I see Jaron is taking a lot of heat for his views. That's OK, he pretty much predicted he would, but I think some folks are throwing the baby out with the bathwater in dismissing the entire article as "mere flamebait" with nothing interesting to say. The fact is, Jaron has a point, though perhaps not the point he actually made. The real point is that innovation needs both fuel and focus to truly thrive.
That fuel can take many forms, of course, but a steady paycheck (and all the qualities of life it enables) remains one of the most reliable forms of fuel yet devised. It's not a bad way of providing focus, either. In a functional commercial organization, you have very specific vision and directives for everyone to follow and the fact that developers don't need to go elsewhere to find ways of paying their mortgage means they can devote themselves exclusively to the task(s) at hand. Contrast this with the general directive to "do whatever floats your boat" in the open source world (modulo whatever organizational goals the thought-leaders may be trying to set) and the fact that, with regrettably few exceptions, its developers still need to put 40+ hours a week into making money some other way. The fact that innovation still occurs in spite of this is highly admirable, but it's definitely like rolling a marble uphill by comparison.
Another point that Jaron failed to make is that the open source world resists change, largely due to the sheer number of opinions on which direction to go in or what constitutes a good or bad idea. In order to topple an existing paradigm, you need to conform to the 10X rule and that's hard. In a closed system, all that it takes to effect change is for one person in a position of authority to say "do it!" and, within reason, it will be done. Even Linus Torvalds saying "do it!" doesn't mean it will get done in the Linux world unless he does it himself, and there's only so much one person can do. Contrast this with the commercial world, where you can have hundreds (if not thousands) of people working in concert on a single goal. Whether the goal is the "wrong" or "right" goal is academic (and largely in the eye of the beholder) - you get on board or you look for another job. Should it subsequently transpire that your goals were wrong, well, all you've wasted is some time and money. If they were right, however, then you've just created something innovative which will have a significant impact on the world at large.
The open source community spends a lot of time arguing itself to a standstill, by comparison, and that's hardly conducive to innovation, which is perhaps the point that Jaron should have made.
Ah slashdot, all the decorum and wit of a nursery school recess... Ruby works fine on 10.4.7, including the pack and unpack functions. Yes, there were bugs (that nobody "went out of their way" to cause - we have better things to do) and it took us longer than we'd have liked to fix them. That experience, in fact, is what led us to devote more resources to ruby going forward. Gah, posting on slashdot is like going to a sleezy strip club, isn't it? It's always against your better judgement, you feel slightly dirty and sad afterwards and you always swear never to do it again. I guess this takes care of any prurient impulses I might have had for the year.:)
Sigh. Wrong? Some of us like rails just because we like rails, OK? And, for the record, we HAVE helped with the writing of Ruby bindings for Cocoa - anyone who was actually interested in that topic rather than just pulling it out of the air as a randomly chosen example of "why Apple must not really love Ruby" would already know this because they'd have checked out the RubyCocoa project and noticed, surprise surprise, that Apple had donated a number of improvements back. Ruby is an excellent language and one we're happy to see better supported on our platform (and willing to put engineering time and effort towards that goal).
Re:As Seen On TV obviously needs attention ("we"??
on
Does launchd Beat cron?
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Well, since you mention it.. If you're reading this, ASOTV, please drop me an email. Nobody's going to eat you, but we'd like to have a discrete word... Thanks.
It must be when a rather innocuous request to freebsd-hackers makes it to slashdot! Just to set the record straight, I didn't do this "at Apple's request", I did this because it seemed silly to fork a header file over the name of a single entry in it and, as I said in my message to -hackers, I just thought I'd check to see if FreeBSD was willing to change it before Apple changed it in their own sources. Anyone with time to waste can see the original message (and the thread which followed) here: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- hackers/2003-May/000791.html
Personally, I rather liked the EDONTPANIC suggestion...
This is an oddly inconsistent rebuttal you make, Mike. First you chastise the original poster for not taking the time to read an article and understand the project he's slamming before doing so, then YOU turn around and barf undigested corn all over the entire Unix movement while at the same time admitting that you could care less about it and see it merely in terms of colored directory listings. If that's really your viewpoint on it, then why not take some of your own advice and admit that you don't understand the Unix perspective and thus aren't qualified to comment on why some people still see enough value in it to try to get it onto the desktop or "recreate" it in the form of FreeBSD? Trust me, it's about FAR more than colored directory listing.
If OS originality is also your only metric for success then you'd do well to look at some of the original OS efforts launched during the 80's and 90's and see how well they did. I'm not pissing on OS research by any means, and we've learned a lot from efforts like Plan9 (which have influenced some of the more modern changes in FreeBSD and Linux - "Unix" is hardly static), but making it sound like OS technology is somehow like a painting or a song and has to be "original" to be successful or relevant is just silly. Hell, that rule doesn't even apply to paintings or music these days either.:-)
I think that's a pretty fair assessment of one of the reasons I went to Apple, thanks.
