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Intel using FreeBSD
From Wes Peters, via DaemonNews.
Intel's InBusiness
Storage Station is a network file server in-a-box. Intel, despite their investment in Linux companies, is using FreeBSD as their OS of choice, as they are now stating. Of
particular interest is their Mean Time Between Failure, 77,244 hours, or a
shade under 9 years. That's probably a little on the low side, but quite
respectable nonetheless.
"The Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) is 77,244 hrs."
... this thing has been tested for 9 years. Definitely not!!!
How did they come up with that morsel of stability,.That's about 9 years. So
-----Transmission Complete----- If you want to email me...Don't
Time for a BSD song.
It's cleaner. It's nicer. It's BSD!
It's thoughtful. It's laid out. It's BSD!
INTEL YAHOO INTEL YAHOO INTEL YAHOO CDROM.COM!
Better license. Better coding. It's BSD!
Better behaved. Better security. It's BSD!
INTEL YAHOO INTEL YAHOO INTEL YAHOO CDROM.COM!
It's BSD! It's Open Source! It's Logical!
It's FREE! It's YOURS! Get it today!
I find it hard to believe that they have some 286en sitting around running commodity hard drives, and that they haven't had the cord kicked, or a drive fail, or a fan overheat in nine years.
Don't get me wrong; I use FreeBSD at home, and I love it. I just think this might be a bit exaggerated.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
any computer you have to upgrade the hardware before you have to reboot is cool. how is freebsd's perfomance compared to linux? oh , and, can i run gnome or kde on it?
thanks a bunch
"Are you satisfied with fucking?" - Dave Matthews from "Halloween"
Sorry guys, but this should be strange to no one - despite their investment in Linux, BSD has the widely acknowleged claim as the most secure OS out of the box. Jeez, if I were building server boxes you aren't intended to have to bring down for years, BSD is *the* obvious choice.
I've used both Linux and FreeBSD on all kinds of machines, and I'm still wondering what the compelling reason to use either operating system is. Both are lighning fast, rock solid, easy to upgrade and maintain, and both are free.
MTBF does not mean how long can it go for without crashing - it means that in a population of 77,244
one will fail every hour.
Linux and BSD will both continue to have their place in the time to come; it is NOT, in my opinion, constructive to highlight the use of one OS over the other as an issue.
The only thing that interests me in that story is the fact that they chose a FREE OS over a commercial one.
This should be told as yet another solid victory for Open Source!
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
A year has approximately 9000 hours in it
To get mean uptimes of ~77,000, simply run, for example, 9 computers for a year. One should crash once.
There are a lot more than 9 computers in the world running -BSD, so you could take a sample on the number of computers running -BSD, and the number of times those computers had to reboot in, say a month. In 31 days, there are 744 hours. To get a total uptime of ~77,000 hours, simply run 1000 computers all month.
Given, you'd need more than just this to get an average mean uptime, but you get the idea.
Of course, I could be wrong.
BitPoet
I don't find this very surprising. What I've seen of the various BSD flavours has been very positive for me. They are still lacking kernel drivers that I would like to see, but I would like to use BSD more.
FreeBSD is an exceptionally stable server platform. It generally demands a lot more from the admin than Linux, but in the hands of a competent admin it's solid as a rock. I'm not surprised they're using it. Also worth nothing that the BSD license allows them to take it proprietary, whereas with Linux it would have to stay opensource.
I'd like to see more integration between the FreeBSD and Linux developers. FreeBSD has a purity and focus not found in Linux; whereas Linux has much better documentation and support, and as a result is much easier to use.
It's important to make sure the Unix market doesn't get fragmented. Linux and *BSD developers should co-operate to ensure that they implement common features in a standard way. For example, the high grade NFS stuff (caching, etc.) should be compatible between Linux and *BSD so that you can run a Linux client with a BSD server, or the other way around.
Competition between the different free Unixes is good, so long as it doesn't give MSFT or someone else a wedge to drive between the communities. When two Unixes become incompatible, each loses access to all the developers in the other camp.
Intel, despite their investment in Linux companies, is using FreeBSD as their OS of choice, as they are now stating.
They do not have an "OS of choice". Intel wants is OS agnostic. They don't care which OS you run, as long as it runs on Intel hardware. Intel probably used FreeBSD for this "file server applicance" because of the BSD license, which is favorable to companies that would like to borrow BSD code for closed, commercial products.
their Mean Time Between Failure, 77,244 hours, or a shade under 9 years.
