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Strong Foundations: FreeBSD, Wikimedia Raise Buckets of Development Money
mbadolato writes "On December 9, 2012, Slashdot reported that the FreeBSD Foundation was falling short of their 2012 goal of $500,000 by nearly 50%. For all of those that continued to echo about how FreeBSD is dying, it's less than three weeks later and the total is presently nearing $200,000 OVER the goal. Netcraft continues to be wrong."
And reader hypnosec adds another crowdfunding success story: "The Wikimedia Foundation has announced at the conclusion of its ninth annual fund-raiser that it has managed to raise a whopping $25 million from 1.2 million donors in just over a week's time. ... As compared to last year's fund-raiser, which got completed in 46 days, this year's was completed in just nine days."
Thank you FreeBSD, for having a useful ZFS implementation. Countless devices around the world exist because of you.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Sacrifice 3 kittens and a puppy dog.
All this proves is that some people are willing to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to things that are important. If only we/they would do the same with some political contributions to those who are trying to change things for the better (human rights, privacy rights, less spying, copyright/patent reform, tort reform, etc, etc, etc).
You can't change the system from the outside. Getting players on the inside requires playing the current incarnation of the game. That requires money.
Maybe your best bet would be forking the project, getting some developers and paying them for the conversion.
I can feel it in my bones, this is the year of FreeBSD! I"ve always had a soft-spot in my heart for BSD of any flavor. Fond memories of running NetBSD on my Mac LCIII are coming back!
you jelly?
Good, also don't forget to help NetBSD if you can, they haven't reached anywhere near expectations.http://www.netbsd.org/donations/
Maybe the Linux Foundation (or someone else, they're the first that come to mind) could do a similar thing to raise money for improving the Linux graphics and wireless stacks? How much improvement could we get for a million USD? Or perhaps there are individual developers out there who would do what Poul-Henning Kamp did? I'd be happy to contribute to such an initiative. Kickstart it?
"Nearly $200,000 over" is actually "$180,000" over. I guess 90% is "nearly 100%".
It's currently $184,905K over, and was before TFA was posted. If you're going to be pedantic about rounding, then you probably shouldn't round in your own comment. There are also a few large pledges (e.g. from Netflix), which may or may not arrive in time to be counted towards the 2012 total. If they don't, then the 2013 total will get an early boost. If they do, then they'll easily push it over the $200K-over mark.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I donate (small amounts) to FreeBSD almost every year, and I don't even use their software currently. They have an important place in the history of Unix-like operating systems, and I have used their software for some great projects in the past.
Wikipedia is so obnoxious with their fundraising, I've stopped donating. The local news recently reported that the most visited page on Wikipedia was "Facebook", and I rarely use it. I did get a kick out of their previous campaign where the staffers photos were above the article - deceptively close to the subject. Searches returned some pretty funny results.
Grandpa: My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star.
Wikimedia is different -- a huge directory of public domain images and other media. I use it for just about every school paper I write. There's no inherent bias in "This is a picture of milk thistle"
Wikimedia is doing FSM's work and is well deserving of your support.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
this article is misleading and upside down.
if an entity has the following charactoristics:
1- good product (quality)
2- product is appreciated (demand)
3- costs are reasonable (feasibility)
4- has a consumer base with spending power (viability)
then it will NECESSARILY meet it's goals. this is basic economics of supply and demand. didn't we all learn this in highschool?
let me fix this article:
"corporations with crap products who raise money with psychological tactics are increasingly finding it difficult to get funding because of the internet."
i would also add: "projects such as netbsd and openbsd that add enormous value to the lives of every human being are underappreciated because the consumer is ignorant of them, and so they fall short of funding goals some times, and it befalls us as responsible technologists to make sure that they continue to protect our interests with the same selfless, joyful, gracious generosity that we have been able to enjoy for so long without giving much in return"
typing this message just left a bad taste in my mouth. to realize that somehow everyone doesn't get this stuff is sad.
may I see your RAW thistle cheese?
how much does it cost to hold family members of the developers hostage? C++ for the most part is a toy language. it lacks orthogonality and for a mature language it is more of a mess than any pother language that i can think of that is widely used. just look at iostream, disgusting! programmers too stupid for regex's should stick to simple things like chewing gum while walking after tying their own shoe laces. /rant
That's the difference.
