Is it just me, or did someone else find it kind of ironic that the first paragraph of a "definitive" survey talks about what wasn't covered?
Re:Why not the FSF/Emacs/GCC/GDB month?
on
RMS Turns 50
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· Score: 1
Very likely there would be no Linux and no *free* BSD either. We would be using SCO and BSDI!
I'm not sure where you get the "no BSD" idea from. Stallman has contributed much to this world, but the Berkeley guys had BSD released as open source since 1977. They created vi, cshell, the first TCP/IP implementation, virtual memory, the Fast File System and other things, all for free, all for anyone to ftp and use. Current FreeBSD core has gcc and gdb, but thats pretty much it for FSF tools. Old FPU-less 386's and 486's may use the GPLed soft-fpu, but thats pretty much it.
Berkeley created a special distribution of BSD that didn't require a UNIX source license. They didn't have to; they already had a source license. They did it so other people could use it openly and freely. Berkeley also fought a lawsuit against USL fighting for your *free* BSD. And won. There's an argument that could be made that if it wasn't for the lawsuit, FreeBSD would be much more popular today. Linus writes in the Tannenbaum exchange that if there was a UNIX work-alike available to him, either the HURD or BSD, he probably wouldn't have bothered to write Linux.
Also, if BSD wasn't free, BSDI wouldn't exist either.
* Slashdot is a Lnux advocacy site. No problem there, but BSD advocates tend to congregate elsewhere. You want to ask questions to people who may know the answers, not Linux guys saying how it works in Linux.
* The trolls. Every BSD pot gets the TrollBots going. Kinda funny when the story is only related to BSD (like OpenSSH) but gets irritating.
* Personality. Though this is flamebait, but there is a fringe element of "Linux is Heaven on earth, all other OSes are blasphemy, BSD goes to Hell" that you tend to find here. Though it is a fringe element, and most BSDers ignore them, it's irritating. Best tool for the job, keep your religion for Sundays or the Sabbath or Ramadan please.
* Popularity. Just happens that there are more Linux users than FreeBSD. A lot of this was due to the Great Dark Lawsuit, essentially Novell suing FreeBSD for licensing issues. The suit was even though FreeBSD code contained very little AT&T code (3 files I think) it was "tainted" with UNIX ideas. This was Novell being kind of jerkish, because it ignored the whole boost that BSD gave to UNIX. Berkely showed how UNIX violated BSD licensing as well and more egregiously in fact. Eventually, BSD (and FreeBSD) was allowed to continue, they removed the 3 offending files, UNIX code now included the BSD license, and life goes on. But during this time, people didn't want to use FreeBSD because of the uncertainty, and they turned to Linux. In fact, Linux says in the famous Tannenbaum exchange/flamewar that he would have used FreeBSD (or the HURD) if it was available at the time, but it wasn't, so he made Linux, and the world is a better place.
Kind of ironic; there are a lot of parallels in the Novell/FreeBSD case vs. the SCO (Caldera)/IBM & Linux case. Possibly people will look at FreeBSD now since they're pretty much free and clear of SCO suing them because of outcome of the Great Dark Lawsuit. I think IBM wil prevail, but if people open their minds a bit and some more folks take a look at FreeBSD the world will be a better place.
You don't need to open a whole new code block for a single statement following an if()
True, but it's good practice, defensive programming to guard against someone (maybe even you) adding a statement after the if() and not putting in the braces. Often times
if (something)
do_something();
turns into if (something)
do_something_else();
do_something();
which is to the compiler... if (something)
do_something_else(); do_something(); Not quite what you intended.
It's just like those guys that always put constants first in their equality comparisons... instead of if (i == 5)... they'll put if (5 == i)... Weird looking, but helps guard against = vs. == errors (which your compiler should flag anyway).
Project Monterey was a plan that never happened It did "happen" in that it had working code, just never released. A lot of the ideas in Monterrey came out in AIX5L I think, but that was part of the license agreement.