When Intel quotes a MTBF of 9 years, they are talking about the hardware, most likely the hard disks. They are not talking about FreeBSD.
cpeterso
/me picks up dead horse
/me beats hose
Why would INTEL choose FreeBSD when Linux has all of the (deserved or not) hype, momentum, and business interest?
To answer that question, get a room full of lawyers for computer company legal departments together and have them read the GPL.
.. ask them if they'd like their company's product to be involved with the GPL license.
I understand the GPL. You understand the GPL. Maybe 95+% of slashdot readers understand the GPL, but do you think that corporate lawyers for tech companies who make their money from intellectual property protection are eager to get involved with anything that might require disclosure of their intellectual property?
I'm betting that many companies have official policies (enforced or not) against opensource software due in part to fear of the GPL.
so... the decision comes down to linux+gpl_potential_legal_worries or *BSD+100%_FREE_No_strings_attached .
And the legal department chooses which one??
__
Despite how we try to ignore them, facts take their toll.
Why would INTEL choose FreeBSD when Linux has all of the (deserved or not) hype, momentum, and business interest?
To answer that question, get a room full of lawyers for computer company legal departments together and have them read the GPL.
.. ask them if they'd like their company's product to be involved with the GPL license.
I understand the GPL. You understand the GPL. Maybe 95+% of slashdot readers understand the GPL, but do you think that corporate lawyers for tech companies who make their money from intellectual property protection are eager to get involved with anything that might require disclosure of their intellectual property?
I'm betting that many companies have official policies (enforced or not) against opensource software due in part to fear of the GPL.
so... the decision comes down to linux+gpl_potential_legal_worries or *BSD+100%_FREE_No_strings_attached .
And the legal department chooses which one??
__
Despite how we try to ignore them, facts take their toll.
Nice idea, but before we get "integration" across the Freenix world, shouldn't we please get a bit of integration across *Linux first? Right now, there's a whole long ways to go.
In my personal experience i have had more luck using linux as a workstation while using *bsd as a server platform. As far as the MTBF goes I am guessing that this is a little bit of a fudge and a bit misleading. Chances are that they are using the death of hardware as the failure. Very rarely have a i seen an os (non MS) just stop working.
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
FYI. That Dameonnews link doesn't work. Also, i looked on their site, and i couldn't find an article related to the topic.
How is it that *BSD demands more from an admin that *Linux does? I run both, and I really don't see that kind of dramatic distinction.
If that's true then:
A list of things likely to fail before FreeBSD
The strange thing is that I bet any 9 year old computers running FreeBSD have Y2K BIOS issues and will fail in what now, less than 2 weeks?
Good thing most of us won't be around to see it, as the Korean, Indian and Pakistani nukes simultaneously launch at 12:00:00 on Jan 1st and wipe us out, turning the survivors into horrible mutant-zombies.
Completely off-topic but (and maybe this would make a good Ask Slashdot) does anybody have any good suggestions for post-apocalyptic type movies to watch over the next couple of weeks? How about video games? For that one I know only of the "Fallout" series.
Microsoft looking for FreeBSD experts and Intel using FreeBSD. Smells fishy to me! Thinking: Windows 2005 - Based on FreeBSD technology, and teamed up with Intel to help dominate the PC market and stomp out Linux...
To find out what Mean Time Between Failure really means, try this Adaptec Whitepaper for an informative look as to how an MTBF can be calculated.
Joseph Elwell.
Fails once every 9 years, hardware only I suspect.
That I could believe, except I am a cynic today. If Intel starts to make boxes that last 9 or 10 years without fail, 4 or 5 years from now they will go broke due to lack of sales. This makes me suggest a decimal place error, maybe 770 hours or about 1 month....
It's like washing machines, when my folks got married they brought a washing machine, it lasted 20 years, they have had 2 more since then... The company that makes them (over here in New Zealand) is many many times more profitable than it was, yet it's product is arguably a worse product despite being cheaper to run and having fancy automatic features.
Tokyo Joe
MTBF is indeed misleading because one of the
factors that goes into it is "design life".
For example, if you have a hard drive with
a MTBF of 150,000 hrs (== 17yrs) that does
not mean that it will fail in 17 years, or
that 150,000 of them would produce one failiure
every hour.
It means that if you replace each drive before
the end of it's design life (5yrs) you will
have a failiure on average every 150,000 hrs.