>> There's no inherent bias in "This is a picture of milk thistle"
Sorry but there is. What format is the image stored in?
Told ya so!
But this doesn't mean you shouldn't still donate! ;-)
--libman
Good on both counts. Congratulations.
As a Haskell user, I find the fight between C and C++ users really funny.
It's like seeing a 101 year old anachronistic Nazi grandpa fight his wheelchair-bound drooling retard of a son:
"What's the point of your existence, if you don't even re-invent the wheel every time you build a car?!"
"Hurrka Durr! *drool* Derp Durr Hurka Derp-urr!”
And why would you do that? C is for the most part a subset of C++. Large part of code should compile in C++ compiler flawlessly.
Why convert? UNIX is C, period.
It's a lot of C, but not all C. According to the FreeBSD mirror on GitHub the FreeBSD distribution contains the following types of code:
C 78.2%
C++ 12.9%
Shell 5.1%
Perl 1.2%
Other 2.4%
There are many more pieces of software that has an important place in the history of Unix-like OSes. Why donate to this specific one?
Should I point out that at the point that the FreeBSD fundraiser was on Slashdot as being a failure, it had only been running for 4 days and had reached nearly half of it's goal...?
Next-gen OS projects are slowly beginning to start up
Like Plan 9 and Inferno? These have started up a loooong time ago. ;-)
Using C++ is rather stupid, however, if you can get the same performance from much more productive and secure languages like Go, Rust, Nimrod, etc.
Using C++ is stupid even if you can't. The tools support for C++ is outrageous by definition. By the time you have a parser for C++, you have written half a compiler. Give me a break.
Ezekiel 23:20
Although I would agree that C++ does many things wrong, we have the benefit of hindsight. I'm also not sure where your rant is directed iostream, regex in general, or using regex as part of iostream. The latter would be incredibly stupid in a core library like iostream.
And as far as regex's being the mark of a good programmer as you imply, I pray I never see any code written by you. A regex can be handy for some simple parsing, matching, whatever, but in many situations they fail in 2 major areas: speed and edge cases. It seems nearly every regex I've ever seen in a critical piece of code is the source of countless bugs. The fixes end up adding to a regex until it becomes a huge unmaintainable gorilla. There's a reason many people refer to them as write-only code. Sorry, but hand-written logic usually can be tweaked to run faster anyway, is more pluggable, testable, and typically suffers from less edge cases. Many languages also offer built-in features or styles that are much better at many of the tasks that people use regex's for in other languages (Lisp and Haskell come to mind as two languages that can parse the hell out of things without such nonsense).
If you can see it in your browser you can convert it to any format you wish. And the license even lets you do that, if you care about that sort of thing.
So if you feel like having your images in dual-interleaved alpha-channeled bitplany goodness, you can! Personally, I'll stick to jpeg for photos and png for illustrations. Unless it's vectors, then I'll take PostScript please. (warning, bias: SVG implementations suck donkey balls)
And also to haiku OS. They all were useful or fun' and still are.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Now maybe there will be some decent intel graphics support so I can run it on my laptops :/ FBSD10, I'm watching you.
One of the things I like about FreeBSD is their openess to languages (in contrast to OpenBSD, who think C is the only language around...)
Throughout the years, FreeBSD developers reached out for what they thought were the best languages for the job: Modula-3 (for cvsup, though now deprecated), Forth on the boot loader (ideal, right? Can drop you into a little Forth shell), Ruby for ports infrastructure. In that way, they are not prejudiced about programming languages. Users contribute a great deal too. All the things you get in Debian (lots of languages).