I did actually change my threshold down low enough to see the original article from that silly "Tsarkon" person and have to say that I haven't laughed so hard in a long time - I should read the trolls more often. He must have an odd working history if he's accustomed to selling his soul in exchange for mere employment (mine is still safely locked in a safe deposit box in Berkeley and Apple has never even expressed an interest in it, perhaps I should be offended).
In any case, FreeBSD remains a great server solution and I've said this from the very beginning. I even took a fair amount of fire during the early 90's for saying that FreeBSD shouldn't even try to focus on the desktop because we had no chance there and weren't the kind of developer community who were likely to ever focus on the needs of the desktop community anyway. The ports collection is great and I'm very proud of it, of course, but that's merely a convenient taxonomy for geeks to use in organizating and installing software, it's not something your mother is ever going to use.
I think history has subsequently proven that being server-centric was exactly the right route for FreeBSD to take, but that doesn't mean I and other Unix hackers had no INTEREST in the desktop, merely that we never saw FreeBSD as a reasonble vehicle for going there. Mac OS X is an entirely different proposition and I think the growing number of Tibooks you see at USENIX conferences every year pretty much speaks for itself. If our anonymous Tsarkon fellow wants to use Windows instead then more power to him (or maybe her - who knows?).
I think this has to be taken somewhat out of context to be offended by it at all. I by no means intended to imply that it was exceptional for a high school graduate without the benefit of a college education to excell at something like software engineering, and some of the best software people I know never went beyond a high school "education" in the formal sense of the word. I also would never say or even imply that a university education was unnecessary or a waste of time. In fact, I can think of few things more fun than being able to spend 4-6 years in the pursuit of academic research or learning the kinds of esoteric things that one's career would never expose one to, like oceanography or astronomy in my particular case. I just never had the luxury of being able to do that, and a luxury it is when you have to take care of yourself from an early age (I left home at 15) so I hope those folks who are in college, especially those who's parents are footing the bill, fully appreciate the blessings they have! Now that I can afford it, it's a bit late...
A number of the ongoing improvements in FreeBSD-stable (from which 4.5 will come) have indeed been making it into Mac OS X.
Apple is also not syncronizing its Darwin releases with those of FreeBSD from a timing perspective, but technologies are certainly being shared between them. Apple has also been providing stuff back, with the recent filesystem exerciser utility that Apple provided being used to find a number of bugs in FreeBSD's NFS and softupdates code. It's all good, man!
First off, I didn't announce anything concerning 4.5 so it's a little odd to see "Jordon Hubbard writes..." [sic] when I did nothing of the kind. 4.5-RELEASE has NOT yet happened and all that Murray Stokely, the primary release engineer, has announced is the availability of release candidate image #3. As we go along the FreeBSD release process, it's customary for the project to release release candidate images for pre-testing so that the final version will be as bug-free as possible and hopefully without any of the sort of brain-os which get caught in the first few hours of testing.
Finally, my first name is spelled "Jordan", like the river. A sure sign that this was a hoax.:)
I'm sure that being first or official isn't what Chris meant to imply and is as distressed by the heading of "BSD: First Official CD Release of FreeBSD" as everyone else is.
Just to clarify this for everyone else, there is no longer any "official" CD publisher of FreeBSD in the sense that they're somehow blessed or endorsed by the FreeBSD project. The project releases all the ISO images one would need to build a full 4-CD boxed set, that being the benchmark product standard established by Walnut Creek CDROM, and simply leaves it up for grabs as to who publishes them in whatever packaged form.
The ISO images themselves are called "official" simply to denote the fact that they're the authoritative reference for FreeBSD release bits. Anyone who publishes something which doesn't deviate too much from this standard is more than free to call the resulting product "FreeBSD" and sell it/give it away/rub it on their bodies/whatever as such.
Needless to say, there also are and have been multiple publishers of FreeBSD CDROM products, so this isn't exactly the "first" such distribution of FreeBSD on CD. But hey, this is Slashdot so two errors in one sentence is actually a fairly high standard when taken in context.:)
Others have already commented more than adequately on the issues of writing to the Carbon or Cocoa APIs and how this is a significant barrier to going to a *BSD or Linux platform, so I won't belabor that point.
A more fundamental question, however, is "why bother?"
In order to justify the expense of any new port on the scale of MS Office, you have to have a really big market for it and the numbers just don't add up here. It's a tremendous committment to take on any new platform, no matter how similar a porting target it may be to one of your existing supported platforms (and that's hardly true here). You need machines running the appropriate reference bits in a myriad of departments, from engineering to media production to tech support, and you need to train your people up on supporting that particular platform. You were going to offer technical and sales support for the product, right? You were going to TEST the bits in a variety of installation scenarios, yes? All of that adds up astronomically, and it's never the simple matter of "typing make" that engineering users seem to think it is.
Just judging by how well (or not) other ISVs have done at getting big number sales in the *BSD or Linux markets, I would have to say that porting office to them would be little more than an expensive and stupid mistake for Microsoft to make. Whatever else Microsoft might be, that stupid they are not.