If you use a device beyond it's design life it
will almost certainly fail.
Having spent 3 days in NYC answering questions...
.1 micron widths, (18 atoms wide!) you have faster migration of the chip chemistry out of where you want, to where you don't want. Even with old TTL, the projected life is 50 years. The newer chips will have less life. (I don't remember the projected life of the newest .18 micron chips)
"Can BSD run this or that?"
The BSDs have support for GNU/Linux binaries. If the program doesn't require a special version of GNU/Linux, or exists as source, it can be made to run on BSD. FreeBSD has some 2,500 different applications. Goto ftp.freebsd.org and look in the packages/INDEX or ports/INDEX and see if your favorite app is listed. If not, port it! (If its hard to port, as the authors to write portable UNIX code, not code for Linux boxes. A foot to the groin, or sticks to the head may help the developers realize that OpenSource is about more than Linux)
"Does BSD preform better than Linux?"
BSD can run Linux binaries. Various studies done via various methods show BSD having a 20% better preformance under high load. If you arn't using your machine alot, you won't notice a difference. If you really care, benchmark it and pick what works for you. Most people have spare CPU cycles, so speed ratings are rather silly.
"Why should I use BSD over Linux?"
If you are in the business of producing software, or producing embedded 'things' (set-top boxes, routers, cameras, controllers, etc la) the BSD licence is simple and easy to understand. The GPL is written to help foster the goal of source code release. If you have no desire to release your code, a BSD licenced base does not have the GPL source code release issues. As a user, BSD can run BSD *AND* Linux shrink-wrapped binaries, whereas Linux can not run BSD. Therefore BSD has a wider base of possible software that can run on it.
As for a 100 year up-time..
As your tempature rises (every 10 degrees increases the reaction rate 2x times), and we approach
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
If you have been using the same box for 9 years I have got to tell you about some wonderfull advances that have been made in both hardware nad operating systems latly. the first one is some crazy guy with a pengan fetish has written from scratch a UNIX kernal and get this he is GIVING it away. the second thing is that you are no longer limited to 33Mz some newer prosseser are cabeble of running at clock speeds greater than 100Mz.
I've actually found FreeBSD to have better documentation than Linux in the form of the FreeBSD Handbook, though that may be because there is only one FreeBSD and many Linux distributions with different configuration tools. The LDP is still and excellent resource.
http://www.freebsd.org/handbookAt the N(BSD BOF)YC (thats BSD birds of a feather at the bazaar in NYC) GNOME was singled out as an example of code that is written with Linux in mind, and not code portability. GNOME is (alledgedly, *I* don't know personally) riddled with Linux-specific assumptions. Even though the code SHOULD be able to work on any X/Unix box, the authors have chosen to make moving the code off of Linux painful.
Add to this, people who push GNU/Linux say LINUX when they should be saying OpenSource or OpenSource OSes only help fuel the belief there is a rift, as opposed to the offending party being just clueless/un-educated. Cluelessness/lack of education is cureable, OS zelotry is not cureable with modern medical technology. This story on Linuxtoday shows a reporter corrected in a case of using the term Linux when the term OpenSource was a better fit.
It boils down to, do you want a rising tide to float ALL boats, or are you only giving a damn about your linux or BSD digny?
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
There's a classic post-apocalyptic computer RPG called Wasteland. In fact, I believe it was done by the same guys who did Fallout, so you can think of Fallout as being the spiritual successor to Wasteland. It was an awesome game, the first non-fantasy RPG I remember playing on my computer. I don't know where you'd find it these days.
Copy protection consisted of numbered paragraphs in an accompanying manual. So, at certain points in the game, it would say "See paragraph x", and you'd have to read paragraph x to see what has happening. Of course, they had to put fake, unused paragraphs in the book too, or else you could just read it and get valuable game hints. Gosh, that system was a bad idea!
---
-- Will quantum computers run imaginary-time operating systems?
BitPoet said: There are a lot more than 9 computers in the world running -BSD, so you could take a sample on the number of computers running -BSD, and the number of times those computers had to reboot in, say a month.
That would give you the MTBF for BSD, but that's only one part of the product. Storage Station also has a board and one or two hard drives. The MTBF for the complete product is mostly based on MTBF for the moving parts, i.e. the hard drives.
Also worth nothing that the BSD license allows them to take it proprietary, whereas with Linux it would have to stay opensource.
Since this is in fact a proprietary product it is obvious why BSD was selected. It was all about the license.