FreeBSD developers also have ported important innovations that are open-sourced but lacking in Linux, because of pure ideology (the GPL doesn't play well with others): Apple's Grand Central Dispatch (a framework that implements concurrency *correctly*), and LLVM (which as a side effect, brings C blocks (effectively, closures for C).
Additionally, many vendors support FreeBSD. I, for instance, run Eiffel on FreeBSD (for the world's best introduction to Object Oriented Programming: A Touch of class. Common Lisp has vendors that support FreeBSD (LispWorks, Franz), and so has Smalltalk (Cincom, Smalltalk/X). All these vendors have free products and commercial support.
There's nothing stopping anyone from doing whatever they want with C++ on FreeBSD. But seriously, C++? Shouldn't you be looking at D?
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
I think just LLVM / Clang is implemented in C++, which is an externally-developed project.
Can't be any active perl code, fortunately FreeBSD doesn't include perl in base.
--libman
On Mac OS X, Unix is a whole lot of Objective-C.
It has the semantics of the purest of OO languages (Smalltalk), but you can mix and match with C. That allows for speed and fast development without the pain and the bugs. It's probably the number one factor for the success of Mac OS as the number 1 Unix out there for users (power users included). No, actually, number 1 OS, period.
If you ask me, Steve Jobs was wright.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
The fact that plan9/etc failed to gain popularity doesn't mean UNIX will be the final idea in operating systems until the heat death of the universe...
I wouldn't call everyone who ever used C++ (which is the majority of major game and app projects) stupid, but it's time for it to die. We have languages that are many times simpler and more elegant that give pretty much the same performance.
--libman
But will you still be laughing after you finish your undergraduate degree?
Wow, just wow ...
Your statement pretty much proves why wikipedia shouldn't even be allowed anywhere near school research. No bias? Are you 8?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Buy a mac.
The picture of the milk thistle inherently encapsulates many of the social dynamics inherent in plant propagation. Clearly the fact that it has etiolated somewhat is also indicative of the effects of global warming on cloud cover. These two spheres of influence create a disparity between the public world of global climatography and the private world of Milk thistle propagation. The author proposes that to properly asses the relationship of these spheres, more funding is needed, as well as the examination of other spheres, both similar and dissimilar.
The fact that plan9/etc failed to gain popularity doesn't mean UNIX will be the final idea in operating systems until the heat death of the universe...
For me, they didn't fail. I think they nicely demonstrated that a lot of cute ideas actually work. That's hardly a failure.
I wouldn't call everyone who ever used C++ (which is the majority of major game and app projects) stupid
Neither would I, it's the fact that people had little choice that is stupid, not the people.
Ezekiel 23:20
On Mac OS X, Unix is a whole lot of Objective-C.
...except for the parts that actually implement Unix behavior, which are mostly C with some amount of C++ and perhaps a small amount of Objective-C.
Wut?
Novel gcc versions and clang are written in C++. In consequence new versions of FreeBSD and Linux fundamentally depend on C++. It's time to move on and bite the bullet: Implement the resource management using the RAII techniques of C++ or lose in the long run. The classic goto cascades of UNIX have brought us too many security holes already and do not scale. What a senseless waste of developper time!
No, he'll be to busy working on his custom xmonad config while he's watching anime and posting about lolis.
Read it again, I said wikimedia not wikipedia. Wikimedia is a great place to get public domain media.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
An effective if unsubtle anti-Haskell troll.
We currently have a few C++ things in the base system:
In a few days, there will also be a BSDL replacement for the GPL'd device tree compiler landing. This is a simple tool that converts between source and flattened device trees, and since it is doing a lot of stuff that involves building maps I decided to use C++ and std::map rather than reinvent the wheel or do something ugly involving macros. Performance isn't an issue, since it's intended to parse input files that are typically under 12KB and produce output that is even smaller, so even without optimisation it uses around 10KB of RAM and under a tenth of a second of CPU time. A higher-level language might have been appropriate, but it's also potentially important to be able to include a statically linked copy for recovery, which rules out most high-level languages.
