This comment was about as dumb as they come. The RIAA is an association of media companies. The cable providers are media companies. You don't really think they're going to let their own lap-dog sue them, do you?
I thought the cable companies totally funded the... system.
As with most things in the USA, some did and some didn't. Some communities laid down cable themselves, some granted rights-of-way in existing underground conduits or on existing poles. Some cable companies strung the cable themselves, over public rights-of-way.
In some cases the early cable operators even strung the cable on poles that belonged to the local telco, without asking permission, and then were granted the ability to keep them by imminent domain laws, after the Bell System was broken up. Isn't that a wonderful sick twist on the whole affair?
There is a lot more at stake than just the wire. The phone companies and in many cases the cable companies were given easements by local governments to run wire under streets, were often given land to place exchange offices on, etc., because they provide a "public good." These days, such rights-of-way can be sold for money, but the telcos and cable companies get a free ride off your tax dollars because they are supposedly providing a public service.
The irony in this is Qwest, generally one of the lousier Baby Bells, has a great DSL service offering. They'll partner with just about any ISPs that will pony up the bucks to drop in a local T-1 or greater connection to the QWest network, and offer dozens to hundreds of ISPs at reasonable rates (starting at roughly $22/month for 256K symmetrical, exclusive of ISP fees).
The cable companies have long complained what a burden it will be to provision cable modems with multiple ISPs, but it's just not true. All they have to be able to do is associate a subscriber, via the MAC address in their cable modem, with a DOCSIS config file that tells them which ISP to communicate with.
The telcos do have a bit of a head start, in that they have a logical and well-defined way to get the data off their network and onto the ISP: they require the ISP to buy telco services, in the form of T-1 or greater lines, to shovel the data across. I'm pretty certain the cable companies will be able to solve this problem in a cable company kind of way, too, if they just put their minds (well, engineers) to it. So let's have it, CableLabs, give us a cable standard for an ISP interconnect over cable.
This decision is more akin to the federal government requiring airlines to fly you to your destination regardless of which rental car company and hotel you will be using, rather than allowing them to refuse to fly you unless you use their rental cars, their hotels, etc. You wanna carry bits around on wire, fine. You wanna provide internet end-point services, that's fine too. Just don't tie the two businesses together.
By requiring a duplication of effort, it assures the public that there will be differing viewpoints presented to them
I don't believe this to be true. We did have significantly more diverse ownership of radio and TV stations through most of my life and yet the message from most of those stations was boringly the same.
I am quite politically active, and have even run for state office before, but I have a hard time caring about this particular bit of corporate shenanigans at the national level because it has barely hurt the level of freedom in America, there are much more important issues before us every day. It has probably done the most damage to diversity in commercial music, but the RIAA has already been on a jihad to destroy the music business, I doubt the FCC will help or hurt their effort much.
Think how much better off we'd be if the FCC banned television altogether, driving the entire TV business underground. We'd probably get TV with meaning then.
Battery life. Check out the power consumption specs on the Alchemy processors, they're way down there, even compared to ARM cpus. I have a Zaurus SL-5500 I used for daily appointment keeping, address book, game playing, and as an MP3 player in my car and at work, and the 8-hour battery life isn't enough. Lower power is better.
I don't know if this will be a useful device on it's own; AMD creates these things as reference/demo designs to get people to jump on the bandwagon and make commercial products, but I really like my Zaurus. Some competition in this arena, to drive functionality up and cost down, would help make a better Personal Geek Assistant (PGA).
If you like the current state, you're going to love it when developers embrace the "multi fork" file concept. The fly in the ointment you describe above are all the other files that go along with the application -- configuration, libraries, etc. Multi-fork won't help with the libraries (I don't think) but it will allow a programmer who is writing for OS X to attach configuration files and such as forks in the executable itself, rather than separate files.
I have no association with Apple other than sideline cheerleader, but this multi-fork filesystem concept really intrigues me. Good idea if used properly...
Gee, I would've loved to have seen this include the BSD package format, and perhaps the Mac OS X one too. Sigh. For what it's worth, they score fairly well on the feature comparison chart, similar to RPMs.