One thing they missed is the whole BSD "fork" of UNIX. Back in the old days, AT&T gave pretty much every University a site license. One of these of course was UC Berkeley, where they did some some pretty core work, such as this unimportant thing we call TCP/IP. For a long time folks referred to TCP/IP as "Berkely sockets". Hmm, they also gave us C-shell, so maybe they shouldn't get off unpunished. BSD got folded into the "one True UNIX" in SVR4.
As far as "getting up to enterprise grade" speed comparisons goes, they're at some level irrelevant, at least in the way SCO framed it. UNIX vendors had to blaze trails, find their way, mess up, and find the true path again. Linux followed these trails in the form of POSIX. It's much quicker to code to a spec than have to code and lay out the spec, distribute the spec as it changes to your development team, and see how well it integrates after all at the same time. Having the spec also makes all that super coordination "magic" that SCO was talking about seem a little less fairy tale-ish. Lay out a spec, give parts to different people, have them code, and then at the end it all comes together. Who else has been burned by Linux' version of select()? It's coded to the BSD select() man page, unfortunately BSD select() isn't and neither is any other commercial vendor, and Linux select() is not bug compatible with other select()s. There's your miracle for you, the magic of troff. (at least it's not info pages, god no...)
BSDi also had a commercial UNIX, BSD based of course, on x86. I did some work on it. At the time wasn't enterprise ready, at least the version I worked on (the SMP implementation was pretty basic, the kernel was forced to run on a single processor) but in later years it got better and in fact I thimk FreeBSD SMPng is based off ideas from BSDi. My non-lawyer mind wonders how many statements of "fact" in the complaint have to be shown to be false before the case can be dismissed.
On other IANAL notes, I wonder if IBMs law firm is reading these posts and all the other arguments on the other web sites and saying "yeah, thats a good point.. yeah, write that one down."
Interesting interview. I liked this quote (emphasis mine).
We would very much like to see Red Hat join [United Linux]. In many ways,
our technology is superior to theirs (especially in our ability to maintain a single-source code across all platforms -- desktop to mainframe) and the addition of Red Hat marketers (which is clearly their strong suit) would benefit everyone. That said, it certainly is not necessary for them to join. - Richard Seibt, CEO SuSE
Did some RedHat guy come over and steal his lunch money when he was 7?:)
Don't forget Slackware... the distribution SuSE (and UnitedLinux) was originally based on.
Does anyone have a map that shows the distros and what they're based on? Mandrake based off RedHat, SuSE off Slack, Caldera and Lindows from Debian. Sometimes it seems that there's just one or two guys making distros and everyone else is piggybacking off them, besides the obvious evryone piggybacking off of the kernel and shared userland stuff.
I know it's pathetically unoptimized, because I don't use emacs and therefore don't know what to leave out, but I had to install the latest and greatest Xemacs for a user here. Directory size: 122Mb. My favorite emacs joke:
"Emacs would make a great OS if they'd just write a decent text editor for it".
Now will this get +1 Funny, or -1 Flamebait? Or just plain old -1 F*&%cking annoying.
Also they claim all commercial UNIXes are SYS5, I'm guessing to show that if you want a real UNIX, you need SYS5. BSDI is/was a commercial BSD UNIX vendor, just to show there are a bunch of ways to get UNIX. Possibly the court would also find relevant that SunOS4 (I refuse to call it Solaris 1, no matter what Sun says) was BSD for years and a lot of people only moved off of it, kicking and screaming, because of Y2K issues, not that it wasn't commercial grade UNIX.
5 types of people in North America - Politicians, Laywers, Marketers, Coders, Labourers.
A long time ago I remember someone stating that one measure of a society is the ratio of number of engineers thinkers and artists (those who create new things) and the number of managers, accountants and lawyers (those who don't create but manage, count, and redistribute wealth based on those creations). If so, thats one ratio we'd be on the lower scale of.
As far as North Americans go, I think the lawyeritis is a disease of us U.S. of Americans, I'd leave the Canadians and Guatemalans out of it. For some reason, Americans don't believe in personal responsibility anymore; it's always someone else's fault. SCO kept the old Xenix code cranking for years, not too many new features, it was very expensive and a wealth generating cash cow. When someone came out and did essentially the same job for cheaper, they called foul. I looked at the complaint, and it seems that they're saying "if you match this API, you must have stolen the code". Ummmmm....
