I know, and my comment was semi-joking, hence the smiley.
My comment was that FreeBSD was dead and dying. It started when the lead programmer and cofounder left to go work for Apple. It continued when 5.0 was pushed back by a year. Now with this news, I think it's impossible to say that FreeBSD is not dying, and personally I consider it dead.
If you think that one person is the thing which lets FreeBSD live or die then I must sadly conclude you have been comparing FreeBSD too much with Linux.
FreeBSD, ever since I joined it about 2-3 years ago, and probably before that, the project didn't fall or rise with the come or leaving of one person.
5.0 was pushed back because of a lot of the developers, including myself, requested this since we didn't believe in releasing a `product' which we found was not what we wanted it to be yet. And we now added KSE to the kernel, which is a major step forward.
Your telco could probably use FreeBSD 1.0. I'm talking about the future.
Funny remark. I foresee a wonderful career for you as psychic instead, since you are able to conjure up the systems we use here.:)
NT is getting there.
Out of there yes. At least in Europe I see less and less usage of Windows systems and the replacing of Windows systems --which ironically first replaced Unix systems-- by Unix systems again.
Stability remains an issue and with the current licensing scheme introduced...
I know nothing about the NT kernel, but I would assume it has a more tightly coupled GUI, for instance, which would pretty much guarantee that unix will always perform better and be more stable.
Yes, NT has its graphical subsystem/driver in the kernel. Performance gain, likely, stability gain, not so likely.
[...]and performance at the kernel level is becoming less and less of an issue with these faster and faster machines.
If I can buy less state of the art hardware, speedwise, by having a kernel which is better designed and optimised and thus making good use of that hardware, I will. I am not going to counter a sloppy non-optimised kernel by buying mega-expensive hardware.
I'm not worried about unix so much as my own personal career. I'm confident that unix will be around for many many many years to come, but how big of a market it will have and how many people will be hired in it.
I think it will remain big. I have had no problems finding new Unix related jobs in the last year (switched jobs twice). Granted, that's Europe.
Where are all these laid off people going to go? Let me know at least that so I can put in my application!
Assuming you are referring to the, now, ex-WRS employees. I know some are busy on their own businesses, already heard some other FreeBSD developers offering them jobs since they know their skillset and the company they work for can use people like that. And others are just looking through the wanted ads. So it basically looks like whatever any person does when they get fired/laid off.
There's very active communication between FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD on issues pertaining to issues which might benefit all three (such as APIs).
I doubt you ever looked very carefully at the SMP work which is underway, plus I honestly doubt you know the significance of careful coding when moving to finegrained locking under SMP. This task is more tedious than you might imagine.
Of course, if I underestimated your skills, feel free to correct me.
First of all, BSD is not dying. In contrary it is growing.
Personally having used HP-UX I found it a shame HP is moving to Linux instead of HP-UX [I thought progress was based on technical merit? Seems hype is winning. =( ].
At this telco I work for our back-end systems will never switch to something like Windows. We have major uptimes on the Unix systems which the Windows machines cannot guarantee.
I still foresee a very bright future since a lot of the people around me start to complain more and more about Windows and where we can push Unix by proclaiming its stability and less idiotic licensing costs, we often win the debate...
We have 5.0 standing for November 2002 [this was changed from November 2001 due to the fact that we weren't quite satisfied with the current state and thought things were missing].
Until we release 5.0 in 2002 we continue to work on 4.x, so we will most likely see 4.5, 4.6, 4.7 and possible 4.8.
Releases will very probably be going through DaemonNews, since it looked like WRS shows no interest of doing so after 4.4.
So possibly all of you subscribers might want to look for a new distributor.
They will not land with gnome, ibm, redhat, or some other branch of BSD. They remain FreeBSD developers, do you really think they will change their aims and goals because they got laid off? They merely had a chance to work on it fulltime compared to the part-time contributions of the majority of us (yes I am a FreeBSD developer too).
They will surely wind up in companies who can use their extensive skills and probably will still be heavily involved in BSD related issues at their next employer.
By European Union laws and agreements, if a company does _not_ provide you with the documentation you need in order to effectively use hardware, you have the fullest right to reverse engineer the hardware in order to make the fullest use of the hardware.
I'm sure someone could even find you book, chapter and verse.
''The Amazon "one clicV patent (in the USA) highlights the stupidity of allowing patents on methods. To recap, Amazon combined web-pages, cookies (which store information about web users) and program code to allow users to buy products by simply clicking on a button on a web page. The technology wasn't new or innovative, it just hadn't been combined in exactly the same way. Now other web sites are prevented from offering a similar interface to users because of Amazons patent. The result is the consumer loses out.''