I may be arrogant, but not for the reasons stated. In the presentation I gave at the NLUUG this year, I was merely being a realist.:-)
I think the essence of my talk was also somewhat distorted by Rob Kaper's summary of it. He failed to mention that my specific "grievance" with open source on the desktop so far lies primarily with its failure to standardize on a single set of "higher level APIs" that ISVs/VARs rely on to bring their applications quickly and cheaply (well, as cheaply as possible) to market. Having a multitude of desktop environments to choose from might be wonderful from an engineer/power user's perspective, but from an ISVs perspective it's a nightmare. They don't want multiple solutions to choose from, they want a SINGLE set of APIs which will enable them to reach all the users in their target market. By APIs I'm also not talking about fopen() and the rest of libc, I'm talking about all the things which enable things like buttons and scrollbars to appear on the screen and for applications to share data between them. Where the open source engineering community consistently "fails" is by making this a technical argument, going to great lengths to point out that things like the WIN32 API and ActiveX are difficult to use, buggy, fraught with security problems, whatever. From the ISV perspective, however, those very same things allow them to reach a user base of millions and are well-documented and "rich" enough in functionality that they can provide a reasonable-enough (deliberate choice of words) user experience to sell their application to some of those millions. From their perspective, that's literally the bottom line and all that counts.
It's a pity that Mr Kaper didn't go to the trouble to describe that portion of my talk since it's where I put the most energy. I didn't want engineers to hear my talk and walk away simply branding me as an anti-KDE or anti-GNOME guy, I'd far prefer that they actually *get the point*. Perhaps that's something you can only do once you've worked for a big ISV who's job it is to deliver mainstream desktop apps, however. Until you've done that, you just haven't really felt the pain of trying to do something like printing or font selection from X.
This is something which got a little confused in the translation. What I said was that it took me several months to come to Apple after my initial interviews because a little detour to Wind River happened in the middle (for reasons I won't go into). This somehow got permuted into my spending months chasing the job. In reality, Apple never gave up after "losing" me to WindRiver and their persistence coupled with my desire to get involved with MacOS X is what finally induced me to leave WRS.
Sorry guys, but this one really is a troll. We've never even heard of this guy nor is there even any such position as "core consultant developer." Nobody has petitioned the core team for a code removal action, either, so it would difficult for us to be "pious and insufferable" in response to a non-event. In short, this guy's posting is a complete fabrication.
Darwin has been going through some changes as OS X gets closer to its ship date of March 24th, 2001. It's true that in the past there was a bit of NetBSD and a bit of FreeBSD in the mix, though more recently the Darwin group has been standardizing on the FreeBSD code base and, as their web site states, last syncronized with FreeBSD 3.2. That's one of the reasons more active code-sharing hasn't really happened yet - things have simply been too far out of sync while the Apple people dealt with far more pressing issues related to getting their first release out the door.
Once that happens, some of the pressure will be off and hopefully a more recent version of the FreeBSD code base can be sync'd with Darwin along with the inevitable flood of product update requests and bug fixes which go into the first point release of OS X. Apple hasn't shown itself to be reluctant to play the open source game at all, they simply don't appear to have had sufficient resources to really take an active role in BSD development and also address all the other challenges they've had to face in getting OS X ready to ship. I've met with various Apple developers on several occasions now and they've shown a lot of enthusiasm for getting more actively involved once they have the cycles to spare.
No, FreeBSD was never "taken over" by BSDi, something which would be impossible even if BSDi had ever wished to do such a thing (how do you take over a volunteer development organization?). When BSDi merged with Walnut Creek CDROM, the existing cooperative relationship between WC and the FreeBSD project simply went with it. BSDi continues to make and ship FreeBSD CDs as well as employ several people to work on FreeBSD full-time and FreeBSD continues to support this as a Good Thing(tm). That's all there is to it. I now return you to your regularly scheduled conspiracy theories.:)
I don't know who ajs talked to, but I don't know of any "bad blood" between NetBSD and FreeBSD and haven't perceived any such thing for quite some time now. Yes, there were times over 7 or 8 years ago when inter-group relations were a little rocky but it very quickly became apparent to all of us that we were only shooting ourselves in the feet by engaging in sibling rivalry and those kinds of activities stopped.
Nowadays, there are a number of developers who sit astride both code bases and keep a close eye on development of import to both projects which can be shared. As someone already noted in this thread, the goals of both projects are also VERY different and a full "merger" just wouldn't make any sense at this point, nor would it even be particularly desirable.
I'm sure the people who do cancer research and the people who research cerebral palsy have a lot in common, for example, in that they're all doctors/health care professionals and share many of the same investigative methods and goals for improving the human condition. The fact remains that they've chosen to focus on different aspects of the very large set of problems facing humans today, however, and while they could probably derive some value in comparing notes from time to time, they're really going after different things.