I first worked with SCO OpenServer in 96. Even at that time I thought "this has no added value, they're going to get their ass kicked by Linux or FreeBSD". I don't see anything compelling from SCO to make me change my opinion of it's value as an OS.
I wonder if they're going to sue FreeBSD? Silly Linux/FreeBSD flame wars aside, in some ways it has more "enterprise" things than Linux. Yes, it doesn't have the device driver support and some of the bells and whistles, but it has a more mature VM, more mature scheduler. How did FreeBSD get these without help from IBM? Here you have this Linux with all this enterprise support, and here's FreeBSD that can go toe to toe with it in many spaces, and the selection often comes to personal preference. I know SCO can't sue BSD (the outcome of the great lawsuit that stymied FreeBSD development for years) but FreeBSD has no AT&T code, yet does many of the same things. Maybe aliens did it; far be it for us mortal programmers to understand this UNIX thing.
SCO forgot that as much as anything, UNIX is now an API. A guaranteed featureset, with the implementations at least at some level irrelevant. If they have no value add over the standard UNIX API (and in some respects Linux is lacking; I hate the way Linux and FreeBSD 5 do threads) then they will be selling to a shrinking locked in marketplace.
Last random point; how is it they're only guessing Linux got these things from UNIX? Can't they just look at the code and say "oh, thats from us"?
BTW: In contrast one of their statements, BSDI is a commercial UNIX, and it's BSD based, not SysV based. It also runs on Intel.
Before you get your undies all twisty, realize that you asked a fairly general question with no obvious answer. What does "Getting started" mean? Do you need help figuring out which of Free, Open, or Net to get? Then tell people what your needs or wants are and ask. Do you need help getting it downloaded? There are no Distros of {Free,Net,Open}BSD but the One True {Free,Net,Open}BSD, at http://www.{free,net,open}bsd.org/ You can download.isos for Net And FreeBSD. You can't download an.iso from www.openbsd.org, but you can buy the CD there. Go to amazon.com, buy the freebsd book, it comes with a CD. And there is a BSD search on Google as well, http://www.google.com/bsd FreeBSD isn't trying to hide, you can find loads on it fairly easily.
I think the comment was based on the fact that you gave no info on what you wanted when it is damn easy to find at least cursory info. It's a perception whole "I'm not going to bother to think or work so I'll ask slashdot so they can do it for me".
Minor quibble: SVR4 itself is an amalgam of SYS5 and BSD. Sun didn't didn't mix them totally on their own, it's part of SVR4.
But since Sun was trying to transition people to new Solaris 2 (SVR4), they did go above and beyond what the SVR4 spec says, including a porting and analysis kit (search your scripts for BSD commands, substitute SVR4 equivs, I think they checked flags somewhat as well) which was good, but also foisted the horror that is/usr/ucb/cc. Sun also added bits to BSD when SUnOS 4 was around. When folks bitch about how Linux rul3z and Solaris suxx0rs cause they don't give anything back, they need to remember that Sun invented NFS and some other things.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm? a whois on freebsd.org brings up Oregon, which is still in the states last I checked. OpenBSD is in Canada because of stupid crypto laws.
Transmeta also has another low-power processor in the works code named "Elroy"
R'im rorry Rinus....
-- Rastro...
Ok, you better not tell me that Batman has cancer or anything...
Holy inflamed prostate, Batman!!!
I saw BB King recently, a killer concert, but he sat all the way through. He can walk, just can't stand for extended periods of time.
Is it just me, or did someone else find it kind of ironic that the first paragraph of a "definitive" survey talks about what wasn't covered?
Very likely there would be no Linux and no *free* BSD either. We would be using SCO and BSDI!
