I was already happy that Europe at least applied more thought into the allowing of patents than the American bureau.
Of course, patents are needed for companies to survive. But the patents, like lawsuits, are now reaching parasite-like proportions and it is obvious this method is failing hard. Especially with more and more governments going the open source route! Take Germany or Brasil for example, if my recollection is still accurate.
Also, most of these innovations are in the public good. The thing is, how do you get people to see the bigger beneficial picture over common petty interests such as money.
Same as with the fact the KDE guys allowed the Iranian people to contribute their Farsi changes. You'd almost get the idea of the idea that some people are more equal than others, merely because they can fork over the money to pay for the lawyers in any lawsuits, rightfully or wrongly.
Illustrating example, and most of us must've encountered it, albeit slightly differently, in real life, is the point were the tables are turned on the politicians and high chief of the NSA in Enemy of the State.
The parallels to business life are easily drawn, it is recognisable to almost all people.
People always seem to assume the `it won't happen to me' attitude for some reason. Given the fact how stupid the majority of the people of this world have shown themselves to be, I'd err on the safe side of things and rather assume the fact that it _will_ happen.
Let's assume the human error is not even present, there's nothing which could prevent a simple data corruption from changing your social security number by one digit and not having people notice it for many, many months or years down the road of life. And the results of something like that, well, we can only guess...
In all fairness, I doubt there's anyone on this planet who knows what's best for me aside from myself. In that contrast you can draw parallels to even more fundamental rights such as suicide and euthanasia. Yes, _rights_. It is my life and I get to chose what I want to do with it. It may be offensive to the image of the average Christian, Muslim, and possibly other religions, but who are they to think they can draw rules up for those of us who do not believe in a god or even gods. The audacity of one human being thinking he can govern another one without his or her consent comes close to playing or wanting to play (a) god.
There just isn't any amount of lawmaking you could start which could cater for all of mankind. And even if you would, the number of rules, plus the amount of legal precedents is too much for most normal people with no interest in law to comprehend. Let alone the people who are not blessed with an IQ above average. (Farscape had a wonderful episode about law and laywers: there was this planet full of lawyers and everything was governed by an incredible amount of rules making life very unpleasant to live.)
That is true, but the memory bus can be made wider, and that won't affect the adressing scheme. Take nVidia's nForce, it uses 2 DIMM slots in paralell to double the memory bandwidth (although the processor bus must be fast enough to use the bandwidth).
Also commonly called `memory interleaving' and has been in use for quite some time now (just look at AlphaServer ES40's for a nice example).
You'd rather have 1 talented guy with a big ego that (can) drive(s) other developers away or 10-15 developers a little less talented, but who can actively work together?
give it a rest please. They way you act in all forums definately gives me a sense of how desperate you actually want to have a position where you think you have some `power'.
I met you in person, and you are quite ok, until you start rambling about BSDL/GPL or the things associated with that. Please, drop it, go and do something constructive with your time. If I had the time you put into all this, pardon me saying so, zealous tracking of issues and responding to them, I would have coded winffs, have TenDRA released up to 7.1.4, and wrote a lot of small compiler tools by now.
You missed the subtle idea that perhaps the person posting this story wasn't one of the developers.
So whatever the original poster's idea behind this was, I have no idea about.
Freedom counts, yes, just not at the expense of someone's person. Learn some social skills and think for a change more along the lines of: what if I were in that position, would I like to have the nitty-gritty about my/their behaviour displayed in full? (There are times when you definately _are_ wrong about what you've done, you know.)
When I hacked on UDF support with Scott Long for the FreeBSD Project we had contact with the Apple guys. They will probably use a lot of the code we worked on.
The reason variable names like that get rejected is beause it makes software source code look like it has been written by a teenager just starting his CompSci degree. Sorry, this is the big world, use real programming paradigms: non-useful variable names _will_ get you comments. Think about the people _after_ you who have to maintain that code.
There are NVidia drivers out there thanks to Matthew Dodd.
He was busy on the GL part when NVidia put him on the backburner due to the GF4 release being near. I am sure that work has now resumed and it will only be a matter of time.