So it is with FreeBSD and NetBSD. FreeBSD is focusing on providing a "product" to a wide variety of internet infrastructure and SOHO market folks and is driven by the demands of the market it's chosen to serve. NetBSD is focused more on OS research and providing a very high degree of OS portability. Both are very worthy and often complimentary goals, but they still require some fundamental differences in mind-set and the allocation of scarce (in both cases) volunteer resources.
Thanks for clarifying this to everyone. We get so used to our methodology that sometimes we forget how confusing some of it can look to people who don't deal with FreeBSD every day. I should, in retrospect, take this more into account when I write the release notes. Thanks again.
This is untrue. FreeBSD currently supports the Olicom PCI token-ring adapters, models OC-3136, OC-3137, OC-3139, OC-3140, OC-3141, OC-3540 and OC-3250.
There are two groups of people in the BSD booth - FreeBSD and BSDI. The BSDI people are giving eval copies of their commercial BSD/oS OS and the FreeBSD people would have been giving away free (unlimited, full-source, non-expiring) copies of the FreeBSD install CD (CD #1) if they had simply arrived as scheduled. It was a shipping snafu and I believe both groups should have give-away CDs tomorrow (Thursday). The 4 CD FreeBSD distribution, FreeBSD book, and various items of FreeBSD-related clothing are also for sale from the same booth. If you want your picture taken with the daemonettes, we'll even take it for you and print it on a laminated card for free.:)
> FreeBSD is in turmoil in several areas. It is common knowledge > that BSD marketshare is in an ongoing decline, and it is > irresponsible to to pretend otherwise. But the big news is that
Nope.
> FreeBSD is *not* free. A big scandal is currently brewing. > FreeBSD is now proprietary. It turns out that the FreeBSD
Nope.
> trademark is owned by Walnut Creek CD ROM. Their lawyers have > been working overtime trying to quash a new user friendly > FreeBSD distribution which has been organized by Brett Taylor > and a prominent investment group. The new FreeBSD is to include
Heh, nope, nope and nope.:)
First, the trademark is jointly owned between Walnut Creek CDROM and FreeBSD, Inc. and will be transferred fully to FreeBSD, Inc. just as soon as we complete the paperwork. Second, none of our lawyers have been working on anything, much less quashing new releases of FreeBSD, and Brett Taylor has no plans to do any such distribution. This FUD-monkey here can't even get his facts straight given that it was Brett GLASS considering such a distribution and nobody has made any attempt to "quash" his proposed distribution. I recently spent some time on the phone talking to him about how to go about doing this, in fact, and, as far as I know, he's still working on it.
> smart installation procedure. Unfortunately, Jordan Hubbard, a > Walnut Creek employee, is threatening legal action against > anyone who wishes to make a new FreeBSD distribution. Walnut
Complete and utter FUD. I have threatened no such thing and I'd love to see this guy show me where I have. Where do people come UP with this crap?
> Creek is determined to maintain a monopoly on ownership of > FreeBSD. Anyone who uses the code to create a new FreeBSD > distribution will be threatened with lawsuit. A terrible legal > battle is in the offing for the BSD world, and it will make the > USL lawsuit look like child's play.
This is the purest idiocy I've seen in a long time and I don't even think that the poster is naive enough to believe it. No lawsuits have been threatened and any threat of same exists purely in the poster's FUD-spreading mind. I hope that anyone who's actually tempted to believe these kind of chicken little tactics will at least try to contact us first and get the REAL story since it bears no resemblance to this one.
I'm sorry, but this posting is just far too enlightened for slashdot. Go sit in the corner.:-)
[Seriously, this was very well said. If everyone followed "HoserHead"'s advice, there would sure be a lot less dreck to wade through here:)]
P.S. Am I the only one who feels that the "anonymous coward" posting feature of Slashdot is its biggest problem? Imagine the increase in SNR if that one "feature" were disabled!
Sigh. Why is it that the most clueless are so often the loudest? And why do they always feel compelled to post as "anonymous coward" - that alone ought to tell you something about the courage of their convictions.:)
Needless to say, FreeBSD has a very definite "niche", a purpose and a growth rate that would probably swamp us if it went any faster. Don't believe the idiots who claim that we're closed to contributions, that we're somehow "less secure" just because we don't shout about it from the rooftops (that's only a good way of collecting a few incoming rounds, IMO) or that we're trying to somehow be another Linux just because we can run Linux binaries. We're very open to contributions and probably even a little more able to accept them because we still (knock on wood) have a pretty good signal-to-noise ratio where that's concerned and don't have to contend with 7 million screaming users and enough variant distributions to cause confusion to even the brightest rocket scientist. We track security fixes in all the major OSes, not just OpenBSD (they're good at security but hardly have a monopoly on finding holes) and, finally, we run Linux binaries because it's a nice thing to provide to our users, not because we're trying to "ape the competition".
