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The BSDs in the WSJ: "Help Build the Web"

Posted by Hemos on from the yesterday-but-it's-still-worth-it dept.

conio writes "The Wall Street Journal published an article on Friday about the open-source BSDs (mainly FreeBSD) and how they're silently serving the Net. " This was submitted yesterday quite a bit, but was in the pay area-thankfully it's free reading now. Good to see BSD get some of the limelight.

7 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. Re:hmm I dont mean to start a flame war but.... by Guy+Harris · · Score: 3
    ...didn't the *bsd flavors of unix had what, 20 years to get their act together and yet let windows and proprietary unix os's come in without a care in the world

    20 years ago, you had to get a license from AT&T to get BSD, as large parts of the code in BSD were based on AT&T UNIX code that hadn't been replaced. They weren't out for World Domination at that point - but, then, Linus Torvalds wasn't our for World Domination when he started working on his kernel, either, as far as I know....

    and now the *bsd hackers are pissed at linux users and the whole computer world for ignoring them.

    There may well be *BSD hackers who are pissed at Linux users and the whole computer world for appearing to ignore them, but

    1. not all BSD hackers are;
    2. not all Linux users are ignoring BSD and much of the computer world isn't ignoring BSD, either, as the Wall Street Journal article this thread started out with shows.
    They screwed up bad on marketing it, selling it, creating hype about it, and giving it to users.

    To what extent did the Linux community "market it, sell it, and create hype about it"? And where did the "marketing, selling, and hype" about Linux come from? I'm not sure it all came from "the Linux hackers".

    Linus invented linux because he couldn't get a unix os for his 386 pc. freebsd either couldn't run on it or it was accessible at the time.

    FreeBSD (and the other freely-available BSDs) have always run on PCs, as I think FreeBSD and NetBSD both came from 386BSD which was a port of Net-2 to, err, umm, the PC.

    IF I am correct (I could be wrong). The group of *bsd hackers bickered among themselves and fragmented and made a terrible mistake. THe mistake was it wasn't involved with the IBM pc when it first came out.

    The first attempt at a completely-free BSD (with all the AT&T code either replaced or blessed as "OK to give out") was, I think, 386BSD, whence came FreeBSD and NetBSD; the "386" in "386BSD" referred to the 80386, because it was a BSD port to the PC.

    The *bsd group didn't let outsiders contribute code so users who wanted a more powerful OS had to buy a separate OS more proprietary OS like sun os, irix, aix. The fragmentation in unix itself began.

    "The *bsd group" of those days was the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley, and they certainly did accept contributions from outsiders. However, not all the stuff Sun, SGI, IBM, etc. did with either AT&T UNIX code or BSD code was necessarily sent back to Berkeley by those companies, and not because the Berkeley folk wouldn't accept it. You can't solely blame Berkeley for the existence of N different flavors of UNIX....

    Unix was crazed by the IS departments until the early 1990's when unix completely became fragmented, proprietary, expensive, and unix companies began bickering among themselves

    That all happened well before the early 1990's; UNIX was well-fragmented by the mid 1980's, with several different proprietary variants, from vendors who largely sold it on their own boxes rather than on, say, IBM-compatible PCs - UNIXes for PCs had existed for a long time, but I don't know how well IN/ix ran on 8088-based PC's (yes, 8088, the one with segmentation but no memory protection), but I suspect it may not have run well enough to push DOS out of the way, and I suspect the same may have been true of the UNIXes for 286-based PCs, although I think Xenix (yes, the Borg's own UNIX, later handed to SCO) may have had a decent market share for small business computers and the like.

    The *bsd crowd ignored bill totally instead of pointing out there fallacies and marketing there OS and they still haven't learned from there mistakes and the source code was still closed and the users ignored average users and were real snotty.

    "The *bsd crowd", if by that you mean the folks at Berkeley and their successors on the {Free,Net,Open}BSD projects, weren't spearheading the commercial UNIX movement - as far as I know, they were building free OSes for their own purposes, which I think was largely what the Linux community was also doing when they started.

    Guess what! Windows took over everything and NT 3.51 came out next and began to steal the unix market.