All of these formats could be done better. The OpenPackages project had a design project underway to consider the features of an ideal, multi- platform package format early last year but it seems to have died from lack of input. It'd be great to see it get a breath of new life. If nothing else, this article could serve as a starting point for what we do and don't like about current formats.
I think you'll be hard-pressed to find a sport where the 'new, improved stuff!' arms race is more prevalent than sail racing. Some of the advances in material sciences in the Americas Cup actually trickle down to the aerospace industry.
Sailing supply stores (called chandleries) offer line (rope to you landlubbers) 1 inch (25 mm) in diameter with a breaking strength of 100,000 lbs (45000 kg).
Before the last Cup, I read an interview with the manager of Paul Cayard's team, who talked about shipping his two hulls from San Fran to Auckland on a steamer with the keels attached. They were worried about shipping the hulls without the keels because these 70 foot long hulls weigh only 3 tons without the keels. Most recreational 35 foot boats weigh that much; the hull on a competitive 70 footer (like the Santa Cruz 70) would normally weigh at least double that. Those 140-foot masts have lead to advances in carbon fiber technology not imaginable 10 years ago.
Even the recreational racer these days is in an arms race. Unless your racing class or club prohibits it, materials and manufacturing technology in sails produces a new breed of sails every couple of years. Changes in underbody design, the continual adoption of newer and better modelling software, etc., make each generation of boat lighter, faster, stronger than the previous.
Now if they'd apply some of that design and materials genius to a comfortable, lightweight marine head (toilet) that didn't clog, I could spend my afternoon sailing instead of knee-deep in $#!%...
Uh, I forgot to mention that in most places in the USA if you go to one of the commercial mailbox rental places, those are not Post Office Boxes (by definition) and they are zoned for commercial use. In the eyes of the law, it's the same as renting a really really small office suite. For most "home" businesses the local mailboxes-r-us might be the ideal location. I don't know if the same holds true in Canada or elsewhere outside the USA.
Laws vary from location to location, but in the Salt Lake City suburb I used to live in, this was not at all difficult. The hardest part was determining which order to do the paperwork in. Here's the capsule review of what we did:
Partner Jody and I wanted to create a consulting business, and decided for various reasons a Limited Liability Company was the right way to go. We visited the state small business office and picked up a very helpful booklet on how to start a small business in Utah. This little book had information on all the various forms you need, who to talk to at City Hall, and how to get a business license if you're not in an incoporated city. Very helpful.
Note: don't think about scamming the business license if you're going to do enough dollar volume to file taxes on. The state tax people will report your income to the city, who will make sure you have a business license. The business license doesn't cost much and is very little additional hassle.
We filed the LLC paperwork with the state first. (An LLC doesn't have to be a business so that paperwork had no prerequisites.) Everything went smoothly and a few days later we got a nice form letter from the State office of something or other notifying us our business name was now registered. The next step was to apply for the business license.
At this point we decided we should get a business bank account and run the checks for all these applications through that account. We tripped down to the local bank that was just up the street from the town hall to open an account, only to be informed we couldn't open an account without a business license. See what I mean about not skipping on the paperwork?
So Jody wrote the check for the business license and we finished our application. In South Jordan home business licenses have to guarantee not to generate business-related traffic; you're not allowed to meet or entertain customers at your home, for instance. Not a problem for us, we were going to sell information and services over the web and do our work on-line or at customer facilities. The hook is, your neigbhors, anyone within 500 feet of your home, get the right to comment at the next town meeting before your license is granted. So the city gave us a list of addresses, we had to write a note to them inviting them to comment at the town meeting and pay the postage. We printed the invites on post cards, got them metered at the Post Office, and brought them back to town hall a few days later. The town clerk looked at the stack, guessed it was about right, and chucked them into their out basket.
The town meeting was a couple of weeks later. Jody and I showed up, nobody else did. We said on our post card that we did our business online and planned to have very few deliveries and no customer traffic, but I doubt most people even bothered to read it. Our business license was approved that night, and the office mailed it to us the next day.