People need to both get their facts straight and stop hiding behind the anonymous coward label if they want to be taken seriously by anyone who actually follows these things. Sadly, actual knowledge doesn't appear to be a prerequisite for posting in these forums.:(
Slashdot Mirror
I see Jaron is taking a lot of heat for his views. That's OK, he pretty much predicted he would, but I think some folks are throwing the baby out with the bathwater in dismissing the entire article as "mere flamebait" with nothing interesting to say. The fact is, Jaron has a point, though perhaps not the point he actually made. The real point is that innovation needs both fuel and focus to truly thrive.
That fuel can take many forms, of course, but a steady paycheck (and all the qualities of life it enables) remains one of the most reliable forms of fuel yet devised. It's not a bad way of providing focus, either. In a functional commercial organization, you have very specific vision and directives for everyone to follow and the fact that developers don't need to go elsewhere to find ways of paying their mortgage means they can devote themselves exclusively to the task(s) at hand. Contrast this with the general directive to "do whatever floats your boat" in the open source world (modulo whatever organizational goals the thought-leaders may be trying to set) and the fact that, with regrettably few exceptions, its developers still need to put 40+ hours a week into making money some other way. The fact that innovation still occurs in spite of this is highly admirable, but it's definitely like rolling a marble uphill by comparison.
Another point that Jaron failed to make is that the open source world resists change, largely due to the sheer number of opinions on which direction to go in or what constitutes a good or bad idea. In order to topple an existing paradigm, you need to conform to the 10X rule and that's hard. In a closed system, all that it takes to effect change is for one person in a position of authority to say "do it!" and, within reason, it will be done. Even Linus Torvalds saying "do it!" doesn't mean it will get done in the Linux world unless he does it himself, and there's only so much one person can do. Contrast this with the commercial world, where you can have hundreds (if not thousands) of people working in concert on a single goal. Whether the goal is the "wrong" or "right" goal is academic (and largely in the eye of the beholder) - you get on board or you look for another job. Should it subsequently transpire that your goals were wrong, well, all you've wasted is some time and money. If they were right, however, then you've just created something innovative which will have a significant impact on the world at large.
The open source community spends a lot of time arguing itself to a standstill, by comparison, and that's hardly conducive to innovation, which is perhaps the point that Jaron should have made.
Ah slashdot, all the decorum and wit of a nursery school recess... Ruby works fine on 10.4.7, including the pack and unpack functions. Yes, there were bugs (that nobody "went out of their way" to cause - we have better things to do) and it took us longer than we'd have liked to fix them. That experience, in fact, is what led us to devote more resources to ruby going forward. Gah, posting on slashdot is like going to a sleezy strip club, isn't it? It's always against your better judgement, you feel slightly dirty and sad afterwards and you always swear never to do it again. I guess this takes care of any prurient impulses I might have had for the year. :)
Sigh. Wrong? Some of us like rails just because we like rails, OK? And, for the record, we HAVE helped with the writing of Ruby bindings for Cocoa - anyone who was actually interested in that topic rather than just pulling it out of the air as a randomly chosen example of "why Apple must not really love Ruby" would already know this because they'd have checked out the RubyCocoa project and noticed, surprise surprise, that Apple had donated a number of improvements back. Ruby is an excellent language and one we're happy to see better supported on our platform (and willing to put engineering time and effort towards that goal).
Well, since you mention it.. If you're reading this, ASOTV, please drop me an email. Nobody's going to eat you, but we'd like to have a discrete word... Thanks.
It must be when a rather innocuous request to freebsd-hackers makes it to slashdot! Just to set the record straight, I didn't do this "at Apple's request", I did this because it seemed silly to fork a header file over the name of a single entry in it and, as I said in my message to -hackers, I just thought I'd check to see if FreeBSD was willing to change it before Apple changed it in their own sources. Anyone with time to waste can see the original message (and the thread which followed) here:- hackers /2003-May/000791.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd
Personally, I rather liked the EDONTPANIC suggestion...
This is an oddly inconsistent rebuttal you make, Mike. First you chastise the original poster for not taking the time to read an article and understand the project he's slamming before doing so, then YOU turn around and barf undigested corn all over the entire Unix movement while at the same time admitting that you could care less about it and see it merely in terms of colored directory listings. If that's really your viewpoint on it, then why not take some of your own advice and admit that you don't understand the Unix perspective and thus aren't qualified to comment on why some people still see enough value in it to try to get it onto the desktop or "recreate" it in the form of FreeBSD? Trust me, it's about FAR more than colored directory listing.
:-)
If OS originality is also your only metric for success then you'd do well to look at some of the original OS efforts launched during the 80's and 90's and see how well they did. I'm not pissing on OS research by any means, and we've learned a lot from efforts like Plan9 (which have influenced some of the more modern changes in FreeBSD and Linux - "Unix" is hardly static), but making it sound like OS technology is somehow like a painting or a song and has to be "original" to be successful or relevant is just silly. Hell, that rule doesn't even apply to paintings or music these days either.
I think that's a pretty fair assessment of one of the reasons I went to Apple, thanks.
