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The State of BSD At the Start of 2013
An anonymous reader writes "NetBSD developer Julian Djamil Fagir provides a nice briefing on what the big three BSD projects have been working on, and explains/reminds us of their cultural differences. Stick a fork in them? Yes, Djamil Fagir mentions a couple of those, too. The recent releases from FreeBSD and NetBSD were covered by Slashdot."
I thought not.
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying
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 a Kreskin 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 is dying
TFS lies about TFA's contents. TFA has FOUR categories covering DragonflyBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD.
This is insanely cool...
Seriously.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I think it's also worth noting that FreeBSD' support for moder GPUs is finally improving:
-nvidia closed-source driver works (as always)
-Intel works https://wiki.freebsd.org/Intel_GPU
-AMD porting has started https://wiki.freebsd.org/AMD_GPU
What I find funny is that BSD is finally, after 10 years of ATT/UNIX trademark fearing BS, starting to not only catch up but exceed in technical developments and market growth. :( And now even Linux is stealing back clean-roomed BSD code that the BSD projects clean-roomed from GPL tools specifically to get away from GPL versions of same. How funny is that :) :)
I've used it as my main desktop for almost 15 years. Well, ok FreeBSD specifically. I run Linux, and a little windows too. All the servers are BSD.
BSD has ZFS, which is the reason Linux has ZFS, because BTRFS is still vaporware.
And because of the ultimate freedom of the BSD two/three clause license all other OS can use BSD code.
But Linux is a zealous camp and insists on infecting people
And now with CLANG/LLVM things are really moving.
No, BSD is not dying, it's building very long term openness and business friendly models, much longer term and open visioned than Linux. BSD cares about these things. One way to see that is the FreeBSD foundation's donations page, the model is working.
Linux is better than it was in the 90s and 2000s, it doesn't crash on me like it used to. They'll both still crash if you poke them in certain ways. But as a daily use, BSD hasn't ever exibited what I used to see with Linux.
Oh, there is also PC-BSD for users, which is sort of like Ubuntu to Debian.
I like not having to worry about KERNEL from Linux + GNU from third parties to make a whole OS... BSD projects provide the sum of those two IN HOUSE. You get the whole OS from one shop. So all that is left is the packages you want to install like X, Firefox, GIMP, whatever just like any other OS.
Anyways, I'm just happy with FreeBSD (and OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD, don't really use NetBSD because they're more embedded).
If you're a Linux user and haven't tried it, grab an ISO and run it in a VM. Don't freak because you might not have a sexy GUI installer with pointy clicky AJAX menus and stuff (that's coming), but take a look at the configuration mechanism after you're up and running, how you update and build the kernel and world... the overall BSD model of things.
See if you like it maybe
GNU itself clarifies that BSD is not based on GNU software. Check out their website
I read TFA. I was rather disappointed that in the list of BSD's accomplishments, no mention was made of IPv6, where FBSD was the pioneer. It was the first to have support from the KAME project, and later, in version 9, they even had the IPv6 only mode, which users could use if they wanted to test whether applications work w/ IPv6 w/o a fallback to IPv4. They would also have done well to have described PC-BSD's EasyPBI package manager, which even FBSD seems to have adapted, as well as the Linux jails in FBSD and PC-BSD.
On the OBSD side, they could have described their routing and firewall capabilities. Also, they could have, in the FBSD part, described m0n0wall and pFsense, and compared them w/ OpenBSD
On the NBSD side, I don't see NetBSD playing much of a role. If they are targeting embedded devices, they would do better to team up w/ Minix3.2, which, as a really small microkernel would be better suited for embedded applications, and focus on the things mentioned, whether it's file systems, networking, getting non-GNU utilities (like FBSD, they too ought to endorse and adapt LLVM/Clang) and Wayland. Since Minix 3.2 is under a BSD license and has adapted the NBSD conventions, it would be a good idea simply to merge them. I mean, does the NBSD kernel have anything special about it that Minix 3.2 doesn't deliver
OSX may have been certified as Unix, but it has been diverging from its ancestor so much that it no longer feels Unix-like in the least.
Some examples:
- no /dev (bye-bye Unix philosophy cornerstone "everything is a file");
- unusable "locate" that doesn't find all the stuff it should (because Apple wants you to use Spotlight, the command line is bad, you silly!);
- much of the userland isn't aware of the HFS+ filesystem extensions (have fun cp'ing files, discovering months later that - oops! - the stuff had a resource fork and is now unusable -- verrry dependable!);
- case insensitive filesystem by default, you could switch to case sensitive for compatibility with any other Unix in the universe (have fun reformatting and reinstalling) but - alas! - important application software won't support it (photoshop & others);
- no cron! If you want to get it to do things periodically, you either gotta write freaking XML for launchd, or run Vixie Cron in addition to launchd. No thanks!