I am not sure what you are getting at. Your argumentation (or lack of) is so fundamentally flawed it is hard to correct it.
There are a lot of people who started a project and developed it on Linux because that was what they had installed, the same goes for FreeBSD. The Apache people started on BSD unixes, the PostgreSQL people on BSD as well. MySQL on Linux, etc etc.
And how many of these people do start side projects, but do not do any kernel work related to either FreeBSD or Linux?
Isn't a typical release of a Linux distribution not the same as a FreeBSD, NetBSD, or whatever other OS distribution? A new kernel containing fixes, enhancements, and new features combined with very recent userland utilities.
I also doubt you did proper research with regard to the rest of the items you mentioned:
- the cool software is the same as for the Linux community - the development tools are the standard CVS, binutils, gcc, gdb
I won't even continue to comment on the rest, since you need to do some proper research before spreading FUD (which will than automagically be no FUD, or at least less).
As a question to/.'s native BSD gurus, what's the Linux binary compatibility like? I still wanna keep the ability to share binaries w/ other machines...
I cannot comment on this from the NetBSD or OpenBSD perspective, someone else has to, since I never had any need for it when running these two. On FreeBSD the linux binary compatibility is quite good IMHO. Marcel Moolenaar is quite an active maintainer. We base the libraries on RedHat 6.x and I saw a commit for 7.x in the last few days. I haven't had much trouble using realplayer or other fancy apps. And in case you hit problems, it can often be easily fixed (emulation mailinglist).
Please don't forget that WRS has provided most of the code that has enabled the SMPng project, the main one to justify the 4.x to 5.x release change.
Hmm, that's not correct.
A team of people got code and help from the BSD/OS developers, this code was significantly reworked, added to the FreeBSD sourcetree. Then this team continued development, part of being full-time WC-CDROM employees, and part as WRS employees. For all I know, Wind River never contributed code as a corporation to the FreeBSD Project. Unless you want to call paying those developers `providing most of the code'.
Does the uncertainty of having a retail publisher for FreeBSD have anything to do with the fact that 4.4 was released as a 4-iso set for download? Heck, as long as you guys keep doing that, who needs a publisher? I'll just donate to The FreeBSD Foundation [freebsd.org].
No, it does not.
The FreeBSD Project has been releasing ISOs for a few releases now and at first it was only the first CD-ROM which we released, but people wanted the ISOs, so we gave them.
Organisations such as DaemonNews, Cheapbytes, FreeBSD Services LTD (in the UK) are examples of companies who provide a distribution channel for the CD-ROMs nowadays. And since WRS has not really shown interest in doing releases after 4.4, people might want to find a new company to get a CD-ROM subscription from. IIRC FreeBSD Services was even doing DVDROM releases.
Why just give a blanket, scathing response to someone who's at least interested in learning something , when you could add a tiny bit of info of where they can find the info they're looking for? Honestly, with the amount of documentation out there, a little friendly info on where to start looking would be helpfull.
My experience is that the amount of undertaking and background research new people to the Unix scene do is virtually non-existant.
When I started I asked some silly questions myself, but in the mean time I bought books about Unix, programming and OS/kernel design, made sure I read Quarterman's 25 years of Unix (I _do_ care about the history and facts) and a host of other books all pertaining to a slight part of Unix and associated areas. Only after when I couldn't find anything there or on the web would I bother people.
That's not being overzealous, that's getting clueful (hopefully) and respecting other people's time. And that is something many people nowadays don't do anymore, they expect answers _now_ and often ask the wrong audience (mailinglist for example).
In my opinion, that's being a parasite.
And of course, you always have some bad people reacting to someone asking, but there's also a large number of people friendly pointing things out. The community is as diverse as the people it is made up from.
I really don't see much practical benefit from having a BSD licensed OS vs. a GPLed one.
Embedded developers, for example, can educate you on that one.
Times have been hard before, but you had Jordan Hubbard pretty much full time then.
Jordan was mostly busy with the PR side of things, something which other people took over from him in the course of the years.
You can't discount that, and the fact that Apple has not yet stepped up to take over the development of FreeBSD seems to indicate to me that they are not going to ever do that. I'm sure the offer was made already.