    Said market was the commercial UNIX market, not the free UNIX "market"....

    Linux has buzz

    Linux has software companies distributing it; for whatever reason, there's no equivalent of Red Hat or SuSE or Caldera or Pacific HiTech or... filling that role for {Free,Net,Open}BSD (no, Walnut Creek CD-ROM isn't in that position, as far as I know), although there is BSDI selling BSD/OS.

    "The *bsd community", if, by that, you mean the developers of {Free,Net,Open}BSD is probably more like the Debian community than like Red Hat or SuSE or... in that regard (although the Debian folk aren't necessarily the official "owners" of all the components that go into their distribution - they're the official source of versions of the kernel, libraries, utilities, etc. that go into a Debian release, but they're not the official home of the Linux kernel or GNU "libc" or...).

    Linux said that linux is made up of 30 full time and over 1,000 part time programmers who work on the kernel while freebsd has only 15 guys.

    The FreeBSD Core Team does have 16 members, but the core team, as the list linked to say, "constitutes the project's ``Board of Directors'', responsible for deciding the project's overall goals and direction as well as managing specific areas of the FreeBSD project landscape" - they're not the sole developers of FreeBSD code. The same probably applies to NetBSD and OpenBSD. There are 151 additional "FreeBSD Developers" "who have commit privileges and do the engineering work on the FreeBSD source tree", and, according to the Contributing to FreeBSD page in the FreeBSD Handbook

    Contrary to what some people might also have you believe, you do not need to be a hot-shot programmer or a close personal friend of the FreeBSD core team in order to have your contributions accepted. The FreeBSD Project's development is done by a large and growing number of international contributors whose ages and areas of technical expertise vary greatly, and there is always more work to be done than there are people available to do it.

    Again, the same may be true of NetBSD and OpenBSD; I'm less familiar with those projects.

    I don't know how many of the core team or the development team work full-time on FreeBSD, so I can't say that FreeBSD has 167 full-time and (some unknown number of) part-time developers (the latter being those who don't have commit privileges but who do contribute code) - and note that this does not say that FreeBSD has more people working on it than are working on Linux systems, as I don't know if those "30 full time people" counts only people working on the kernel or also counts people working on GNU "libc", GNU utilities that aren't also used in the BSDs, etc..

    However, it does suggest that "freebsd has only 15 guys" is a big oversimplification.

    There could well be more people working on the stuff that goes into a Linux distribution and that doesn't also go into the BSDs or that isn't also available for BSD (people working on XFree86 aren't "Linux developers", as their stuff goes into the BSDs as well, and the folks working on KDE, at least, aren't "Linux developers", either, as binary packages of KDE 1.1.1 are available for FreeBSD and possibly the other BSDs) than are working on FreeBSD, but this doesn't mean that FreeBSD, or any of the other BSDs, are ipso facto doomed.

    I believe freebsd had the unix code already and was around over 12 years longer then linux

    12 years before today is 1987; FreeBSD didn't exist then, and Linux didn't just show up today, so FreeBSD wasn't around 12 years longer than Linux. Much of the BSD code was around before Linux existed, but much of the GNU and other code that goes into a Linux distribution was around before Linux existed as well, so I'm not sure {Free,Net,Open}BSD had as big a head start as you seem to think (it did have one, as far as I know, but not a 12 year head start).

  2. You've just gotta love diversity.. by Kitsune+Sushi · · Score: 3

    "The free programs are all variants of the venerable Unix system invented by AT&T Corp. And they aren't just running Yahoo. While Microsoft almost never talks about it, its own Hotmail free e-mail service runs not on its flagship Windows NT but on FreeBSD."

    I wouldn't want to talk about either, since when Microsoft first acquired Hotmail, they switched over all the servers to Windows NT. Needless to say, their setup experienced mild "difficulties" as NT tried to handle the all the user load, and failed.. miserably.. After a short period (not short enough for many, I'm sure) they were forced to switch back. And they call their systems "advanced"?