If OSX is Unix, it's the worst Unix I've ever seen. No serious command line nerd could ever like it (OTOH, it's perfect for know-nothings who like to click on pretty pictures). Using it is a totally different (as in "worse") experience than using any BSD (or Linux!), so spare me the old "OSX is BSD" hearsay!
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
iOS is doing even better.
There seem to be some uninformed posters here, so here is the OS X relationship to BSD:
The OS X/iOS kernel is based on Mach, which is a microkernel mashed together with a BSD kernel. It has a lot of BSD code in it and continues to share code with the other BSDs. It has features borrowed from BSD such as DTrace, PF firewall, file system support (including ZFS before it was removed), the networking subsystem, kqueue, jails, and others. While Mach is fundamentally different in some ways, to a POSIX binary it looks and feels just like any other BSD system.
The OS X userland is also based on BSD and was originally derived from FreeBSD. It uses the BSD libc and many of the command line tools are from the BSD world (from grep to ssh). It also includes some GNU tools, such as bash. Apple is actively working on replacing many of these, and they recently dropped GCC and GDB and replaced them with Clang and LLDB.
The article states "TrueCrypt, a disk encryption tool, though being Closed Source, gained a wide distribution among computers due to its ease of use and cross-platform compatibility." I think this is misleading as the source code is licensed under a custom license but it is open source (depending on what one means by open source). It's not a BSD or GPL license, but the code is open and one is allowed to modify it and distribute binaries and source of the modified version. It has to be renamed and there are some other restrictions, but to call it closed source is misleading.
It's not that. I've updated the db (and I let update it periodically, via launchd) but it still won't find everything (not even regular user-owned stuff).
Yeah, I had come across that one. Then again, you first have to know it exists. Apple won't warn you nor inform you. And when you investigate and find out, it's usually because the regular Unix tools have already wrought havoc.
Whatever. Have fun developing on a case-insensitive file system and not noticing case mismatches that will suddenly stop the show when you run your stuff on a proper Unix.
That won't work, from at least 10.6 onwards. No cron by default. If you want it, you must use it in addition to launchd. If you want to start cron at boot, you have to tell launchd, by writing freaking XML!
I don't like because it's a bastardized Unix that's not nearly Unix-like enough.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
> ls dir2
README
> mv dir1/readme dir2/
> ls dir2
readme
Bye-bye README! Because of this nonstandard behaviour, I once lost a bunch of files. Thankfully, I realized soon enough and I had backups; but - since then - I know I can't trust shell scripts known to work on other Unixes.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
- no /dev (bye-bye Unix philosophy cornerstone "everything is a file");
- unusable "locate" that doesn't find all the stuff it should (because Apple wants you to use Spotlight, the command line is bad, you silly!);
- much of the userland isn't aware of the HFS+ filesystem extensions (have fun cp'ing files, discovering months later that - oops! - the stuff had a resource fork and is now unusable -- verrry dependable!);
- case insensitive filesystem by default, you could switch to case sensitive for compatibility with any other Unix in the universe (have fun reformatting and reinstalling) but - alas! - important application software won't support it (photoshop & others);
- no cron! If you want to get it to do things periodically, you either gotta write freaking XML for launchd, or run Vixie Cron in addition to launchd. No thanks!
If OSX is Unix, it's the worst Unix I've ever seen. No serious command line nerd could ever like it (OTOH, it's perfect for know-nothings who like to click on pretty pictures). Using it is a totally different (as in "worse") experience than using any BSD (or Linux!), so spare me the old "OSX is BSD" hearsay!
So you noticed that /dev/ still exists. Well done. Although mounting is automatic (which I hardly see as being a bad feature and something unique to Mac OS X) there's no reason why you can't manually mount stuff as you wish. man mount.
On locate, log a bug if it's not working as intended. This is what techie people do. I'd opt for mdfind unless I have a script that *absolutely must* use locate. mdfind is fast and isn't reliant upon having an up-to-date locate database.
cp by default preserves resource forks. It's been that way for over six years! You're right that prior to that it was a mess during the period when resource forks were still very much used in Classic applications, and CpMac was kind of hidden away in the developer tools. Anyway resource forks were problematic for a long time. Saw plenty of issues where people would email files or copy them to alien filesystems, ending up with broken applications. man CpMac and man cp.
Agreed on the case insensitive default of HFS+. That I find a bit odd.
On cron - it was at first odd to see it go but I'm now happy working with launchd. XML isn't a pain if you have templates ready, or use something to generate the XML for you. Granted it's not as straightforward as popping a line in to a crontab. Personal preference and use cases really. I like launchd because a task can be triggered by a fairly broad range of events. I too miss the simplicity of cron.
Incidentally, I've had similar issues switching between BSD and Linux. Shit's not necessarily where I expect it to be. I'd say your gripes are more to do with outdated information and personal preference. I stick with BSDs, not because I think they're inherently a better Unix than Linux - more because BSD feels like coming home. Linux feels like a parallel universe where things are sufficiently different to be noticeable, yet overall pretty familiar.
-- Using the preview button since 2005