Sorry, Apple never offered that. But we do have some Apple developers in the group and some FreeBSD developers working on MacOS X or working for Apple.
[snip]
That was Jordan Hubbard, on August 30. Do you really think you're going to get everyone working as hard as possible at this point? Or was that all just pep-talk bullshit from JH? Personally, I think it was pep-talk bullshit, but it was also an accurate assessment.
You obviously missed the KSE import by Julian Elischer and Peter Wemm. Futhermore, there has been an increase in people working on the CURRENT sourcecode.
FreeBSD developers chase off anyone who doesn't already have extensive experience.
That's definately not true. I have gained most of my experience during my years as part of the developers.
Furthermore, criticism isn't necessarily meant as discouragement, but don't forget that if you mention ideas to the BSD developers (speaking in general, not just the committers) that most of these people have made a living in programming and Unix before most people even heard of Linux or BSD as alternative to Windows.
There is a difference in age and mindset between the BSD community and the Linux community. I often see the BSD community to be geared around 30'ish whilst the Linux community seems to have people around 20'ish in there. Of course, both have their exceptions on the old and young ages.
Furthermore, what I noticed (and I have touched a lot of different Unix systems in my past, including different Linux distributions) is that the mindset in the BSD community seems less focused on hacking up stuff, but more on adding well-tested code -call it more mature code if you like-.
Again, this has its exceptions on both side.
And do note, I am not saying that either is technologically more advanced than the other, I am merely saying that for my wishes and desires BSD was better in that it was a full operating system with a mature way of development behind it. YMMV.
By the time someone has extensive experience, they're usually working on Linux already.
Quite possible. But everyone is allowed to send patches to the BSD projects, just make sure you take all comments merely as sharing of experience on how to approach things. I know my C skillset improved by getting `lectured' time and time again about things. And not just C, but also the ability to develop things as a team, do maintenance work, technical writing, and the list goes on.
It is quite possible that the bar to entering and hacking on Linux might be lower, but does it, in the end, make it more stable or faster or..? Do not forget, most subsystems, VFS, VM, drivers, are pretty specialist kinds of source code which do verge a lot of knowledge. Not to mention designing APIs. That's the beauty of peer review. Either people confirm my idea is sound and solid or they tell me I should recheck my understanding of things. But it is in the human nature to take most criticism as a scolding.
No, as I said he's only technically correct. Linux has become the term for all GNU/Linux OS's, regardless of the fact that it technically only describes the kernel.
True, I am not disputing that. See further below.
If/when HURD is ever released it will be the HURD OS regardless of who distributes it. A car doesn't cease to be a Ford just because it was bought froma distributor called AAA Car Sales.
I don't think this applies quite the same to operating systems. What you for sake of simplicity of the `argument' are forgetting is that each distribution has its own philosophy and ways of accomplishing things.
There is a multitude of different package mechanisms to install third party applications. Paths and such differ as well, some usr/opt, others prefer the more BSDish/usr/local. And so on and so on.
This is the reason why initiatives as the Linux Standards Base exists. To consolidate all these mechanisms into having at least a common denominator for functionality.
Furthermore, not every distribution uses the _exact_ same Linux kernel. Some use the kernel.org ones, others the ones with Alan Cox' patches applied, others add their own patches (found on the web or home-developed).
Linux is an operating system, the word has passed into the language with that definition due to use.
I agree, the word has come to mean an operating system, but it is fundamentally flawed, for reasons of which I have only skimmed the surface above. And yet, so are many more words in our language nowadays.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite right,
I was already happy that Europe at least applied more thought into the allowing of patents than the American bureau.
Of course, patents are needed for companies to survive. But the patents, like lawsuits, are now reaching parasite-like proportions and it is obvious this method is failing hard. Especially with more and more governments going the open source route! Take Germany or Brasil for example, if my recollection is still accurate.
Also, most of these innovations are in the public good. The thing is, how do you get people to see the bigger beneficial picture over common petty interests such as money.