Personally I don't like the idea of a company taking code I write, and then selling it without me getting a piece of the action.
By the way, does anyone have mirror of the article? Daemon News is slashdotted.
Congratulations, your OS got endorsed by Intel's OEM. They'll go on to make lots of cash without thanking you or giving anything back to FreeBSD. Meanwhile, Intel will go on supporting Linux.
Is this really good news? Or is it an argument in favour of the GPL?
Ya know how FreeBSD pages most idle processes out of real core and in to swap? Does OpenBSD do this also? This really makes a big diffrence on older PCs with small amounts of ram.
I have to return some videotapes...
we should be able to moderate /. articles out of the main page
Take Redhat/Linux, for example (please :-). Most of what Redhat ships is undocumented, and that which exists is severely underpowered compared with BSD.
For example, let's suppose you'd like to learn about the interface to the system's terminal drivers. That's in tty(4).
That's a huge difference. As you can plainly see, the amount of info on just one device in BSD is much better than on Linux. And if you look at the overall device coverage, the same theme carries through.And that's just part of it. Here's a bug list on Redhat docs that I've submitted, along with programs to automatically detect these problems. You should really read those over to start to get a feel for how bad it is.
I'd like to make clear that redhat has done a very great job at fielding these bugs and trying to do something about them. I am completely happy with their customer service. I'm not trying to knock that.
Some of the tools I used for this are:
- cfman - make sure manpages have accurate SEE ALSOs
- no3man - identify which library calls aren't mannable
- noman - identify which commands are installed without manpages
- scatman - find turds in mantrees
So not only is the documentation exceptionally scarce in Linux, it's very, very buggy. You wouldn't believe how nasty the situation truly is. Run those on your own systems and you'll see what I mean. And yes, I checked this on Debian/Linux and SuSE/Linux as well as Redhat/Linux. It was all nasty. I also checked on OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Solaris. You'll see that there's a world of difference here. Find yourself a Redhat system and an OpenBSD system, for example, and start poking around. You'll see.My point of view is that it isn't fair to the user of your system for you to ever include something that isn't documented. When I have been part of releases, either the old Unix releases from years ago or even the new Perl releases today, the rule was simple: if it isn't documented, it isn't shipped. No excuses.
I strongly believe that the Linuces should do the same. Let no program or library be shipped which is undocumented. It's the very least a systems integrator can do. That's just part of what we mean when we say that BSD distributions are more "solid" than Linux distributions. The commercial Unices and the free BSDs take this kind of thing seriously. The Linuces, so far, do not. I have hope that this will change, and Redhat has a truly positive attitude about all this, but right now, you just can't compare them.
Pehaps the issue has been fixed. I have no idea, I don't track GNOME, I only am reporting what was mentioned, and others agreed.
GNOME isn't the only example...there exists software that is licensed for no cost ONLY on Linux. Its now working state doesn't change that it WAS written as a Linux only App, nor does it change the linux only software licences. The point *I* was making is some people work to licence software/make software for Linux only. And that policy helps OpenSource exactly HOW?
(Oh, and GNOME runs on 3.3 BSD...exists as a pre-compiled package GNOME 1.0.0.)
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Why bother? Unlike most (all?) Linux distributions, installing FreeBSD is an exercise in simplicity.
That's it -- you're done. Reboot, and you're up and running!
As a side note, IMO FreeBSD is more open-source-friendly than most current Linux distributions in one very important way: you can download the source (one of the packages) to the entire OS (not just the kernel) and rebuild it.
We tried making a source-only distribution of Linux a while back. What I found out surprised me. Many of the system utilities had source that was hard to find -- the distribution packages often wouldn't build under those same distributions. We never were able to get a complete system that could rebuild itself from source -- it ended up quite flaky. FreeBSD gives you this for free -- a real developers system.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
poopie said: And the legal department chooses which one??
It wasn't the legal department, it was the company that built the product for Intel. Said company has now been bought by Maxtor, so you can probably guess which company's hard drives will be appearing in the next release of this product.
If Intel had designed and built this product themselves, the OS inside would probably be VxWorks. That's what goes into other "appliances" from the same internal group.
I would think that if he said Linux, he meant linux. Redhat is not linux, it is a compilation of linux software and the Linux kernel. AKA a "distribution". Related items: Debian, Slackware, Mandrake, Caldera, Corel, Stampede, etc.
--- Stampede linux for me! I play with fire to break the ice..