I'm not sure where you get the "no BSD" idea from. Stallman has contributed much to this world, but the Berkeley guys had BSD released as open source since 1977. They created vi, cshell, the first TCP/IP implementation, virtual memory, the Fast File System and other things, all for free, all for anyone to ftp and use. Current FreeBSD core has gcc and gdb, but thats pretty much it for FSF tools. Old FPU-less 386's and 486's may use the GPLed soft-fpu, but thats pretty much it.
Berkeley created a special distribution of BSD that didn't require a UNIX source license. They didn't have to; they already had a source license. They did it so other people could use it openly and freely. Berkeley also fought a lawsuit against USL fighting for your *free* BSD. And won. There's an argument that could be made that if it wasn't for the lawsuit, FreeBSD would be much more popular today. Linus writes in the Tannenbaum exchange that if there was a UNIX work-alike available to him, either the HURD or BSD, he probably wouldn't have bothered to write Linux.
Also, if BSD wasn't free, BSDI wouldn't exist either.
A few reasons.
* Slashdot is a Lnux advocacy site. No problem there, but BSD advocates tend to congregate elsewhere. You want to ask questions to people who may know the answers, not Linux guys saying how it works in Linux.
* The trolls. Every BSD pot gets the TrollBots going. Kinda funny when the story is only related to BSD (like OpenSSH) but gets irritating.
* Personality. Though this is flamebait, but there is a fringe element of "Linux is Heaven on earth, all other OSes are blasphemy, BSD goes to Hell" that you tend to find here. Though it is a fringe element, and most BSDers ignore them, it's irritating. Best tool for the job, keep your religion for Sundays or the Sabbath or Ramadan please.
* Popularity. Just happens that there are more Linux users than FreeBSD. A lot of this was due to the Great Dark Lawsuit, essentially Novell suing FreeBSD for licensing issues. The suit was even though FreeBSD code contained very little AT&T code (3 files I think) it was "tainted" with UNIX ideas. This was Novell being kind of jerkish, because it ignored the whole boost that BSD gave to UNIX. Berkely showed how UNIX violated BSD licensing as well and more egregiously in fact. Eventually, BSD (and FreeBSD) was allowed to continue, they removed the 3 offending files, UNIX code now included the BSD license, and life goes on. But during this time, people didn't want to use FreeBSD because of the uncertainty, and they turned to Linux. In fact, Linux says in the famous Tannenbaum exchange/flamewar that he would have used FreeBSD (or the HURD) if it was available at the time, but it wasn't, so he made Linux, and the world is a better place.
Kind of ironic; there are a lot of parallels in the Novell/FreeBSD case vs. the SCO (Caldera)/IBM & Linux case. Possibly people will look at FreeBSD now since they're pretty much free and clear of SCO suing them because of outcome of the Great Dark Lawsuit. I think IBM wil prevail, but if people open their minds a bit and some more folks take a look at FreeBSD the world will be a better place.
You don't need to open a whole new code block for a single statement following an if()
True, but it's good practice, defensive programming to guard against someone (maybe even you) adding a statement after the if() and not putting in the braces. Often times
if (something)
do_something();
turns into
if (something)
do_something_else();
do_something();
which is to the compiler...
if (something)
do_something_else();
do_something();
Not quite what you intended.
It's just like those guys that always put constants first in their equality comparisons...
instead of
if (i == 5)...
they'll put
if (5 == i)...
Weird looking, but helps guard against = vs. == errors (which your compiler should flag anyway).
Project Monterey was a plan that never happened
It did "happen" in that it had working code, just never released. A lot of the ideas in Monterrey came out in AIX5L I think, but that was part of the license agreement.
One thing they missed is the whole BSD "fork" of UNIX. Back in the old days, AT&T gave pretty much every University a site license. One of these of course was UC Berkeley, where they did some some pretty core work, such as this unimportant thing we call TCP/IP. For a long time folks referred to TCP/IP as "Berkely sockets". Hmm, they also gave us C-shell, so maybe they shouldn't get off unpunished. BSD got folded into the "one True UNIX" in SVR4.