Same as with the fact the KDE guys allowed the Iranian people to contribute their Farsi changes. You'd almost get the idea of the idea that some people are more equal than others, merely because they can fork over the money to pay for the lawyers in any lawsuits, rightfully or wrongly.
Illustrating example, and most of us must've encountered it, albeit slightly differently, in real life, is the point were the tables are turned on the politicians and high chief of the NSA in Enemy of the State.
The parallels to business life are easily drawn, it is recognisable to almost all people.
People always seem to assume the `it won't happen to me' attitude for some reason. Given the fact how stupid the majority of the people of this world have shown themselves to be, I'd err on the safe side of things and rather assume the fact that it _will_ happen.
Let's assume the human error is not even present, there's nothing which could prevent a simple data corruption from changing your social security number by one digit and not having people notice it for many, many months or years down the road of life. And the results of something like that, well, we can only guess...
In all fairness, I doubt there's anyone on this planet who knows what's best for me aside from myself.
In that contrast you can draw parallels to even more fundamental rights such as suicide and euthanasia. Yes, _rights_. It is my life and I get to chose what I want to do with it. It may be offensive to the image of the average Christian, Muslim, and possibly other religions, but who are they to think they can draw rules up for those of us who do not believe in a god or even gods. The audacity of one human being thinking he can govern another one without his or her consent comes close to playing or wanting to play (a) god.
There just isn't any amount of lawmaking you could start which could cater for all of mankind. And even if you would, the number of rules, plus the amount of legal precedents is too much for most normal people with no interest in law to comprehend. Let alone the people who are not blessed with an IQ above average.
(Farscape had a wonderful episode about law and laywers: there was this planet full of lawyers and everything was governed by an incredible amount of rules making life very unpleasant to live.)
There are still people who think that Enemy of the State is merely a movie...
In fact, Fairlight created the first browser for the Commodore 64:
http://hem.passagen.se/harlekin/
Look at FairligHTML. (1997!)
Also commonly called `memory interleaving' and has been in use for quite some time now (just look at AlphaServer ES40's for a nice example).
You'd rather have 1 talented guy with a big ego that (can) drive(s) other developers away or 10-15 developers a little less talented, but who can actively work together?
Brett,
give it a rest please. They way you act in all forums definately gives me a sense of how desperate you actually want to have a position where you think you have some `power'.
I met you in person, and you are quite ok, until you start rambling about BSDL/GPL or the things associated with that. Please, drop it, go and do something constructive with your time. If I had the time you put into all this, pardon me saying so, zealous tracking of issues and responding to them, I would have coded winffs, have TenDRA released up to 7.1.4, and wrote a lot of small compiler tools by now.
You missed the subtle idea that perhaps the person posting this story wasn't one of the developers.
So whatever the original poster's idea behind this was, I have no idea about.
Freedom counts, yes, just not at the expense of someone's person. Learn some social skills and think for a change more along the lines of: what if I were in that position, would I like to have the nitty-gritty about my/their behaviour displayed in full? (There are times when you definately _are_ wrong about what you've done, you know.)
That will change.
When I hacked on UDF support with Scott Long for the FreeBSD Project we had contact with the Apple guys. They will probably use a lot of the code we worked on.
The reason variable names like that get rejected is beause it makes software source code look like it has been written by a teenager just starting his CompSci degree.
Sorry, this is the big world, use real programming paradigms: non-useful variable names _will_ get you comments.
Think about the people _after_ you who have to maintain that code.
This has nothing to do with idiocy, but more with having social skills or rather the lack thereof.
This is just a small part of a much, much bigger story.
Unless you know the full story I honestly think you have little right to even guess about what started it and what not.
FreeBSD went out of business?
How on earth can an open source project go out of business?
Please, take your trolling elsewhere.
There are NVidia drivers out there thanks to Matthew Dodd.
He was busy on the GL part when NVidia put him on the backburner due to the GF4 release being near.
I am sure that work has now resumed and it will only be a matter of time.
Not to mention there's a lot of synergy between both Apple and us BSD developers.
Robert Watson and his TrustedBSD project has even got commit access on the Darwin tree.
Scott Long and myself have for UDF some contact with some Apple people.