Nice to see some offices have some sensibility left.
Once again the sheer idiocy of the US patent office is revealed in all its glory.
Sad thing is the overseas offices are bowing to this idiocy as well and granting the patent in the other countries since it should be ok since it passed in the US.
The last couple of years I have been so amazed at the sheer lack of common sense or ability to think logically it is not funny anymore.
I mean, patents on math equations, trademarks on parts/pieces of the english language, patents on vague ideas.
And they wonder with idiocies like this why suicide rates are high. *sigh*
I find this whole debate funny as it is so typical for the USA.
To illustrate, I have a (digital) TV from Thomson [a French TV manufacturer] hooked up to a Sony VCR through means of a SCART cable.
My TV supports showing the TV guide as well, but it grabs that from the CEEFAX/Teletext/Teletekst pages [which you can manually set/configure]. Aside from this it also gets the clock synced with the clock from the Teletext.
When you're looking at the programmes' overview you can select one and opt to record it, the TV and VCR will work out the details through their SCART link. Also, if you change config on your TV wrt channels it will sync this with the VCR.
Who needs a TiVo when you got set-ups like this?
By flooding the world with good GPL'd software, proprietary software can be eradicated, if copyright law is respected / enforced.
Then I seriously hope that the average GPL coder gets a clue about programming anyway.
Basic nits: endian assumptions, failure to cast properly, shadowing declarations, malloc()/free() idiosyncracies, failure to grok basic computer architecture.
Sorry to come off as a snob, but thus far all my ex-colleagues, colleagues and friends [even those using Linux] agreed that everything happening on the GPL and Linux side of things are more and more hacks, whilst BSD introduced pragmatically better source code due to the developer's experience. Needless to say most of them adopted BSD systems to get programming done.
Now, having said that, I do know a bunch of great Linux and GPL coders who I admire a lot for their understanding and clue-level.
Another general nit, thus far I have not seen any open source project which made me go ``Whoah'' as to its revolutionary scale of innovation. We see that open source is trying to duplicate existing applications a manyfold, but no real innovations are happening. I think I'll bow to Apple for being at least a bit innovative in this way.
Also, aside from that, given that we are still living in a world dominated by commercial interest, the chances of GPL reforming the world are less than 0.01 %. If you are serious about everything being non-proprietary, free and open, start by reforming the world first not to depend on economics.
Now that is true, there always is BSD. I have a suspicion it won't do well in this market. Strangely enough, I think it'll be because of it's license. I suspect that people wanting to use it will get better warm fuzzies from the GPL because then they know that if the OS is improved, they get the improvements, regardless of whatever ridiculous maze of 'strategic alliances' is in place today.
Sorry to disappoint you, but your argument is very, very flawed.
You are totally ignoring the fact that a lot of the developers on both sides of the license [BSDL and GPL for this argument] are also people doing coding in their free time and are voluntarily producing amazing code feats which will benefit the community, thus giving the companies who use those codebases new code to look on and improve their product with.[Ow, that's a nice intellectual property debate right there] Also, on both sides there are companies actively submitting back code to the respective projects.
Furthermore, there might be a lot of companies who are using GPL'd code which makes it into their product, which you don't know, and possibly never will, and thus never submit code back to improve the base source tree they initially took their code from. Logically, the same thing happens with the BSDL, but this explicitly allows it!
Please don't trust and spread the myth that the GPL guarantees anything! That is a claim which has not been proven to be 100% watertight.
People who say the GPL is going to die, obviously have no idea about the rationale of someone using the GPL.
And that's the same with the BSDL though. I know of a lot of companies who prefer to use the BSDL'd sources since that allows them to release their products with good quality backing source, same as with tons of GPL'd projects, without the need to worry much about releasing their sources to the public.
This is important for a lot of companies, since it will allow companies to leverage themselves over their competitors.
This is very important in the embedded world.
Personally I only see the GPL to be a possible solution towards a longer term goal. The goal in which the world has no need for money anymore and no need to protect intellectual property.
But that's the idealist side of me.:)
Re:Unstable Implementation
on
Java 2 For BSD
·
· Score: 2
Not to shoot bullets on your parade. But obviously you don't know about FreeBSD 4.0 and higher. The Virtual Memory system has been completely rewritten by Matthew Dillon et al. Please do proper research before you post. Thanks. Enough FUD in the world already.