I did actually change my threshold down low enough to see the original article from that silly "Tsarkon" person and have to say that I haven't laughed so hard in a long time - I should read the trolls more often. He must have an odd working history if he's accustomed to selling his soul in exchange for mere employment (mine is still safely locked in a safe deposit box in Berkeley and Apple has never even expressed an interest in it, perhaps I should be offended).
In any case, FreeBSD remains a great server solution and I've said this from the very beginning. I even took a fair amount of fire during the early 90's for saying that FreeBSD shouldn't even try to focus on the desktop because we had no chance there and weren't the kind of developer community who were likely to ever focus on the needs of the desktop community anyway. The ports collection is great and I'm very proud of it, of course, but that's merely a convenient taxonomy for geeks to use in organizating and installing software, it's not something your mother is ever going to use.
I think history has subsequently proven that being server-centric was exactly the right route for FreeBSD to take, but that doesn't mean I and other Unix hackers had no INTEREST in the desktop, merely that we never saw FreeBSD as a reasonble vehicle for going there. Mac OS X is an entirely different proposition and I think the growing number of Tibooks you see at USENIX conferences every year pretty much speaks for itself. If our anonymous Tsarkon fellow wants to use Windows instead then more power to him (or maybe her - who knows?).
I think this has to be taken somewhat out of context to be offended by it at all. I by no means intended to imply that it was exceptional for a high school graduate without the benefit of a college education to excell at something like software engineering, and some of the best software people I know never went beyond a high school "education" in the formal sense of the word. I also would never say or even imply that a university education was unnecessary or a waste of time. In fact, I can think of few things more fun than being able to spend 4-6 years in the pursuit of academic research or learning the kinds of esoteric things that one's career would never expose one to, like oceanography or astronomy in my particular case. I just never had the luxury of being able to do that, and a luxury it is when you have to take care of yourself from an early age (I left home at 15) so I hope those folks who are in college, especially those who's parents are footing the bill, fully appreciate the blessings they have! Now that I can afford it, it's a bit late...
A number of the ongoing improvements in FreeBSD-stable (from which 4.5 will come) have indeed been making it into Mac OS X.
Apple is also not syncronizing its Darwin releases with those of FreeBSD from a timing perspective, but technologies are certainly being shared between them. Apple has also been providing stuff back, with the recent filesystem exerciser utility that Apple provided being used to find a number of bugs in FreeBSD's NFS and softupdates code. It's all good, man!
First off, I didn't announce anything concerning 4.5 so it's a little odd to see "Jordon Hubbard writes..." [sic] when I did nothing of the kind. 4.5-RELEASE has NOT yet happened and all that Murray Stokely, the primary release engineer, has announced is the availability of release candidate image #3. As we go along the FreeBSD release process, it's customary for the project to release release candidate images for pre-testing so that the final version will be as bug-free as possible and hopefully without any of the sort of brain-os which get caught in the first few hours of testing.
:)
Finally, my first name is spelled "Jordan", like the river. A sure sign that this was a hoax.
I'm sure that being first or official isn't what Chris meant to imply and is as distressed by the heading of "BSD: First Official CD Release of FreeBSD" as everyone else is.
:)
Just to clarify this for everyone else, there is no longer any "official" CD publisher of FreeBSD in the sense that they're somehow blessed or endorsed by the FreeBSD project. The project releases all the ISO images one would need to build a full 4-CD boxed set, that being the benchmark product standard established by Walnut Creek CDROM, and simply leaves it up for grabs as to who publishes them in whatever packaged form.
The ISO images themselves are called "official" simply to denote the fact that they're the authoritative reference for FreeBSD release bits. Anyone who publishes something which doesn't deviate too much from this standard is more than free to call the resulting product "FreeBSD" and sell it/give it away/rub it on their bodies/whatever as such.
Needless to say, there also are and have been multiple publishers of FreeBSD CDROM products, so this isn't exactly the "first" such distribution of FreeBSD on CD. But hey, this is Slashdot so two errors in one sentence is actually a fairly high standard when taken in context.
Others have already commented more than adequately on the issues of writing to the Carbon or Cocoa APIs and how this is a significant barrier to going to a *BSD or Linux platform, so I won't belabor that point.
A more fundamental question, however, is "why bother?"
In order to justify the expense of any new port on the scale of MS Office, you have to have a really big market for it and the numbers just don't add up here. It's a tremendous committment to take on any new platform, no matter how similar a porting target it may be to one of your existing supported platforms (and that's hardly true here). You need machines running the appropriate reference bits in a myriad of departments, from engineering to media production to tech support, and you need to train your people up on supporting that particular platform. You were going to offer technical and sales support for the product, right? You were going to TEST the bits in a variety of installation scenarios, yes? All of that adds up astronomically, and it's never the simple matter of "typing make" that engineering users seem to think it is.
Just judging by how well (or not) other ISVs have done at getting big number sales in the *BSD or Linux markets, I would have to say that porting office to them would be little more than an expensive and stupid mistake for Microsoft to make. Whatever else Microsoft might be, that stupid they are not.