With business license in hand, we revisted the bank and our account was opened in a few minutes. It was shockingly painless. They were happy to add a second signature line on the standard checks for us. We were shocked to find out the same checks that cost $5/box for a residential account are $15/box for a business account, but the account itself was free and we only needed one box of checks anyhow. Be prepared to get charged more for everything from checks to phone lines if you tell them it's for business purposes. When dealing with phone companies, sometimes saying it's for a "home office" will get you the same features at residential rates. Caveat Emptor!
That was it. For the next 4 years we renewed the business license each year, for $35, and filed an annual report to the same State office of something or other with the $15 filing fee, and had no other interaction with the local authorities at all.
We did file for and receive an Employer Identification Number (EIN) from the Infernal Revenue Service (rat bastards), becaus
...switch to DirecTV. For $40 per month, I get 140 channels, including my local channels. To get those same channels with Time Warner would likely be $55.
Sorry, doesn't add up. I get (roughly) the same 140 channels, including all 9 local channels (gotta love SoCal), plus internet access at 2.5 mbps (yeah, almost double T-1) for $77. And I can't see the 110 W. satellite slot from my apartment, so I couldn't bring over my much-missed DiSH, which has better geek programming than DirecTV.
Daemon News banners ads are filled in randomly. I loaded the page in question then hit the 'reload' button five times and got the following ads on the page:
bottom banner "Get BSD Stuff" box
LinuxWorld NYC NetBSD 1.5.3 NetBSD 1.6 OpenBSD DOSSIER Iron Systems Iron Systems FreeBSD book LinuxWorld Expo FreeBSD 4.7 FreeBSD 4.6.2 update NetBSD 1.6
As another reply pointed out, Daemon News supports all BSD derived operating systems, commercial or free. You might even come up with a Darwin or Mac OS X ad in the mix.
Uh, duh, the announcement didn't say it was almost ready, it said it was done. The available shortly part means it was being copied to the ftp mirrors as the post went out. You're really dense about online software, aren't you?
Squeezer, you really don't understand the dynamics of the embedded market. Every cent on the Bill of Materials (BoM) is 3 or 4 cents in the customers hand.
You're also not realizing the correct scale. When you roll out 5 servers or 20 desktops, management doesn't freak out if you say you need to spend an additional $20 each for memory, blowing a few hundred dollars. When you propose adding $2 to the bottom line on a half-million units, you get laughed out of your product planning meeting.
For those of you who actually know a little bit about the embedded market, go surf the RTEMS web pages for info about another fine embedded OS. This is is actually covered by the GPL, with a sensible amendment that you CAN do binary-only distributions of your product that includes RTEMS. The folks there are quite nice and very knowlegable, too.
Over a thousand employees? Think IBM or Philips or Sony here, where they have tens of thousands of products that contain software. It is questionable whether they'd want all of their software on a central server, but I have worked for divisions that produce tens or even hundreds of software products. A central repository for such a division would be of use.
Please don't construe any of this to mean that I find SourceForge itself to be useful. I completely fail to see why projects would rush to a site like SourceForge, other than for the advertising. A central site for release information like FRESHports, coupled with per-project home pages, seems much simpler to me.
Oddly enough, while being the most "free" version of Linux, Debian is also closest to the BSD projects in term of development model. Since the Anonymous Coward crowd immediately cast "WRS lays off FreeBSD developers" as "FreeBSD is dying," this obviously means Debian is dying, too.
Or maybe neither really needs an advertising budget anymore? Nah, that couldn't be it.
It was interesting to read that Matt Dillon is supporting Rik van Riel's work on the VM in Linux.
Matt is no stranger to Linux, having helped with the TCP implemenation in the Linux IPv4 network protocol stack. For confirmation, see linux/net/ipv4/tcp*.c on your favorite Linux machine.
A lot of companies are embedding BSD these days. NAS and SAN companies are popping up all over the place, using FreeBSD and some NetBSD; new network equipment from small start-ups to major players based on OpenBSD and NetBSD (and FreeBSD in the case of Juniper and Coyote).