Note that none of the kernel, and no userland utilities essential for operation are written in C++.
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Ruby for ports infrastructure
The ports infrastructure is written in make, not Ruby. You are probably thinking of portupgrade, which is a (deprecated) third-party tool for managing potrs.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I've already got a serviceable parka, thanks.
Since FBSD has deprecated gcc and moved to LLVM/Clang, can't the OS be written in Objective-C?
Thank you, FBSD, for being a pioneer not only in implementing IPv6, but also producing possibly the first IPv6-only implementation of an OS. I hope that Monowall and pFsense develop advanced IPv6 specific security and routing features that makes them fully usable for that purpose.
In fact, I wish that PC-BSD, if not FBSD, adds support for Wayland, and allows DEs that implement their Window managers in Wayland to run on top of it. While FBSD may want X11 for legacy reasons, I doubt that the same is as true about PC-BSD.
Implement the resource management using the RAII techniques of C++ or lose in the long run.
That's a false dichotomy, if I've ever seen one.
Ezekiel 23:20
We probably shouldn't trust anything anyone who says "developper" says about programming, anyway.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
Yes, portupgrade is separate from the base system, available through the ports system itself. It's only "deprecated", however, in that it used to essentially be "the standard" for ports system front ends, and has been edged out in that regard by portmaster. There are other front ends as well, though, and they're there to provide choices, as is portmaster.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
maybe they'll develop a desktop OS now.
alive to the universe, dead to the world
I'm hoping that DragonFly BSD's HAMMER FS, when it's ready, will be ported to FreeBSD, and then to all other OS'es. It already has some advantages over ZFS, like reduced memory requirements, and is planning to add a lot of additional features (ex. clustering) in the near future.
By the virtue of its copyfree license, HAMMER can spread like wildfire to all OS'es, including proprietary and copyleft ones! Imagine never having to convert your home partition, and always having optimal FS features and performance, as you switch from OS to OS to OS!
--libman
Novel gcc versions and clang are written in C++. In consequence new versions of FreeBSD and Linux fundamentally depend on C++.
As I mentioned below:
"If there was a smaller copyfree C compiler available (no C++ / ObjC bs), then it would have been much preferable to LLVM / Clang as part of FreeBSD base. Unfortunately projects like pcc / ack / etc are further behind. Perhaps Open / Net / DragonFly BSD are holding out for those, but FreeBSD needed to ditch gcc ASAP."
FreeBSD chose to go with LLVM / Clang, but anyone can fork FreeBSD and replace it with a copyfree pure-C compiler, without C++ in base and with nothing major depending on it.
FreeBSD uses a C compiler that also includes C++ / ObjC support and is itself written in C++, but it doesn't "fundamentally depend" (or in any way "depend") on C++.
It's time to move on and bite the bullet: Implement the resource management using the RAII techniques of C++ or lose in the long run. The classic goto cascades of UNIX have brought us too many security holes already and do not scale. What a senseless waste of developper time!
If you can't handle hands-on memory management like a big boy, then you shouldn't be doing UNIX system programming. Use a scripting language instead. Or use something like Go / Rust / Nimrod / D to write a post-UNIX OS. When they're ready.
C++ isn't the future, it's a mistake from the past!
--libman
It's glad to see that at least some OS people in the FOSS community pick tools based on how well they are at the particular task at hand, as opposed to their ideological biases ("C good, C++ bad" etc).
Then again, FreeBSD development was always much more pragmatic than Linux, from what I've seen.
The tools support for C++ is outrageous by definition. By the time you have a parser for C++, you have written half a compiler. Give me a break.
Once the compiler is already written, though, why is it an issue?
Tools support for C++ took a long time coming, but it's finally here. There are IDEs out there that do 100% accurate code completion on arbitrarily complex C++ code, for examples (templates and all).