No, they would have to bring along ALL the technology to make the technology to keep the chip running....in your example, their own chip-making methods.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
The NFS stuff should be written as implementations of the NFS v2 and v3 protocols, so that you can run an XXX client with a YYY server, or the other way around. If the Linux server can't work with non-Linux clients, or the Linux client can't work with non-Linux servers, or a BSD server can't work with clients not running that BSD, or a BSD client can't work with servers not running that BSD, that's a bug, and should be fixed. Some day, that client or server may find itself talking to Solaris, or HP-UX, or IRIX, or Digital UNIX, or AIX, or....
If there is some interoperatiblity problem with Linux and other systems, or some BSD and other systems, please let the developers know, so that they can fix it. (Is there, in fact, some interoperability problem to which you're alluding? Or, by the "caching, etc." stuff, are you referring to protocols such as NQNFS, which, as the name suggests, is Not Quite NFS, but is, instead, an NFS-derived protocol with additions above and beyond what's in NFS?)
I don't know about any difficulties in porting GNOME, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit if GNOME was Linux specific.
The GNOME builders are pretty much GPL advocates. Note the similarity between the names GNU and GNOME?
I find it interesting that someone who appears to support a software license that allows the closing off of modifications to "OpenSource" software seems to have an issue with others not writing their software in a form that is optimally available to them.
The whole point of the GPL is that all "boats" that ride on the tide created by it will rise evenly, or at least you can choose how much of the tide you wish to take advantage of. With BSD style licenses, some of the boats can suddenly become sea planes. These craft can benefit from the rising tide, if they chose, but can travel apart from the tide. GPL advocates feel that someone who benefits from their tide should contribute back innovations that allow new technological advances. Seems fair to me.
The GPL is about fairness, not freedom in the sense of "free beer". It's more like you can come enjoy the "free beer", but you're required to share any beer you brew.
The GPL recognizes the reality that left on it's own, software tends to become closed and militates agains this trend.
GPL advocates definitely are generally against having the rising tide floating ALL boats. For example, most GPL advocates are not in favor of floating Microsoft's boat.
Sheesh, to reestablish my reputation as a recovering Karma Junkie, I'll probably have to make several offtopic or "first posts" now. *SIGH*
-Jordan Henderson
> The GPL recognizes the reality that left on it's own, software tends to become closed and militates agains this trend.
Right, just look at what happened to BSD, Apache, and X11. Can't get the source for any of those any more. Thank god for that GPL, eh?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
AC wrote:
For the record, I picked up the link from DaemonNews, and from Wes' posting to the FreeBSD mailing lists. He didn't submit the story to Slashdot. His name is in the intro because that's where I got the original pointer.
If Wes had submitted it, the intro would read something like "Wes Peters writes..."
I'd appreciate if you'd provide links back to the mailing list discussion in which Intel engineers contributed.
The story is about their Storage Station, and in particular, despite Intel's investment in Be, Linux, Aix, SCO, and NT (whether direct financial investment, or another kind) they didn't choose any of these when they wanted a reliable solution. They chose FreeBSD.
N
You're talking about 'electromigration' ... basicly it's something like the 'tide of electrons down a wire nudge the atoms a bit in their direction, the narrower the path the higher the current density and a stronger 'nudge'
This has a runnaway failure case where as atoms get nudged away from a spot the wire gets narrower, the current density goes up, more atoms move etc etc
The rate of electromigration has a lot to do with the width of the wires (how many atoms), the shape of them (sharp corners can be a problem) and the current density - which scales down as features go down - but from memory it's PEAK current density that's the issue so you have to be carefull about wires with lots of capacitance on them.
As important as this is there's another problem that effects up-time - metastability - basicly in every computer there are places where signals cross from one clock domain to another and modern flip-flops go a bit bizarre if the signals they are storing change just at the moment that the act of storage is occuring - usually this is avoided by good synchronous design - but where signals cross clock domains this can't be avoided. Instead we design special flops that are less likely to 'go metastable' and put multiple flops one after the other all to reduce the chances of metastabile failures. But that's all you can do - reduce the chance - you can't avoid it - all you can do is calculate the chance of failure for a particular clock crossing signal (say 1 per 100 years) and multiply it by the number of such crossings (say 100 in a system giving in this case a chance of 1/year).