Linux seems to be gobbling up the low end of the market while BSD chews its way across the high end. The meeting ground in the middle is an interesting place to be, and why WRS wanted to acquire BSD/OS. They were bombarded by their customers with requests for something like Linux, with WRS tools (and support, I guess, though I've never found a WRS support contract to be worth much).
WRS chose BSD/OS because they are very familiar with the GPL -- remember they've been a major commercial sponsor of GCC for many years -- and do not believe the GPL is suitable for commercial embedded "trade secret" code, for themselves or their customers.
I never believed WRS would hold onto the FreeBSD assets for long. The original integration of Walnut Creek into BSDi never really worked out, and WRS was never likely to hold onto a cost center that did not produce profits. Internal and external pressure to finish and release Tornado for FreeBSD, based on the two-year-old but never released Tornado for Linux, was ignored by company management, proving the lack of any real support for FreeBSD in WRS management.
For the Anonymous Cowards out there, I fail to see how a company that never helped FreeBSD dropping their non-support of it will substantially change the FreeBSD project. FreeBSD did fine without a corporate sponsor originally, and the CD-ROM business is no longer important to the survival of FreeBSD. The current strategy of having the project produce ISO images and allowing anyone who wishes to burn those images onto CDs and sell them meets the needs of the customers, the project, and the vendors, no formal relationship is needed.
The only real remaining issue is to get the FreeBSD trademark transistioned to someone who will keep and protect it.
I suspect IP laws will have to undergo a rather complicated change dealing with different uses of patents on non-physical objects and processes in order to preserve the ability of individuals to tinker with their computers and create free software availabe to all who can use it.
The exact point of patent law is to prevent from distributing any such invention, for profit or for free.
The stated intent of patent law is to encourage people to spend the time and money to develop expensive processes that benefit mankind, but I'm not sure those incentives are necessary in the software world.
Please route all accusations of communist leanings to/dev/null.
Continuously re-examining our laws and how they apply to our changing society is a sign of a thriving, participatory government "of the people".
Darwin is based substantially on FreeBSD. If you want the exact parentage, it is based on the Mach microkernel with a BSD-ish kernel running atop that, borrowing from the NetBSD PowerPC code. Most of the "userland" utilities came from FreeBSD, starting at about the 3.2 release. All of the above have been developed and customized by Apple for their needs.
How much of Darwin is based on parts of FreeBSD that are not part of BSD?
It's nice to for Jonathan to say he will continue to assist with the project, but what happens when his time becomes consumed at Apple, and he *has no* time for the FreeBSD project, how will FreeBSD stand up.
That's Jordan, not Jonathan, and the project will survive just fine. Jordan is one of approximately 250 committers on the FreeBSD project, programmers who are allowed to directly check in changes to the source code. He is also one of the 9 members of the Core Team, the group assigned to be roughly the supreme court of the FreeBSD project. Both bodies are large enough to run adequately with one member down, even one as active as Jordan.
If Jordan finds himself too busy to fully contribute to the Core Team, I would expect him to say so and step aside; he is certainly one of the most honest men I've ever met. In the first election for the FreeBSD Core Team held last fall, Jordan was one of the few members of the original Core Team members maintained by the voters, so his popularity among the FreeBSD project is not in doubt.
Rest assured that the FreeBSD project has not allowed itself to suffer from the "what happens if Linus gets hit by a bus" problem, unlike our friends in the Linux community. Our transition of power is assured, unless all of the committers scattered around the globe and all existing copies of the CVS archives -- several million by now -- were to be destroyed simultaneously.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and we're going to do at least 27 more just to irritate you.
We're much more likely to be appalled at the quality of Anonymous Cowards^W^WLinux zealots than annoyed at the quantity of them.
This comment was about as dumb as they come. The RIAA is an association of media companies. The cable providers are media companies. You don't really think they're going to let their own lap-dog sue them, do you?
As with most things in the USA, some did and some didn't. Some communities laid down cable themselves, some granted rights-of-way in existing underground conduits or on existing poles. Some cable companies strung the cable themselves, over public rights-of-way.