    "The Linux saga is already the stuff of modern legend. In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old student in Helsinki, began writing an operating system essentially from scratch so he could have something to use on his home computer. The programs FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, by contrast, are the descendants of code written in the late 1970s and early 1980s at UC Berkeley."

    Oh please. No matter how technically accurate or inaccurate the media is, they always leave out some important aspects. I know I sound like a broken record, but I feel as if this is an important issue which needs to be addressed. Is there any way we can let the media know that we have GNU/Linux today because of both the GNU Project and Linus Torvalds, and not just Linus? Public perception is a big deal.. the only thing people listen to are just PR issues, anyway. Any insights on this? I don't believe I've heard of any before.

    Ugh. Just killed article window. Too lazy to reopen. Hmm.. "no ego about letting people use their software"? I think I got that right, and it sounds egotistical in and of itself. What, GNU/Linux was all written by just one person? Ha!

    --

    ~ Kish

  3. So far most of the comments have been negative by jfunk · · Score: 3

    Why is that?

    I read the article, and liked it.

    These journalists have come a long way since the "UNIX has no GUI" days. The article was entirely positive, written to give credit where it was due (I'm a Linux guy, btw).

    The article wasn't posted to start a flame war, but that's going to happen anyway. It's already started.

    It's like Ford vs. GM vs. whoever. Strong points, weak points, there are always reasons behind one's choice, and they're always valid.

    The noise has only been getting worse, and it's extremely redundant.

    These articles are *good*. Please accept that.

  4. Loving my FreeBSD-3.3 RC #3 Box by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4
    There is no doubt that I am fervently in favor of the growing popularity of linux, but I have to say I am an unabashed fan of my ever-so-lovingly tweaked FreeBSD box. Whats to love?

    1. Easy to harden. I have two ports open - X (6000, 6010) and SSH (22). It was very easy to get my box to this stage. Much easier than it was with RH 6.0, which I have also hardened.

    2. Easy to upgrade. I have yet to see any tool surpass /usr/ports for pure ease of use. I cvsup my ports every night, and in the morning I check the logs to see what package have been tweaked and configured and are ready to be loaded up. Then once or twice I week I cvsup the source code for the OS and do a make world. Upgrading FreeBSD is very very easy - cvsup is gorgeous and I've found nothing like it.

    3. Easy to play nice with linux. I can run linux binaries without recompiling. What else is there to say?

    4. One distribution, great docs, great organization. FreeBSD.org maintains everything I need to deal with regarding the OS in a clear and concise manner. The FreeBSD handbook is available online. I get CD subscriptions multiple times a year, at a good price. I find the linux world of distros rather confusing. FreeBSD makes it easier for me to know the "source of truth".

    Bravo to linux folks for making inroads into corporate America, and thanks to FreeBSD for a island of sanity in the OS archipeligo.

  5. Factual issues by gr · · Score: 5
    First off, let me say that it's good to see an article even addressing these issues in the Wall Street Journal, and as one poster said, they did a pretty good job for mainstream media. That said, the author tries to go into details and teach a history that he actually doesn't know, and that some /. readers also may not know, because it's pretty convoluted. These are arguably minor points, but I think they're important.
    The BSD programs and Linux actually share a common lineage, a collective development process and a rambunctious cast of characters.

    The free programs are all variants of the venerable Unix system invented by AT&T Corp.
    This is basically untrue. All four BSDs (including BSDi's BSD/OS) stem from the AT&T Unix sources, Linux was written entirely without access to those sources. It behaves similarly in a lot of ways, but vastly differently in others (arp and routing tables, for instance).

    This isn't to say that either Unix/BSD's or Linux's way is better (I personally prefer the methods that have been around and proven for twenty-odd years, but that's me).

