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Yearly FreeBSD Foundation Fundraising Campaign Is On
An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD Foundation's annual year-end fundraising drive is currently running. Their goal this year is US$ 1M, and they're currently at US$ 427K. In 2013, the efforts that were funded were from the last drive were: Native iSCSI kernel stack, Updated Intel graphics chipset support, Integration of Newcons, UTF-8 console support, Superpages for ARM architecture, and Layer 2 networking updates. Also various conferences and summit sponsorships, as well as hardware purchases for the Project. The Foundation is a US 501(c)3 non-profit, so your donations (if in the US) are tax-deductible. Some of the larger 2013 (corporate?) sponsors so far are NetApp, LineRate, WhatsApp, and Tarsnap."
I need to start my fundraising to make an open source clone of OS/2 Warp :)
As I recall, FreeBSD provided some of the key underpinnings to Mac OS X and iOS. Surely Apple can spare some of its $90B back to the effort. $1M is a rounding error compared to $90B...
Program Intellivision!
FreeBSD probably isn't useful to you every day. Maybe some of your net traffic will go through a FreeBSD box, but that box could be replaced by just about anything really. However, I'm not trying to say that FreeBSD is useless or irrelevant - what I want to say is that FreeBSD has some excellent out-of-band uses.
I think people should consider the value of the educational, developmental, experimental and competitive opportunities that FreeBSD provides. We need projects and communities which have low hanging fruit for beginners and we need projects that are ready to give different approaches to problems a go - so that the rest of us on whatever OS can learn from it regardless of the success of the implementation.
The same goes for my favourite alternative OS - Haiku which also contains some bits and pieces from FreeBSD for networking/wireless IIRC. (BTW, it has package management now and a lot of improvements to the native browser, and more.)
FreeBSD isnt for the desktop. Next time you need a quick-deploy firewall with advanced features in a virtual environment, and you stumble across pfSense or m0n0wall, remember to thank FreeBSD for making such a stable system.
My experience with it has been limited to a few appliances (freenas, pfsense, etc), but I've generally found it to be way more stable and better performing than linux alternatives (openfiler, untangle). Im sure there are a myriad of technical and non-technical reasons for that, but either way, I hope the FreeBSD folks keep it up.
Check out PC-BSD sometime. http://www.pcbsd.org/
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
My (Free)BSD desktop works very well, and it doesn't constantly guess incorrectly about what I want it to do.
"fucktard"? Really? Is that you again Linus?
Works fine for me on chips supported by dri. The dri2 support is being nailed down now and once that's in it'll work fine on the same bleeding edge Intel hardware Linux does.
I'm the wifi guy. The WiFi is now up to date on Intel and Atheros 11n. I'd like some help with broadcom. I'll do the Intel and Atheros 11ac stuff early next year.
I'm currently evaluating power management. FreeBSD and xorg on my ivybridge lenovo x230 draw 9w when idle. We are ok at using the deep sleep states per core and package but there's room for improvement.
I'm making the turbo boost stuff work out of the box. Powerd is .. Dumb. Modern CPUs are fine at running at the highest clock rate but spending time in c3 and lower. So I'll fix powers to do that on these chips.
I'm using an x230 in vesa mode but it works fine if you use the new DRI and xorg code. I do day to day hacking on the lenovo t400, mostly due to the cardbus slot I still use.
The only thing missing is hotplug express card.
So.. It's not perfect. 10.0 will not be laptop great. I expect 10.1 with updated dri2 and xorg along with Intel WiFi fixes and my power management stuff to be great.
There.
Yup. If you want to use BSD on desktop, PC-BSD is your ticket. Setting up a desktop on vanilla FreeBSD is not impossible either, but it's a pain in the ass. Just note that PC-BSD recently dropped 32-bit support (P4, early Atom, Core 1 Duo...).
At my last company we developed an online ordering system for restaurants in the mid 2000's and deployed on FreeBSD over Linux using Pair Networks as our server & colo provider. When younger developers who only knew of Linux asked why my response was, "I don't want to waist time with the systems end of things. BSD will sit there and do it's job." Granted a lot of the backend was also written in Perl.
Once the software was written there wasn't a lot of maintenance, especially once we replaced MySQL with PostgreSQL. We'd have to power down one of the cluster to replace a harddrive, or rather Pair handled that, now and then. Maybe have a hardware failure, but we didn't have any problems stemming from the server OS in six years of operation.
Compare that to the point of sale we wrote which was powered on Linux. There was a number of times that changes to the Linux kernel borked something. Unfortunately touchscreen support & BSD was sorely lacking at the time. It got to the point where I considered hiring someone to write a driver.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Stability comes in many forms, not simply up time.
For example, Linux has a long, long history of badly managed architectural transitions:
a.out to ELF
libc to glibc
virtual memory manager musical chairs
filesystem flavor of the month
32bit to 64bit
package manager du jour
sound
MAKEDEV/devfs/udev.
Stack on top of that the variety of distributions, with their own often wildly different ideas about where things should live and how they should be managed, frequently causes stability issues by introducing human error points. Many of those ideas are also inherently bad and affect stability, such as RedHat and friends throwing everything and the kitchen sink into /usr. -Yes, some packages can be retargeted...but not many, and doing so breaks convention (albeit a bad one) causing the same sort of management stability issues that multiple distros cause just on the local level.
All of that ends up being a make-work program for Linux System Administrators...honestly at leat 50% of your daily job only exists because of the instability of the Linux ecosystem.
Linux (all distros, all of it) is a Configuration Manager's worst nightmare.
My