I may be arrogant, but not for the reasons stated. In the presentation I gave at the NLUUG this year, I was merely being a realist. :-)
I think the essence of my talk was also somewhat distorted by Rob Kaper's summary of it. He failed to mention that my specific "grievance" with open source on the desktop so far lies primarily with its failure to standardize on a single set of "higher level APIs" that ISVs/VARs rely on to bring their applications quickly and cheaply (well, as cheaply as possible) to market. Having a multitude of desktop environments to choose from might be wonderful from an engineer/power user's perspective, but from an ISVs perspective it's a nightmare. They don't want multiple solutions to choose from, they want a SINGLE set of APIs which will enable them to reach all the users in their target market. By APIs I'm also not talking about fopen() and the rest of libc, I'm talking about all the things which enable things like buttons and scrollbars to appear on the screen and for applications to share data between them. Where the open source engineering community consistently "fails" is by making this a technical argument, going to great lengths to point out that things like the WIN32 API and ActiveX are difficult to use, buggy, fraught with security problems, whatever. From the ISV perspective, however, those very same things allow them to reach a user base of millions and are well-documented and "rich" enough in functionality that they can provide a reasonable-enough (deliberate choice of words) user experience to sell their application to some of those millions. From their perspective, that's literally the bottom line and all that counts.
It's a pity that Mr Kaper didn't go to the trouble to describe that portion of my talk since it's where I put the most energy. I didn't want engineers to hear my talk and walk away simply branding me as an anti-KDE or anti-GNOME guy, I'd far prefer that they actually *get the point*. Perhaps that's something you can only do once you've worked for a big ISV who's job it is to deliver mainstream desktop apps, however. Until you've done that, you just haven't really felt the pain of trying to do something like printing or font selection from X.
This is something which got a little confused in the translation. What I said was that it took me several months to come to Apple after my initial interviews because a little detour to Wind River happened in the middle (for reasons I won't go into). This somehow got permuted into my spending months chasing the job. In reality, Apple never gave up after "losing" me to WindRiver and their persistence coupled with my desire to get involved with MacOS X is what finally induced me to leave WRS.
Sorry guys, but this one really is a troll. We've never even heard of this guy nor is there even any such position as "core consultant developer." Nobody has petitioned the core team for a code removal action, either, so it would difficult for us to be "pious and insufferable" in response to a non-event. In short, this guy's posting is a complete fabrication.
Darwin has been going through some changes as OS X gets closer to its ship date of March 24th, 2001. It's true that in the past there was a bit of NetBSD and a bit of FreeBSD in the mix, though more recently the Darwin group has been standardizing on the FreeBSD code base and, as their web site states, last syncronized with FreeBSD 3.2. That's one of the reasons more active code-sharing hasn't really happened yet - things have simply been too far out of sync while the Apple people dealt with far more pressing issues related to getting their first release out the door.
Once that happens, some of the pressure will be off and hopefully a more recent version of the FreeBSD code base can be sync'd with Darwin along with the inevitable flood of product update requests and bug fixes which go into the first point release of OS X. Apple hasn't shown itself to be reluctant to play the open source game at all, they simply don't appear to have had sufficient resources to really take an active role in BSD development and also address all the other challenges they've had to face in getting OS X ready to ship. I've met with various Apple developers on several occasions now and they've shown a lot of enthusiasm for getting more actively involved once they have the cycles to spare.
No, FreeBSD was never "taken over" by BSDi, something which would be impossible even if BSDi had ever wished to do such a thing (how do you take over a volunteer development organization?). When BSDi merged with Walnut Creek CDROM, the existing cooperative relationship between WC and the FreeBSD project simply went with it. BSDi continues to make and ship FreeBSD CDs as well as employ several people to work on FreeBSD full-time and FreeBSD continues to support this as a Good Thing(tm). That's all there is to it. I now return you to your regularly scheduled conspiracy theories. :)
I don't know who ajs talked to, but I don't know of any "bad blood" between NetBSD and FreeBSD and haven't perceived any such thing for quite some time now. Yes, there were times over 7 or 8 years ago when inter-group relations were a little rocky but it very quickly became apparent to all of us that we were only shooting ourselves in the feet by engaging in sibling rivalry and those kinds of activities stopped.
Nowadays, there are a number of developers who sit astride both code bases and keep a close eye on development of import to both projects which can be shared. As someone already noted in this thread, the goals of both projects are also VERY different and a full "merger" just wouldn't make any sense at this point, nor would it even be particularly desirable.
I'm sure the people who do cancer research and the people who research cerebral palsy have a lot in common, for example, in that they're all doctors/health care professionals and share many of the same investigative methods and goals for improving the human condition. The fact remains that they've chosen to focus on different aspects of the very large set of problems facing humans today, however, and while they could probably derive some value in comparing notes from time to time, they're really going after different things.
So it is with FreeBSD and NetBSD. FreeBSD is focusing on providing a "product" to a wide variety of internet infrastructure and SOHO market folks and is driven by the demands of the market it's chosen to serve. NetBSD is focused more on OS research and providing a very high degree of OS portability. Both are very worthy and often complimentary goals, but they still require some fundamental differences in mind-set and the allocation of scarce (in both cases) volunteer resources.