All of this is a long way of pointing out that there's no way Intel has any idea which chips in their systems (at the least the ones that they didn't design) are subject to metastable failures - it's unlikely they are spec'd with data on such failure rates and I doubt anyone bothered to discover all the potentially metastable flops in a whole computer system and add up the chances - a MTBF specd by disk drive motor MTBFs may not include other failures that are transitory.
Finally - a quick note about clock chipping .... what happens when you have a clock-chipped processor running on the hairy edge is that you are forcing flops into operating in a metastable region - just because things don't fail right away doesn't mean they wont next week, or month or ....
"Personally I don't like the idea of a company taking code I write, and then selling it without me getting a piece of the action."
The solution is simple, don't make it free! Otherwise you'll get into the situation I was in last month.
You see, Mrs. McGillicuddy told me I was free to pick apples out of her apple tree. This was very generous, I though prematurely. So I picked a quarter bushel of apples and made a bunch of pies. One of these pies I took to the church bake sale. The court date is next week.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
If someone gives you a book as a gift, and you later sell it to a used-bookstore, why should the original gift giver care?
I think most people would be offended by someone selling their gifts.
Want to know why that is?
3.4-RELEASE just came out today.
There are some _last minute issues_ with a couple of the minor packages on the cd.. hence, it was set so that you couldn't download them. Wait a few days for it to settle while they fix it up.
-bugg
Keep an eye on Dæmon News for more information about this issue, if you care to have your prejudices rearranged.
I'm interested in this for various reasons.
I've seen one on Apache/Perl/Mod_Perl on BSD and Linux, and the performance on each. I'd love to see more.
GNOME wasn't that bad. Not nearly as bad as some of the Sun/Solaris software I've looked at. Quite a few patches around bad or missing #defines and #includes, a few problems with threads. We complicated our lives a bit by trying to get it all back into a BSD rather than a SysV type directory layout.
;)
I spent a lot of time on getting the two CD players to work, since they used Linux style ioctl's, and I hacked around some termcap/terminfo stuff in the PPP utils to get it to compile (no one's ever complained that it doesn't work, but I suspect that's because no one's ever tried it
-Jeremy
Last night I tried to recompile Enlightenment, only to find that someone had come into my home and stolen it off of my hard drive. Lousy bastards!
p.s. Anyone else wonder why Gnome started dumping all of Rasterman's stuff the second he quit Redhat?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Well, since Gnome claims it works on all X11 boxes, it up to Gnome to back it up. After all, GTK/Gnome works on more platforms than Qt/KDE...wait...it doesn't?...aaargh...they lied to me... again!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Right, just look at what happened to BSD, Apache, and X11. Can't get the source for any of those any more. Thank god for that GPL, eh?
I didn't mean to say that once open code somehow becomes closed over time.
But, the best forks tend to be closed off. There's just too much temptation to make something off of your changes. If a for-profit corporation owns the changes, they owe it to their stockholders to try to get something for the value they are creating. The GPL enforces a discipline on Open Source developers to ensure that they not only benefit from Open Source, but that their works benefit those who created the works they used as a starting point.
Closed forks happen and continue to happen with *BSD. If BSD/OS didn't offer considerable value over FreeBSD, it wouldn't sell. Any improvements made to the Open Source versions of *BSD can easily be folded in to BSD/OS, but the real added value of BSDI's offering remains closed.
There's not much call for a closed Apache as there're a number of free alternatives in that space. The commercial market for Web Servers is pretty much dominated by NetScape. I believe there are actually a few closed forks of Apache out there.
As to X11, X/Open tried to start charging for the latest once, but they weren't offering enough added value to make a go of it. There are a number of closed off X-Servers, but XFree86 dominates here. Had the X Consortium not been supporting it for years, there may have been more commercialized X Servers available. But the heavily supported (by corporate donation) X11 made a commercial branch uncompetitve. By the time the X Consortium was out of the way, too little new development was done on the base code to justify someone taking a closed fork commercial.
-Jordan Henderson
AFAIR, it's Berkeley Software Distribution, not Berkley Systems Design. Another acronym, BSDI, stands for Berkeley Software Design, Inc.
That is why we should be happy that Microsoft had made good use from BSD code.
Merry Christmas.
Frankly, the problem with info is that the standalone info reader's interface (based on emacs) is not very pleasant to most people. I never ever use the info reader; when I read an info file, I always do it from emacs.
There are other third-party info readers around which have a friendlier interface. I've never tried them, so I can't comment.
---
they use all different os'es so ?