The relationship between BSDI and the other BSD's hasn't been ill. Basing on all the FUD I have been encountering in the comments posted it seems as if most people whom seek something ill behind the merger are Linux users whom think that BSDI is a Microsoft kind of company. Well it isn't guys, in fact, the people there are actually pretty cool.
That said, BSDI already used large parts of all BSD source trees without the individual projects building a grudge about that towards BSDI. That's why we use the BSD License and that is why we are not concerned; we _explicitely_ allow such things!
Please read the Daemon News article prior to posting here.
I am sure that a lot of the committer base at either camp is mature enough to sort any problems, should they even arise, out. That will probably have been discussed to death by WC and BSDI prior to the merge.
Continuing into the direction we have always headed.
Frankly the roots clearly are in the server market, but FreeBSD is just as good as for the desktop. I think the modest and non-flashy default install makes this possible.
Personally I wouldn't mind FreeBSD staying in the server side of the whole ballgame, but given the `legion' of commiters, of which I am one, we clearly have one side leaning more to servers and one side more to the desktop and this will most definately ensure that the result will be usuable for both.
Actually, FreeBSD is already there for embedded systems, in which case we call it picoBSD and which resides in the source tree as well.
And all in all, to be fair, the larger part of where the OS is going depends on the userbase, and the userbase has been predominant by ISP-like types from the start...
The BSD's, as in the people driving it, aren't interested in being on everyone's desktop.
They just want to be here. We don't really see our place as Linux competitor, but merely as another Open Source OS which strives to be around making sure people have a choice of decent OS's to use for their goals.
Slashdot Mirror
Merely questions.
I know, and my comment was semi-joking, hence the smiley.
My comment was that FreeBSD was dead and dying. It started when the lead programmer and cofounder left to go work for Apple. It continued when 5.0 was pushed back by a year. Now with this news, I think it's impossible to say that FreeBSD is not dying, and personally I consider it dead.
If you think that one person is the thing which lets FreeBSD live or die then I must sadly conclude you have been comparing FreeBSD too much with Linux.
FreeBSD, ever since I joined it about 2-3 years ago, and probably before that, the project didn't fall or rise with the come or leaving of one person.
5.0 was pushed back because of a lot of the developers, including myself, requested this since we didn't believe in releasing a `product' which we found was not what we wanted it to be yet. And we now added KSE to the kernel, which is a major step forward.
Your telco could probably use FreeBSD 1.0. I'm talking about the future.
Funny remark. I foresee a wonderful career for you as psychic instead, since you are able to conjure up the systems we use here. :)
NT is getting there.
Out of there yes. At least in Europe I see less and less usage of Windows systems and the replacing of Windows systems --which ironically first replaced Unix systems-- by Unix systems again.
Stability remains an issue and with the current licensing scheme introduced...
I know nothing about the NT kernel, but I would assume it has a more tightly coupled GUI, for instance, which would pretty much guarantee that unix will always perform better and be more stable.
Yes, NT has its graphical subsystem/driver in the kernel. Performance gain, likely, stability gain, not so likely.
[...]and performance at the kernel level is becoming less and less of an issue with these faster and faster machines.
If I can buy less state of the art hardware, speedwise, by having a kernel which is better designed and optimised and thus making good use of that hardware, I will. I am not going to counter a sloppy non-optimised kernel by buying mega-expensive hardware.
I'm not worried about unix so much as my own personal career. I'm confident that unix will be around for many many many years to come, but how big of a market it will have and how many people will be hired in it.
I think it will remain big. I have had no problems finding new Unix related jobs in the last year (switched jobs twice). Granted, that's Europe.
Where are all these laid off people going to go? Let me know at least that so I can put in my application!
Assuming you are referring to the, now, ex-WRS employees. I know some are busy on their own businesses, already heard some other FreeBSD developers offering them jobs since they know their skillset and the company they work for can use people like that. And others are just looking through the wanted ads. So it basically looks like whatever any person does when they get fired/laid off.
Bzzzt.
Wrong.
There's very active communication between FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD on issues pertaining to issues which might benefit all three (such as APIs).
I doubt you ever looked very carefully at the SMP work which is underway, plus I honestly doubt you know the significance of careful coding when moving to finegrained locking under SMP. This task is more tedious than you might imagine.
Of course, if I underestimated your skills, feel free to correct me.
Get a grip. :)
:)
First of all, BSD is not dying. In contrary it is growing.
Personally having used HP-UX I found it a shame HP is moving to Linux instead of HP-UX [I thought progress was based on technical merit? Seems hype is winning. =( ].