As far as "getting up to enterprise grade" speed comparisons goes, they're at some level irrelevant, at least in the way SCO framed it. UNIX vendors had to blaze trails, find their way, mess up, and find the true path again. Linux followed these trails in the form of POSIX. It's much quicker to code to a spec than have to code and lay out the spec, distribute the spec as it changes to your development team, and see how well it integrates after all at the same time. Having the spec also makes all that super coordination "magic" that SCO was talking about seem a little less fairy tale-ish. Lay out a spec, give parts to different people, have them code, and then at the end it all comes together. Who else has been burned by Linux' version of select()? It's coded to the BSD select() man page, unfortunately BSD select() isn't and neither is any other commercial vendor, and Linux select() is not bug compatible with other select()s. There's your miracle for you, the magic of troff. (at least it's not info pages, god no...)
BSDi also had a commercial UNIX, BSD based of course, on x86. I did some work on it. At the time wasn't enterprise ready, at least the version I worked on (the SMP implementation was pretty basic, the kernel was forced to run on a single processor) but in later years it got better and in fact I thimk FreeBSD SMPng is based off ideas from BSDi. My non-lawyer mind wonders how many statements of "fact" in the complaint have to be shown to be false before the case can be dismissed.
On other IANAL notes, I wonder if IBMs law firm is reading these posts and all the other arguments on the other web sites and saying "yeah, thats a good point.. yeah, write that one down."
Mmmmmm Unprocessed fish sticks...
- from when Homer went all 3-D and saw donuts/toroids...
4. If Microsoft has money left over, go to step 1.
Right there shows that MS is smarter than most dot-coms. They'll only buy stuff if they have money.
Hmm, shouldn't this be in Basic? Hmm, if I remember my old MS BASIC from my C64...
10 GOSUB 100
20 LET MYMONEY = MYMONEY + PRICE
30 LET MSMONEY = MSMONEY - PRICE
40 PRINT "Waiting for market to kill us"
50 LET MSMONEY = MSMONEY + (PRICE / 10)
60 IF MSMONEY > 0 THEN GOTO 20
70 PRINT "Microsoft is BANKRUPT"
80 END
100 PRINT "CREATING BUSINESS"
110 PRINT "Mmmm, paradigm shift....."
120 PRINT "GENERATING BUZZWORDS"
130 PRINT "BUYING AERON CHAIRS"
140 RETURN
I know this was a joke, but coral pretty much makes up all reefs. And unfortunately, most reefs are endangered, including the Great Barrier Reef. which I think is the one you're talking about.
Or Sean Connery's line in "The Untouchables" -
Don't bring a knife to a gunfight.
Did some RedHat guy come over and steal his lunch money when he was 7?
Don't forget Slackware... the distribution SuSE (and UnitedLinux) was originally based on.
Does anyone have a map that shows the distros and what they're based on? Mandrake based off RedHat, SuSE off Slack, Caldera and Lindows from Debian. Sometimes it seems that there's just one or two guys making distros and everyone else is piggybacking off them, besides the obvious evryone piggybacking off of the kernel and shared userland stuff.
Me without mod points...
I know it's pathetically unoptimized, because I don't use emacs and therefore don't know what to leave out, but I had to install the latest and greatest Xemacs for a user here. Directory size: 122Mb. My favorite emacs joke:
"Emacs would make a great OS if they'd just write a decent text editor for it".
Now will this get +1 Funny, or -1 Flamebait? Or just plain old -1 F*&%cking annoying.
You had the upgrade.. I had 1 Friggin K of RAM. And I LIKED it. The keyboard did suck.
(you could write relocatable code, but its support was limited)
Branching (jumping to a relative address) is limited to an 8-bit signed offset.
Check a map. Guatemala, a neighbor of Mexico, is in North America. You may say "central America" but that's not a continent. It's in North America.
Also they claim all commercial UNIXes are SYS5, I'm guessing to show that if you want a real UNIX, you need SYS5. BSDI is/was a commercial BSD UNIX vendor, just to show there are a bunch of ways to get UNIX. Possibly the court would also find relevant that SunOS4 (I refuse to call it Solaris 1, no matter what Sun says) was BSD for years and a lot of people only moved off of it, kicking and screaming, because of Y2K issues, not that it wasn't commercial grade UNIX.