    The author may have been trying to straighten out this mis-statement when he wrote:
    The Linux saga is already the stuff of modern legend. In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old student in Helsinki, began writing an operating system essentially from scratch so he could have something to use on his home computer. The programs FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, by contrast, are the descendants of code written in the late 1970s and early 1980s at UC Berkeley.
    ... but I'm not sure that really clarifies things for the average reader, and has some factual failings of its own (Linus wrote a kernel, not an operating system, and operating system needs basic software, Gnu had it, we all know the drill and the fanatics involved).
    OpenBSD was started in 1995 by Theo de Raadt, a mountain biking 31-year-old Canadian after being kicked out of the NetBSD movement.
    Okay, so maybe Theo didn't leave NetBSD under the friendliest of circumstances, but to claim he was "kicked out" isn't really fair. He had disagreements about what the focus of the program should be, so he broke off to pursue the focus he felt was more important. This doesn't make either focus invalid, just points up the fact that you can't have one set of people focusing on both spreading platform support and securing all OS processes. The above comments imply that there's some kind of lasting enmity between the Open- and NetBSD projects, which simply isn't true.

    All of this said, the point an earlier poster made about how this is a pretty good article, and that the mainstream media is doing a much better job than they once did is quite valid. I'm also gladdened to see this article wasn't just more slobbering over RedHat... I've seen quite enough of that to last me the rest of my days.
    --
    Do you have a /. uid shorter than five digits? No? Then piss off.
  6. If only your article were not so full of FUD... by cmc · · Score: 3

    FUD, you ask? Yes!

    2. Easy to upgrade. I have yet to see any tool surpass /usr/ports for pure ease of use. apt-get install "insert-name-here" is even easier and faster.

    FreeBSD also allows binary package installation.
    $ pkg_add ftp//:url_to_package

    FreeBSDs package management is great but it is NO match to Debian GNU/Linux. Debian is even easier to upgrade.
    1) You don't have to fix /etc by hand

    This is nonsense. Package management has nothing to do with the /etc directory. FreeBSD uses CVSup for that, and there is an excellent port which can update /etc for you automagically called mergemaster.

    2) You don't have to wait for hours for your stuff to compile (apt-get downloads binary packages unless told otherwise)

    FreeBSD also has gradual binary upgrades for both the -STABLE and -CURRENT systems known as "snapshots". See ftp://current.freebsd.org.

    3) You have to remake all your ports one by one after upgrading system. On Debian all packages are a part of distribution. If you upgrade system everything is upgraded.

    What gives you this idea? I've got a whole lot of ports I've preserved across many dozens of FreeBSD 4.0-CURRENT recompiles over several months:

    • GIMP
    • Many KDE apps (though I use GNOME mainly now)
    • nmap
    • The XFree86 stuff
    • Window Maker
    • Eterm
    • pdksh
    • vMac
    • jade
    • XAnim
    etc...
    FreeBSD handbook is great, but then most of the major linux distributions(Debian and RedHat) have such handbooks too (usually online too) + a huge collection of online docs at LDP
  7. As I make world by BadlandZ · · Score: 3
    Hmm. I have am currently running Debian, Red Hat, and FreeBSD. I have ran Slackware, SuSE, Open Linux, and a few others, plus some commercial UNIX systems (DEC, SGI, etc). And, the one conclusion I have come to is that the worst feature I have seen in any OS is clearly something I see from Linux (and to a lesser extent in FreeBSD).

    What's that feature you ask? Well, it's the small part of the user base that constantly has to say "my OS is better than yours."

    Each has it's benifits, and among the ones I like best are Red Hat and FreeBSD. Advocating the benifits of one over another is pointless when it will only start a flame war. There is no match for ports in the Linux world, dselect and dpkg are not as tight or relyable or intuitive, and it's not compileing from source allowing complete optimization based on your /etc/make.conf file, so it's not comparing apples to apples, it's comparing apples to oranges. And, rpm also has a remote package get, btw, rpm -ivh ftp://site.org/path/to.rpm works fine.

    The "tightness" and "tweakability" of FreeBSD is very good, and trying to say that Linux is better is shortsighted. Linux has a huge (yet unorginized, and frequently poorly documented) breath of applications that run native, and FreeBSD is still working to cetch up.

    Can't we just agree to disagree, and admit there is a great deal of good in both OS's. Start drawing on eachothers strengths, and admit that the interoperability of UNIX in it's many varients is still less fragemented that the Microsoft and Mac world would like us to believe? Or must we continue to drive wedges between diffrent UNIX factions, and fragement ourselfs into oblivion like was done in the past?