Kevin,
Thanks for clarifying this to everyone. We get so used to our methodology that sometimes we forget how confusing some of it can look to people who don't deal with FreeBSD every day. I should, in retrospect, take this more into account when I write the release notes. Thanks again.
- Jordan
This is untrue. FreeBSD currently supports the Olicom PCI token-ring adapters, models
OC-3136, OC-3137, OC-3139, OC-3140, OC-3141, OC-3540 and OC-3250.
There are two groups of people in the BSD booth - FreeBSD and BSDI. The BSDI people are giving eval copies of their commercial BSD/oS OS and the FreeBSD people would have been giving away free (unlimited, full-source, non-expiring) copies of the FreeBSD install CD (CD #1) if they had simply arrived as scheduled. It was a shipping snafu and I believe both groups should have give-away CDs tomorrow (Thursday). The 4 CD FreeBSD distribution, FreeBSD book, and various items of FreeBSD-related clothing are also for sale from the same booth. If you want your picture taken with the daemonettes, we'll even take it for you and print it on a laminated card for free. :)
Hahaha. Well, thanks for bringing a smile to my face. Rave on, dude.. :)
> FreeBSD is in turmoil in several areas. It is common knowledge
:)
> that BSD marketshare is in an ongoing decline, and it is
> irresponsible to to pretend otherwise. But the big news is that
Nope.
> FreeBSD is *not* free. A big scandal is currently brewing.
> FreeBSD is now proprietary. It turns out that the FreeBSD
Nope.
> trademark is owned by Walnut Creek CD ROM. Their lawyers have
> been working overtime trying to quash a new user friendly
> FreeBSD distribution which has been organized by Brett Taylor
> and a prominent investment group. The new FreeBSD is to include
Heh, nope, nope and nope.
First, the trademark is jointly owned between Walnut Creek CDROM and FreeBSD, Inc. and will be transferred fully to FreeBSD, Inc. just as soon as we complete the paperwork. Second, none of our lawyers have
been working on anything, much less quashing new releases of FreeBSD, and Brett Taylor has no plans to do any such distribution. This FUD-monkey here can't even get his facts straight given that it was Brett GLASS considering such a distribution and nobody has made any attempt to "quash" his proposed distribution. I recently spent some time on the phone talking to him about how to go about doing this, in fact, and, as far as I know, he's still working on it.
> smart installation procedure. Unfortunately, Jordan Hubbard, a
> Walnut Creek employee, is threatening legal action against
> anyone who wishes to make a new FreeBSD distribution. Walnut
Complete and utter FUD. I have threatened no such thing and I'd love to see this guy show me where I have. Where do people come UP with this crap?
> Creek is determined to maintain a monopoly on ownership of
> FreeBSD. Anyone who uses the code to create a new FreeBSD
> distribution will be threatened with lawsuit. A terrible legal
> battle is in the offing for the BSD world, and it will make the
> USL lawsuit look like child's play.
This is the purest idiocy I've seen in a long time and I don't even think that the poster is naive enough to believe it. No lawsuits have been threatened and any threat of same exists purely in the poster's FUD-spreading mind. I hope that anyone who's actually tempted to believe these kind of chicken little tactics will at least try to contact us first and get the REAL story since it bears no resemblance to this one.
- Jordan
I'm sorry, but this posting is just far too enlightened for slashdot. Go sit in the corner. :-)
:)]
[Seriously, this was very well said. If everyone followed "HoserHead"'s advice, there would sure be a lot less dreck to wade through here
P.S. Am I the only one who feels that the "anonymous coward" posting feature of Slashdot is its biggest problem? Imagine the increase in SNR if that one "feature" were disabled!
Sigh. Why is it that the most clueless are so often the loudest? And why do they always feel compelled to post as "anonymous coward" - that alone ought to tell you something about the courage of their convictions. :)
:(
Needless to say, FreeBSD has a very definite "niche", a purpose and a growth rate that would probably swamp us if it went any faster. Don't believe the idiots who claim that we're closed to contributions, that we're somehow "less secure" just because we don't shout about it from the rooftops (that's only a good way of collecting a few incoming rounds, IMO) or that we're trying to somehow be another Linux just because we can run Linux binaries. We're very open to contributions and probably even a little more able to accept them because we still (knock on wood) have a pretty good signal-to-noise ratio where that's concerned and don't have to contend with 7 million screaming users and enough variant distributions to cause confusion to even the brightest rocket scientist. We track security fixes in all the major OSes, not just OpenBSD (they're good at security but hardly have a monopoly on finding holes) and, finally, we run Linux binaries because it's a nice thing to provide to our users, not because we're trying to "ape the competition".
People need to both get their facts straight and stop hiding behind the anonymous coward label if they want to be taken seriously by anyone who actually follows these things. Sadly, actual knowledge doesn't appear to be a prerequisite for posting in these forums.