In some cases the early cable operators even strung the cable on poles that belonged to the local telco, without asking permission, and then were granted the ability to keep them by imminent domain laws, after the Bell System was broken up. Isn't that a wonderful sick twist on the whole affair?
The irony in this is Qwest, generally one of the lousier Baby Bells, has a great DSL service offering. They'll partner with just about any ISPs that will pony up the bucks to drop in a local T-1 or greater connection to the QWest network, and offer dozens to hundreds of ISPs at reasonable rates (starting at roughly $22/month for 256K symmetrical, exclusive of ISP fees).
The cable companies have long complained what a burden it will be to provision cable modems with multiple ISPs, but it's just not true. All they have to be able to do is associate a subscriber, via the MAC address in their cable modem, with a DOCSIS config file that tells them which ISP to communicate with.
The telcos do have a bit of a head start, in that they have a logical and well-defined way to get the data off their network and onto the ISP: they require the ISP to buy telco services, in the form of T-1 or greater lines, to shovel the data across. I'm pretty certain the cable companies will be able to solve this problem in a cable company kind of way, too, if they just put their minds (well, engineers) to it. So let's have it, CableLabs, give us a cable standard for an ISP interconnect over cable.
This decision is more akin to the federal government requiring airlines to fly you to your destination regardless of which rental car company and hotel you will be using, rather than allowing them to refuse to fly you unless you use their rental cars, their hotels, etc. You wanna carry bits around on wire, fine. You wanna provide internet end-point services, that's fine too. Just don't tie the two businesses together.
I don't believe this to be true. We did have significantly more diverse ownership of radio and TV stations through most of my life and yet the message from most of those stations was boringly the same.
I am quite politically active, and have even run for state office before, but I have a hard time caring about this particular bit of corporate shenanigans at the national level because it has barely hurt the level of freedom in America, there are much more important issues before us every day. It has probably done the most damage to diversity in commercial music, but the RIAA has already been on a jihad to destroy the music business, I doubt the FCC will help or hurt their effort much.
Think how much better off we'd be if the FCC banned television altogether, driving the entire TV business underground. We'd probably get TV with meaning then.
I don't know if this will be a useful device on it's own; AMD creates these things as reference/demo designs to get people to jump on the bandwagon and make commercial products, but I really like my Zaurus. Some competition in this arena, to drive functionality up and cost down, would help make a better Personal Geek Assistant (PGA).
I have no association with Apple other than sideline cheerleader, but this multi-fork filesystem concept really intrigues me. Good idea if used properly...
All of these formats could be done better. The OpenPackages project had a design project underway to consider the features of an ideal, multi- platform package format early last year but it seems to have died from lack of input. It'd be great to see it get a breath of new life. If nothing else, this article could serve as a starting point for what we do and don't like about current formats.
Sailing supply stores (called chandleries) offer line (rope to you landlubbers) 1 inch (25 mm) in diameter with a breaking strength of 100,000 lbs (45000 kg).
Before the last Cup, I read an interview with the manager of Paul Cayard's team, who talked about shipping his two hulls from San Fran to Auckland on a steamer with the keels attached. They were worried about shipping the hulls without the keels because these 70 foot long hulls weigh only 3 tons without the keels. Most recreational 35 foot boats weigh that much; the hull on a competitive 70 footer (like the Santa Cruz 70) would normally weigh at least double that. Those 140-foot masts have lead to advances in carbon fiber technology not imaginable 10 years ago.
Even the recreational racer these days is in an arms race. Unless your racing class or club prohibits it, materials and manufacturing technology in sails produces a new breed of sails every couple of years. Changes in underbody design, the continual adoption of newer and better modelling software, etc., make each generation of boat lighter, faster, stronger than the previous.
Now if they'd apply some of that design and materials genius to a comfortable, lightweight marine head (toilet) that didn't clog, I could spend my afternoon sailing instead of knee-deep in $#!%...
Uh, I forgot to mention that in most places in the USA if you go to one of the commercial mailbox rental places, those are not Post Office Boxes (by definition) and they are zoned for commercial use. In the eyes of the law, it's the same as renting a really really small office suite. For most "home" businesses the local mailboxes-r-us might be the ideal location. I don't know if the same holds true in Canada or elsewhere outside the USA.