5 types of people in North America - Politicians, Laywers, Marketers, Coders, Labourers.
A long time ago I remember someone stating that one measure of a society is the ratio of number of engineers thinkers and artists (those who create new things) and the number of managers, accountants and lawyers (those who don't create but manage, count, and redistribute wealth based on those creations). If so, thats one ratio we'd be on the lower scale of.
As far as North Americans go, I think the lawyeritis is a disease of us U.S. of Americans, I'd leave the Canadians and Guatemalans out of it. For some reason, Americans don't believe in personal responsibility anymore; it's always someone else's fault. SCO kept the old Xenix code cranking for years, not too many new features, it was very expensive and a wealth generating cash cow. When someone came out and did essentially the same job for cheaper, they called foul. I looked at the complaint, and it seems that they're saying "if you match this API, you must have stolen the code". Ummmmm....
I first worked with SCO OpenServer in 96. Even at that time I thought "this has no added value, they're going to get their ass kicked by Linux or FreeBSD". I don't see anything compelling from SCO to make me change my opinion of it's value as an OS.
I wonder if they're going to sue FreeBSD? Silly Linux/FreeBSD flame wars aside, in some ways it has more "enterprise" things than Linux. Yes, it doesn't have the device driver support and some of the bells and whistles, but it has a more mature VM, more mature scheduler. How did FreeBSD get these without help from IBM? Here you have this Linux with all this enterprise support, and here's FreeBSD that can go toe to toe with it in many spaces, and the selection often comes to personal preference. I know SCO can't sue BSD (the outcome of the great lawsuit that stymied FreeBSD development for years) but FreeBSD has no AT&T code, yet does many of the same things. Maybe aliens did it; far be it for us mortal programmers to understand this UNIX thing.
SCO forgot that as much as anything, UNIX is now an API. A guaranteed featureset, with the implementations at least at some level irrelevant. If they have no value add over the standard UNIX API (and in some respects Linux is lacking; I hate the way Linux and FreeBSD 5 do threads) then they will be selling to a shrinking locked in marketplace.
Last random point; how is it they're only guessing Linux got these things from UNIX? Can't they just look at the code and say "oh, thats from us"?
BTW: In contrast one of their statements, BSDI is a commercial UNIX, and it's BSD based, not SysV based. It also runs on Intel.
Before you get your undies all twisty, realize that you asked a fairly general question with no obvious answer. What does "Getting started" mean? Do you need help figuring out which of Free, Open, or Net to get? Then tell people what your needs or wants are and ask. Do you need help getting it downloaded? There are no Distros of {Free,Net,Open}BSD but the One True {Free,Net,Open}BSD, at http://www.{free,net,open}bsd.org/ You can download .isos for Net And FreeBSD. You can't download an .iso from www.openbsd.org, but you can buy the CD there. Go to amazon.com, buy the freebsd book, it comes with a CD. And there is a BSD search on Google as well, http://www.google.com/bsd FreeBSD isn't trying to hide, you can find loads on it fairly easily.
I think the comment was based on the fact that you gave no info on what you wanted when it is damn easy to find at least cursory info. It's a perception whole "I'm not going to bother to think or work so I'll ask slashdot so they can do it for me".
Minor quibble: SVR4 itself is an amalgam of SYS5 and BSD. Sun didn't didn't mix them totally on their own, it's part of SVR4.
/usr/ucb/cc. Sun also added bits to BSD when SUnOS 4 was around. When folks bitch about how Linux rul3z and Solaris suxx0rs cause they don't give anything back, they need to remember that Sun invented NFS and some other things.
But since Sun was trying to transition people to new Solaris 2 (SVR4), they did go above and beyond what the SVR4 spec says, including a porting and analysis kit (search your scripts for BSD commands, substitute SVR4 equivs, I think they checked flags somewhat as well) which was good, but also foisted the horror that is