At this telco I work for our back-end systems will never switch to something like Windows. We have major uptimes on the Unix systems which the Windows machines cannot guarantee.
I still foresee a very bright future since a lot of the people around me start to complain more and more about Windows and where we can push Unix by proclaiming its stability and less idiotic licensing costs, we often win the debate...
Don't worry.
Please make sure you check your facts.
FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are operating systems and split off for various reasons and now serve their own niches.
Linux is only a kernel. It becomes an operating system only due to the fact that people created their own distributions.
And if we look at the distributions, there are over 100 distributions (at least).
So ask yourself, which part is more ripe for consolidation then?
Agreed.
I already saw troll postings saying BSD is dying.
*sigh*
When will people realise the importance of volunteer based in these projects?
ObSidenote: I wouldn't label OP's post as funny.
Correct.
We have 5.0 standing for November 2002 [this was changed from November 2001 due to the fact that we weren't quite satisfied with the current state and thought things were missing].
Until we release 5.0 in 2002 we continue to work on 4.x, so we will most likely see 4.5, 4.6, 4.7 and possible 4.8.
Releases will very probably be going through DaemonNews, since it looked like WRS shows no interest of doing so after 4.4.
So possibly all of you subscribers might want to look for a new distributor.
Do remember that there never WAS nor HAS BEEN any official development of FreeBSD.
It is and will remain a volunteer project.
The matter that corporations decide(d) to employ certain developers full-time to work on FreeBSD was only for the corporation's own benefit.
For god's sake people, it is not like the people they laid off now cease to exist.
Websites likes DaemonNews and other initiatives will offer CD-ROM sets and merchandise.
Your question is kind of irrelevant in a way.
They will not land with gnome, ibm, redhat, or some other branch of BSD. They remain FreeBSD developers, do you really think they will change their aims and goals because they got laid off? They merely had a chance to work on it fulltime compared to the part-time contributions of the majority of us (yes I am a FreeBSD developer too).
They will surely wind up in companies who can use their extensive skills and probably will still be heavily involved in BSD related issues at their next employer.
And then again they may not.
Sorry, you are wrong.
By European Union laws and agreements, if a company does _not_ provide you with the documentation you need in order to effectively use hardware, you have the fullest right to reverse engineer the hardware in order to make the fullest use of the hardware.
I'm sure someone could even find you book, chapter and verse.
Simply apply ingress routing on your border routers and see a lot of lame DDoS traffic diminish.
For fun I did a :
us patent office stupidity
search on Google.
Second hit leads to www.patent.gov.uk:
''The Amazon "one clicV patent (in the USA) highlights the stupidity of allowing patents on methods. To recap, Amazon combined web-pages, cookies (which store information about web users) and program code to allow users to buy products by simply clicking on a button on a web page. The technology wasn't new or innovative, it just hadn't been combined in exactly the same way. Now other web sites are prevented from offering a similar interface to users because of Amazons patent. The result is the consumer loses out.''
Nice to see some offices have some sensibility left.
Once again the sheer idiocy of the US patent office is revealed in all its glory.
Sad thing is the overseas offices are bowing to this idiocy as well and granting the patent in the other countries since it should be ok since it passed in the US.
The last couple of years I have been so amazed at the sheer lack of common sense or ability to think logically it is not funny anymore.
I mean, patents on math equations, trademarks on parts/pieces of the english language, patents on vague ideas.
And they wonder with idiocies like this why suicide rates are high. *sigh*
I find this whole debate funny as it is so typical for the USA. To illustrate, I have a (digital) TV from Thomson [a French TV manufacturer] hooked up to a Sony VCR through means of a SCART cable. My TV supports showing the TV guide as well, but it grabs that from the CEEFAX/Teletext/Teletekst pages [which you can manually set/configure]. Aside from this it also gets the clock synced with the clock from the Teletext. When you're looking at the programmes' overview you can select one and opt to record it, the TV and VCR will work out the details through their SCART link. Also, if you change config on your TV wrt channels it will sync this with the VCR. Who needs a TiVo when you got set-ups like this?
By flooding the world with good GPL'd software, proprietary software can be eradicated, if copyright law is respected / enforced.
Then I seriously hope that the average GPL coder gets a clue about programming anyway.
Basic nits: endian assumptions, failure to cast properly, shadowing declarations, malloc()/free() idiosyncracies, failure to grok basic computer architecture.
Sorry to come off as a snob, but thus far all my ex-colleagues, colleagues and friends [even those using Linux] agreed that everything happening on the GPL and Linux side of things are more and more hacks, whilst BSD introduced pragmatically better source code due to the developer's experience. Needless to say most of them adopted BSD systems to get programming done.
