is 1/8 of a byterig.

  2. 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
  3. I wish them luck. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is a good "Put up or shut up" moment for BSD. For all the whining I hear about "Viral" and "Anti Business" licenses the various *BSD projects sure do have a meager adoption (Buisness, home, free or otherwise) compared to their GPL counterparts (Linux). I think an aggressive, forward looking BSD project would be great to have.

    Granted, not all the most popular open source projects have "Viral" licenses (Eg - Most Apache foundation projects), but maybe.. Just maybe Linux's success is in part due to the GPL.

    Some people feel the GPL is stealing something that they're somehow entitled too. In reality, it's more of an exchange. You give up the ability to have a certain business model, and in return you get the collective work of everyone else who's made the same agreement. You give up exclusive control of your source in return for a world-class, flexible, free, operating system with widespread uses. For free. With a BSD style license you're able to opt out of that "collective work" provision. You can take, but you don't have to give. As a result, the project does not grow.

    It's probably in your long-term interest for the project to grow. I think the success of Linux proves this.

    1. Re:I wish them luck. by killmenow · · Score: 5, Informative

      in what sense do you consider Linux to be a success?

      In the sense that it runs twice as many servers as Windows, roughly the same about of desktops as Macs (according to Steve Ballmer), and more mobile devices than any other OS in existence (where, btw, it is outpacing its rivals by a wide margin and now selling more units than desktop devices per year as nearly a million new linux-based (yes, Android is based on linux) mobile devices are activated every day. That sounds pretty successful. And it doesn't even include the embedded market, which you clearly know nothing about. So many embedded devices in use in many industries (the cable industry for instance) run Red Hat Linux and other distros.

      By what metric is Linux "world-class"?

      As of June 2010 the operating systems used on the world's top 500 supercomputers were: Linux 91.0%, Unix 4.4%, Hybrid Unix/Linux 3.4%, Windows HPC 1.0%, BSD 0.2%
      That metric works for me. You apparently prefer ones with pretty pointy-clicky thingies.