Just because it is not visible to the general public doesn't mean that it is not there.
No rumours.
ICC works on FreeBSD, which funnily is the Linux binary.
Furthermore I am at the moment revamping TenDRA in order to have an extra alternative. Takes time to get it up to par, but it is slowly coming about.
I am not sure what you are getting at. Your argumentation (or lack of) is so fundamentally flawed it is hard to correct it.
There are a lot of people who started a project and developed it on Linux because that was what they had installed, the same goes for FreeBSD.
The Apache people started on BSD unixes, the PostgreSQL people on BSD as well. MySQL on Linux, etc etc.
And how many of these people do start side projects, but do not do any kernel work related to either FreeBSD or Linux?
Isn't a typical release of a Linux distribution not the same as a FreeBSD, NetBSD, or whatever other OS distribution? A new kernel containing fixes, enhancements, and new features combined with very recent userland utilities.
I also doubt you did proper research with regard to the rest of the items you mentioned:
- the cool software is the same as for the Linux community
- the development tools are the standard CVS, binutils, gcc, gdb
I won't even continue to comment on the rest, since you need to do some proper research before spreading FUD (which will than automagically be no FUD, or at least less).
Have a nice day.
As a question to /.'s native BSD gurus, what's the Linux binary compatibility like? I still wanna keep the ability to share binaries w/ other machines...
I cannot comment on this from the NetBSD or OpenBSD perspective, someone else has to, since I never had any need for it when running these two. On FreeBSD the linux binary compatibility is quite good IMHO. Marcel Moolenaar is quite an active maintainer. We base the libraries on RedHat 6.x and I saw a commit for 7.x in the last few days. I haven't had much trouble using realplayer or other fancy apps. And in case you hit problems, it can often be easily fixed (emulation mailinglist).
Please don't forget that WRS has provided most of the code that has enabled the SMPng project, the main one to justify the 4.x to 5.x release change.
Hmm, that's not correct.
A team of people got code and help from the BSD/OS developers, this code was significantly reworked, added to the FreeBSD sourcetree. Then this team continued development, part of being full-time WC-CDROM employees, and part as WRS employees. For all I know, Wind River never contributed code as a corporation to the FreeBSD Project. Unless you want to call paying those developers `providing most of the code'.
Does the uncertainty of having a retail publisher for FreeBSD have anything to do with the fact that 4.4 was released as a 4-iso set for download? Heck, as long as you guys keep doing that, who needs a publisher? I'll just donate to The FreeBSD Foundation [freebsd.org].
No, it does not.
The FreeBSD Project has been releasing ISOs for a few releases now and at first it was only the first CD-ROM which we released, but people wanted the ISOs, so we gave them.
Organisations such as DaemonNews, Cheapbytes, FreeBSD Services LTD (in the UK) are examples of companies who provide a distribution channel for the CD-ROMs nowadays. And since WRS has not really shown interest in doing releases after 4.4, people might want to find a new company to get a CD-ROM subscription from. IIRC FreeBSD Services was even doing DVDROM releases.
Why just give a blanket, scathing response to someone who's at least interested in learning something , when you could add a tiny bit of info of where they can find the info they're looking for? Honestly, with the amount of documentation out there, a little friendly info on where to start looking would be helpfull.
My experience is that the amount of undertaking and background research new people to the Unix scene do is virtually non-existant.
When I started I asked some silly questions myself, but in the mean time I bought books about Unix, programming and OS/kernel design, made sure I read Quarterman's 25 years of Unix (I _do_ care about the history and facts) and a host of other books all pertaining to a slight part of Unix and associated areas. Only after when I couldn't find anything there or on the web would I bother people.
That's not being overzealous, that's getting clueful (hopefully) and respecting other people's time. And that is something many people nowadays don't do anymore, they expect answers _now_ and often ask the wrong audience (mailinglist for example).
In my opinion, that's being a parasite.
And of course, you always have some bad people reacting to someone asking, but there's also a large number of people friendly pointing things out. The community is as diverse as the people it is made up from.
FreeBSD runs on i386, and Alpha.