Now, having said that, I do know a bunch of great Linux and GPL coders who I admire a lot for their understanding and clue-level.
Another general nit, thus far I have not seen any open source project which made me go ``Whoah'' as to its revolutionary scale of innovation. We see that open source is trying to duplicate existing applications a manyfold, but no real innovations are happening. I think I'll bow to Apple for being at least a bit innovative in this way.
Also, aside from that, given that we are still living in a world dominated by commercial interest, the chances of GPL reforming the world are less than 0.01 %. If you are serious about everything being non-proprietary, free and open, start by reforming the world first not to depend on economics.
Thank you for an excellent post, which hopefully helps other people to look at sides from more than just [their own/one] angle.
Now that is true, there always is BSD. I have a suspicion it won't do well in this market. Strangely enough, I think it'll be because of it's license. I suspect that people wanting to use it will get better warm fuzzies from the GPL because then they know that if the OS is improved, they get the improvements, regardless of whatever ridiculous maze of 'strategic alliances' is in place today.
Sorry to disappoint you, but your argument is very, very flawed.
You are totally ignoring the fact that a lot of the developers on both sides of the license [BSDL and GPL for this argument] are also people doing coding in their free time and are voluntarily producing amazing code feats which will benefit the community, thus giving the companies who use those codebases new code to look on and improve their product with.[Ow, that's a nice intellectual property debate right there]
Also, on both sides there are companies actively submitting back code to the respective projects.
Furthermore, there might be a lot of companies who are using GPL'd code which makes it into their product, which you don't know, and possibly never will, and thus never submit code back to improve the base source tree they initially took their code from.
Logically, the same thing happens with the BSDL, but this explicitly allows it!
Please don't trust and spread the myth that the GPL guarantees anything!
That is a claim which has not been proven to be 100% watertight.
People who say the GPL is going to die, obviously have no idea about the rationale of someone using the GPL.
And that's the same with the BSDL though. I know of a lot of companies who prefer to use the BSDL'd sources since that allows them to release their products with good quality backing source, same as with tons of GPL'd projects, without the need to worry much about releasing their sources to the public.
:)
This is important for a lot of companies, since it will allow companies to leverage themselves over their competitors.
This is very important in the embedded world.
Personally I only see the GPL to be a possible solution towards a longer term goal. The goal in which the world has no need for money anymore and no need to protect intellectual property.
But that's the idealist side of me.
Not to shoot bullets on your parade. But obviously you don't know about FreeBSD 4.0 and higher. The Virtual Memory system has been completely rewritten by Matthew Dillon et al. Please do proper research before you post. Thanks. Enough FUD in the world already.
And why would we be concerned?
The relationship between BSDI and the other BSD's hasn't been ill. Basing on all the FUD I have been encountering in the comments posted it seems as if most people whom seek something ill behind the merger are Linux users whom think that BSDI is a Microsoft kind of company. Well it isn't guys, in fact, the people there are actually pretty cool.
That said, BSDI already used large parts of all BSD source trees without the individual projects building a grudge about that towards BSDI. That's why we use the BSD License and that is why we are not concerned; we _explicitely_ allow such things!
The whole of FreeBSD will remain open.
Please read the Daemon News article prior to posting here.
I am sure that a lot of the committer base at either camp is mature enough to sort any problems, should they even arise, out. That will probably have been discussed to death by WC and BSDI prior to the merge.
Just to clarify something, Microsoft already took BSD Licensed code.
Just strings(1) through, for example, ftp.exe.
Continuing into the direction we have always headed.
Frankly the roots clearly are in the server market, but FreeBSD is just as good as for the desktop. I think the modest and non-flashy default install makes this possible.
Personally I wouldn't mind FreeBSD staying in the server side of the whole ballgame, but given the `legion' of commiters, of which I am one, we clearly have one side leaning more to servers and one side more to the desktop and this will most definately ensure that the result will be usuable for both.
Actually, FreeBSD is already there for embedded systems, in which case we call it picoBSD and which resides in the source tree as well.
And all in all, to be fair, the larger part of where the OS is going depends on the userbase, and the userbase has been predominant by ISP-like types from the start...
The BSD's, as in the people driving it, aren't interested in being on everyone's desktop.
They just want to be here. We don't really see our place as Linux competitor, but merely as another Open Source OS which strives to be around making sure people have a choice of decent OS's to use for their goals.
As has been stated before, it will remain open under the terms the BSDL (BSD License) provides.