Partner Jody and I wanted to create a consulting business, and decided for various reasons a Limited Liability Company was the right way to go. We visited the state small business office and picked up a very helpful booklet on how to start a small business in Utah. This little book had information on all the various forms you need, who to talk to at City Hall, and how to get a business license if you're not in an incoporated city. Very helpful.
Note: don't think about scamming the business license if you're going to do enough dollar volume to file taxes on. The state tax people will report your income to the city, who will make sure you have a business license. The business license doesn't cost much and is very little additional hassle.
We filed the LLC paperwork with the state first. (An LLC doesn't have to be a business so that paperwork had no prerequisites.) Everything went smoothly and a few days later we got a nice form letter from the State office of something or other notifying us our business name was now registered. The next step was to apply for the business license.
At this point we decided we should get a business bank account and run the checks for all these applications through that account. We tripped down to the local bank that was just up the street from the town hall to open an account, only to be informed we couldn't open an account without a business license. See what I mean about not skipping on the paperwork?
So Jody wrote the check for the business license and we finished our application. In South Jordan home business licenses have to guarantee not to generate business-related traffic; you're not allowed to meet or entertain customers at your home, for instance. Not a problem for us, we were going to sell information and services over the web and do our work on-line or at customer facilities. The hook is, your neigbhors, anyone within 500 feet of your home, get the right to comment at the next town meeting before your license is granted. So the city gave us a list of addresses, we had to write a note to them inviting them to comment at the town meeting and pay the postage. We printed the invites on post cards, got them metered at the Post Office, and brought them back to town hall a few days later. The town clerk looked at the stack, guessed it was about right, and chucked them into their out basket.
The town meeting was a couple of weeks later. Jody and I showed up, nobody else did. We said on our post card that we did our business online and planned to have very few deliveries and no customer traffic, but I doubt most people even bothered to read it. Our business license was approved that night, and the office mailed it to us the next day.
With business license in hand, we revisted the bank and our account was opened in a few minutes. It was shockingly painless. They were happy to add a second signature line on the standard checks for us. We were shocked to find out the same checks that cost $5/box for a residential account are $15/box for a business account, but the account itself was free and we only needed one box of checks anyhow. Be prepared to get charged more for everything from checks to phone lines if you tell them it's for business purposes. When dealing with phone companies, sometimes saying it's for a "home office" will get you the same features at residential rates. Caveat Emptor!
That was it. For the next 4 years we renewed the business license each year, for $35, and filed an annual report to the same State office of something or other with the $15 filing fee, and had no other interaction with the local authorities at all.
We did file for and receive an Employer Identification Number (EIN) from the Infernal Revenue Service (rat bastards), becaus
Sorry, doesn't add up. I get (roughly) the same 140 channels, including all 9 local channels (gotta love SoCal), plus internet access at 2.5 mbps (yeah, almost double T-1) for $77. And I can't see the 110 W. satellite slot from my apartment, so I couldn't bring over my much-missed DiSH, which has better geek programming than DirecTV.
Daemon News banners ads are filled in randomly. I loaded the page in question then hit the 'reload' button five times and got the following ads on the page:
bottom banner "Get BSD Stuff" box
LinuxWorld NYC NetBSD 1.5.3
NetBSD 1.6 OpenBSD
DOSSIER Iron Systems
Iron Systems FreeBSD book
LinuxWorld Expo FreeBSD 4.7
FreeBSD 4.6.2 update NetBSD 1.6
As another reply pointed out, Daemon News supports all BSD derived operating systems, commercial or free. You might even come up with a Darwin or Mac OS X ad in the mix.
Uh, duh, the announcement didn't say it was almost ready, it said it was done. The available shortly part means it was being copied to the ftp mirrors as the post went out. You're really dense about online software, aren't you?