Btw, just for information: Sparc64, PPC and IA-64 are being worked on and committed to the sourcetree.
I really don't see much practical benefit from having a BSD licensed OS vs. a GPLed one.
Embedded developers, for example, can educate you on that one.
Times have been hard before, but you had Jordan Hubbard pretty much full time then.
Jordan was mostly busy with the PR side of things, something which other people took over from him in the course of the years.
You can't discount that, and the fact that Apple has not yet stepped up to take over the development of FreeBSD seems to indicate to me that they are not going to ever do that. I'm sure the offer was made already.
Sorry, Apple never offered that. But we do have some Apple developers in the group and some FreeBSD developers working on MacOS X or working for Apple.
[snip]
That was Jordan Hubbard, on August 30. Do you really think you're going to get everyone working as hard as possible at this point? Or was that all just pep-talk bullshit from JH? Personally, I think it was pep-talk bullshit, but it was also an accurate assessment.
You obviously missed the KSE import by Julian Elischer and Peter Wemm. Futhermore, there has been an increase in people working on the CURRENT sourcecode.
Who volunteers for FreeBSD anymore?
The numbers are amazing.
FreeBSD developers chase off anyone who doesn't already have extensive experience.
That's definately not true. I have gained most of my experience during my years as part of the developers.
Furthermore, criticism isn't necessarily meant as discouragement, but don't forget that if you mention ideas to the BSD developers (speaking in general, not just the committers) that most of these people have made a living in programming and Unix before most people even heard of Linux or BSD as alternative to Windows.
There is a difference in age and mindset between the BSD community and the Linux community. I often see the BSD community to be geared around 30'ish whilst the Linux community seems to have people around 20'ish in there. Of course, both have their exceptions on the old and young ages.
Furthermore, what I noticed (and I have touched a lot of different Unix systems in my past, including different Linux distributions) is that the mindset in the BSD community seems less focused on hacking up stuff, but more on adding well-tested code -call it more mature code if you like-.
Again, this has its exceptions on both side.
And do note, I am not saying that either is technologically more advanced than the other, I am merely saying that for my wishes and desires BSD was better in that it was a full operating system with a mature way of development behind it. YMMV.
By the time someone has extensive experience, they're usually working on Linux already.
Quite possible. But everyone is allowed to send patches to the BSD projects, just make sure you take all comments merely as sharing of experience on how to approach things. I know my C skillset improved by getting `lectured' time and time again about things. And not just C, but also the ability to develop things as a team, do maintenance work, technical writing, and the list goes on.
It is quite possible that the bar to entering and hacking on Linux might be lower, but does it, in the end, make it more stable or faster or..? Do not forget, most subsystems, VFS, VM, drivers, are pretty specialist kinds of source code which do verge a lot of knowledge. Not to mention designing APIs. That's the beauty of peer review. Either people confirm my idea is sound and solid or they tell me I should recheck my understanding of things. But it is in the human nature to take most criticism as a scolding.
No, as I said he's only technically correct. Linux has become the term for all GNU/Linux OS's, regardless of the fact that it technically only describes the kernel.
True, I am not disputing that. See further below.
If/when HURD is ever released it will be the HURD OS regardless of who distributes it. A car doesn't cease to be a Ford just because it was bought froma distributor called AAA Car Sales.
I don't think this applies quite the same to operating systems. What you for sake of simplicity of the `argument' are forgetting is that each distribution has its own philosophy and ways of accomplishing things.
There is a multitude of different package mechanisms to install third party applications. Paths and such differ as well, some usr /opt, others prefer the more BSDish /usr/local. And so on and so on.
This is the reason why initiatives as the Linux Standards Base exists. To consolidate all these mechanisms into having at least a common denominator for functionality.
Furthermore, not every distribution uses the _exact_ same Linux kernel. Some use the kernel.org ones, others the ones with Alan Cox' patches applied, others add their own patches (found on the web or home-developed).
Linux is an operating system, the word has passed into the language with that definition due to use.
I agree, the word has come to mean an operating system, but it is fundamentally flawed, for reasons of which I have only skimmed the surface above. And yet, so are many more words in our language nowadays.