AFAIK, linux is the only "unix" that can actually mount an smb share. otherwise its smbclient, which is similar to ftp. not nearly as nice as just mounting a share.
DAVE is a commercial product. this may be a concern to some potential users.
the cobalt cube also does appletalk and nfs. of course, so can freebsd but for some reason intel chose not to enable either.
in the case of appletalk i dont blame them. it has to be the most inefficent file sharing ive ever seen. (stupid packets the just get sent along for no reason (keepalive?) bogging down the rest of that subnet)
anyway, i dont know the price/performance etc of these devices let alone how they compare, but for a small department, the cube seems like a much better buy.
i dont work for cobalt or even use thier product, just making an observation. i did just set up a freebsd file server / gateway / firewall (and then converted it to openbsd because freebsd is still using the broken rsaref and i need to ssh in.) so i found the article interesting.
You know, it's one thing to be a linux enthusiast, and something entirely different to be a zealot. Gee, so Intel chose to use FBSD instead of Linux for something. They must be smoking crack because linux is always better than anything else! Get real. I use linux on my PC because it has the hardware support for all of the crap I have. FreeBSD has proven itself as a viable choice for a server os... (Yahoo, CDROM.com anyone?) What pisses me off more than anything are those linux users that are completely blind in their devotion to the OS. Linux is about having software that doesn't suck- I believe that's how linus himself said it. FreeBSD certainly falls under that model if you ask me.
> But, the best forks tend to be closed off.
Am I the only one that doesn't see inherent evil in this? Let's see, if I work 80-hour weeks dedicating myself to a project, eat, sleep, and breathe the project so it can be the best... You're damn straight I'm going to maximize the return from it. Your sense of what's The Right Thing To Do with the software simply isn't a factor if you didn't create it. Your future contributions to the software simply don't substitute as an adequate exchange for my efforts -- at some point I want to cash in and enjoy some other part of life unrelated to the software. I work hard on something, I expect payment. I don't work for love alone.
That said, I would have to recognize that this fork was a value-add and not a wholly original work, and give credit where it's due -- the BSD license still requires that, though no longer in every bit of advertising. But the same applies even more to wholly original works.
The GPL is a perfectly valid choice of the creator to require that value-adds are available under the same free terms. The BSD license is a perfectly valid choice of the creator to enable those creating value adds to dictate the terms of what is an acceptable exchange for their additions. If I care about the program more than the future exchange value for its contributors, I'll choose GPL.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
> I'm sorry. You have tried to use facts to refute this baseless GPL claim. Please write a BASIC loop that says "I will worship Richard Stallman" and use a GOTO in the code as pennence, and sin no more!
:)
Shouldn't that be an infinitely recursive LISP function?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I never said anything about evil, never.
What I did say was that it was odd that someone who favors a license that allows forks to become closed off is complaining that developers who clearly had a GPL bent (the GNOME developers) were not going out of their way to support a non-GPL'd operating system.
I then went on to point out the differences between GPL and other licenses and why people of a GPL bent may not be interested in "floating all boats". My argument is not with mr, it's with the guy who said that Linux and *BSD should make sure to have better integration.
Now, maybe I'm picking a fight here. The way this thread has gone is someone suggested that we "should make sure that we *BSD and Linux compatibility" and mr said "hey, I'm willing, it's these Linux guys". I pointed out that there are people who develop under the GPL with a purpose, and that purpose does not include floating other boats.
I do personally believe that the GPL will, as intended, eventually develop such a large code base that it will be more economical in most cases to use (and extend) GPL'd code than it will be to use other licenses.
Software reuse has always been something of a chimera. The GPL breaks down one of the great barriers to software reuse.
So, I guess you can count me as someone who thinks the GPL does very positive things, in general. That's not to say that I think closing software is "inherently evil". I write closed software when under the employ of various entities and I don't find it "evil".
-Jordan Henderson
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Or a scatter gram of first failures vs time, color coded with the kind of failure (disk, memory, mobo stuff, etc.) And for those systems capable of reporting soft failures, those would be interesting too.
Also a scatter gram of soft failures vs time backwards from same-item hard failure.
I wish Consumer Reports would do their stuff with cumulative graphs and scattergrams. They have enough data to show some interesting things.
I wonder how the MPG ratings would plot vs time after tuneup.
BTW, anyone know of a system with ECC memory that detects and reports soft error statistics? How do I know my ECC memory hasn't just been covering up a stuck single-bit error since the beginning?