For those of you who actually know a little bit about the embedded market, go surf the RTEMS web pages for info about another fine embedded OS. This is is actually covered by the GPL, with a sensible amendment that you CAN do binary-only distributions of your product that includes RTEMS. The folks there are quite nice and very knowlegable, too.
http://www.oarcorp.com/RTEMS/rtems.html
eCos is not GPLd, you dork. Why bother posting when you don't know anything about the thread?
Please don't construe any of this to mean that I find SourceForge itself to be useful. I completely fail to see why projects would rush to a site like SourceForge, other than for the advertising. A central site for release information like FRESHports, coupled with per-project home pages, seems much simpler to me.
Another GPL zealot trying to jump onto the OS X bandwagon. Just get the OpenPackages set and be happy.
Oddly enough, while being the most "free" version of Linux, Debian is also closest to the BSD projects in term of development model. Since the Anonymous Coward crowd immediately cast "WRS lays off FreeBSD developers" as "FreeBSD is dying," this obviously means Debian is dying, too.
Or maybe neither really needs an advertising budget anymore? Nah, that couldn't be it.
Matt is no stranger to Linux, having helped with the TCP implemenation in the Linux IPv4 network protocol stack. For confirmation, see linux/net/ipv4/tcp*.c on your favorite Linux machine.
Linux seems to be gobbling up the low end of the market while BSD chews its way across the high end. The meeting ground in the middle is an interesting place to be, and why WRS wanted to acquire BSD/OS. They were bombarded by their customers with requests for something like Linux, with WRS tools (and support, I guess, though I've never found a WRS support contract to be worth much). WRS chose BSD/OS because they are very familiar with the GPL -- remember they've been a major commercial sponsor of GCC for many years -- and do not believe the GPL is suitable for commercial embedded "trade secret" code, for themselves or their customers.
I never believed WRS would hold onto the FreeBSD assets for long. The original integration of Walnut Creek into BSDi never really worked out, and WRS was never likely to hold onto a cost center that did not produce profits. Internal and external pressure to finish and release Tornado for FreeBSD, based on the two-year-old but never released Tornado for Linux, was ignored by company management, proving the lack of any real support for FreeBSD in WRS management.
For the Anonymous Cowards out there, I fail to see how a company that never helped FreeBSD dropping their non-support of it will substantially change the FreeBSD project. FreeBSD did fine without a corporate sponsor originally, and the CD-ROM business is no longer important to the survival of FreeBSD. The current strategy of having the project produce ISO images and allowing anyone who wishes to burn those images onto CDs and sell them meets the needs of the customers, the project, and the vendors, no formal relationship is needed.
The only real remaining issue is to get the FreeBSD trademark transistioned to someone who will keep and protect it.
The exact point of patent law is to prevent from distributing any such invention, for profit or for free.
The stated intent of patent law is to encourage people to spend the time and money to develop expensive processes that benefit mankind, but I'm not sure those incentives are necessary in the software world.
Please route all accusations of communist leanings to /dev/null.
Continuously re-examining our laws and how they apply to our changing society is a sign of a thriving, participatory government "of the people".
How much of Darwin is based on parts of FreeBSD that are not part of BSD?
How can a part of FreeBSD not be a part of BSD?
That's Jordan, not Jonathan, and the project will survive just fine. Jordan is one of approximately 250 committers on the FreeBSD project, programmers who are allowed to directly check in changes to the source code. He is also one of the 9 members of the Core Team, the group assigned to be roughly the supreme court of the FreeBSD project. Both bodies are large enough to run adequately with one member down, even one as active as Jordan.
If Jordan finds himself too busy to fully contribute to the Core Team, I would expect him to say so and step aside; he is certainly one of the most honest men I've ever met. In the first election for the FreeBSD Core Team held last fall, Jordan was one of the few members of the original Core Team members maintained by the voters, so his popularity among the FreeBSD project is not in doubt.
Rest assured that the FreeBSD project has not allowed itself to suffer from the "what happens if Linus gets hit by a bus" problem, unlike our friends in the Linux community. Our transition of power is assured, unless all of the committers scattered around the globe and all existing copies of the CVS archives -- several million by now -- were to be destroyed simultaneously.