It only got 1MB Cache and a rather slow harddisk. And it can't take more then 4GB ram so I really can't imagine what kind of task it would be good at.
It's a workstation! It doesn't need more than 4GB of RAM! It's not supposed to be a supercomputer or a server or a kiddie's game box. It's a freaking workstation!
If a hardware manufacturer would give back his changes to you, that would change your life (a little bit).
What's hilarious is that FreeBSD supports my hardware better than Linux does, on both my desktop and my laptop. If someone had told me this would be the case before I got the hardware, I would not have believed them.
Yet fewer manufacturers are "giving back" to FreeBSD compared to Linux. Official manufacturer support doesn't seem to be the issue.
This is what I meant with "island".
It may be an island, but there's lots of bridges off of it! If Microsoft manages to come out with a M$BSD that sucks away all of the FreeBSD developers, there's still NetBSD and OpenBSD to fall back on. Heck, there's still Linux! But this is an unrealistic hypothetical situation. It's not going to happen.
I didn't say it bothered me. I wasn't only responding to you who said that it didn't match your experience. It might not match your experience, but it matches some people's. I don't find it hard to believe that the grandparent post discovered a "sea" of Linux users all busy compiling, rebooting and repeating.
Only recently could you. As little as two months ago Solaris for x86 wasn't free beer.
Re:I read the article when it was on newsforge
on
BSD For Linux Users
·
· Score: 1
Yeah I know. He submitted the article to freebsd-advocacy early this week, and we all told him to tone down the condescension. Matter of fact, he did. You should have seen it before! It would be a great article once it runs through a few edits to eliminate the underlying bias and to correct a few misfacts.
1. BSD would be anarchy. You can do whatever you want with whatever you want, whenever you want to. Murder your own mother? Nobody cares, you're free to do so! It's anarchy baby!
Hardly. Actually, you're entire analogy of using government sucks. This is software. It's a completely different domain with nothing in common with systems of government. You might as well be comparing licenses to brands of beer, for as much sense as it makes.
Another thing Linux users might miss are man pages that say "go to the info page".
"This man page is not kept up to date except when volunteers want to maintain it. If you find a discrepancy between the man page and the software, please check the Info file, which is the authoritative documentation.
If we find that the things in this man page that are out of date cause significant confusion or complaints, we will stop distributing the man page. The alternative, updating the man page when we update the Info file, is impossible because the rest of the work of maintaining GNU CC leaves us no time for that. The GNU project regards man pages as obsolete and should not let them take time away from other things."
Sort of makes you feel all warm and fuzzy all over doesn't it?
Before you guys start hauling out the firearms and killing each other, why don't you go back reread the article, particularly the page on ports. The emphasis the author makes is that philosophy behind ports is a significant difference from the philosophy behind packages. Even though with most systems you can choose to use source (SRPMS) or packages (RPMS), with their intendent updating mechanisms (apt-get, uprmi), the underlying philosophy of how things work is much different. Rather than write a twenty or thirty seperate articles comparing each Linux distribution to FreeBSD, he chose to write one. Just because Gentoo uses a source-based packaging system is no reason to discount the entire article, because it is still an apt comparison between FreeBSD and Redhat, Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, etc, etc.
People with his pretentious attitude make up a sizable portion of the FreeBSD community.
Unfortunately, people with similar pretentious attitudes make up significant portions of the vocal Linux community as well. You don't believe me? Go read though the comments on this article! It's easy to see elitism in the other guy's camp, but it's very difficult to see it in your own.
Your copy, yes. But you're not alone in the world. You need a community to help you (seems like many BSD folks think they are an island).
FreeBSD has a community. So does NetBSD and OpenBSD. I don't need to achieve "world domination" in order to get good software. No matter what Microsoft does with it's copy of FreeBSD, my copy is still intact, along with the copies of those who develop it. It would change nothing in my life.
If the majority starts to use a closed branch of your code, then you lose something beyond the code - relevance in the real world.
This isn't a popularity contest. I could care less what the majority does. This isn't a zero-sum game. I only need enough people working on my chosen software to keep it going.
Last I checked, FreeBSD was growing fairly rapidly. It might not be growing as fast as Linux, but frankly, who cares? I have no worries that it's going to disappear in the next few years.
I hope that you recognize that this analogy doesn't make any sense. A proprietary derivative of a law has no significance for anybody.
The analogy was meant to demonstrate that no matter how much one changes their own copy of a document, the original document is unchanged.
Take another example. "Alice in Wonderland" is in the public domain. It is not copylefted. So along comes Microsoft and exploits it. They change the wording, the plot, dumb down the puns, etc. Then they release it under a proprietary license, charging a fee to read it (not merely a fee to purchase the paper it's printed on). Further, let's assume that their version of AiW becomes more popular than the original. Does this change anything? No, not really. It's sad that so many people are choosing to read the bastardized version rather than the original, but the original is still there and unchanged. There are no restrictions in place anywhere that prevent people from accessing it. Anyone who wants to can go get it and read it. It's still in the public domain.
Any version of the csh. Its faults as a scripting language are well known.
It's not there to be a scripting language. If you check, none of the scripts that come with OpenBSD are written in csh. They're written in bourne shell instead (also included in the base install). csh is there to be a user shell. The advantages of csh over bourne shell from the *user* perspective are legion. It's a crappy scripting language, but a very decent shell, especially in it's tcsh incarnation.
That experience might not resemble yours, but it resembles a lot of people's experience with Linux. Especially if they're using a source based distribution. I've seen people who download, compile, reboot, and repeat for EVERY single Linux kernel every released. They upgrade on Monday, but if a new minor version comes out and Wednesday they upgrade all over again.
This is not universal, far from it. But it's common enough in some Linux subcultures that it is noticable.
But I notice that you aren't commenting on the "sea of crashing Windows machines." I seriously doubt that these machines crash often enough to be considered a "sea." I do know that they crash however. It's entirely possible to me that in his environment Linux machines are unnecessesarily upgraded just as often as Windows machines crash.
Indeed. And Microsoft, SCO and Sun also charge you for the GNU stuff they have used over the years as well. For example, Sun uses a lot of GPLd software in Solaris. But Mr. McNealy still isn't going to give a free copy of Solaris. You still have to pay for it. And until you've paid for it, you are not a party to the GPL.
It really is about liberty. With BSD there are no restrictions imposed by a king, despot, president or committee. It's liberty as in "you're free, so don't come asking for a book of rules on how to run your life."
It cannot be enslaved, because it's *software*! No matter how much your fold, mangle or mutilate your copy of it, my copy remains unscathed. It cannot be stolen, shackled or hidden away.
If this doesn't make sense to you, consider this analogy: "But the US Constitution wasn't released under the GPL! There's nothing to stop Microsoft from making it proprietary then charging us a fee to exercise our speech, press and religion!"
Then change the name! Taking a cue from a recent/dot article on software nomenclature, I propose "bFree". Even RMS would switch just to be use an OS of that name!
I'm starting to come to the opinion that no software over a certain level of complexity will ever be secure. And that level of complexity is pretty low.
The state of software engineering is starting to collide with the real world. Taking a look at the real world, I see that a simple sledgehammer will force entry into my home, regardless of the number of locks on my door. Unauthorized entry into my automobile is similarly trivial. I have IT managers screaming at me that their security audit managed to crack my login password in only 46 hours, but I have never had any landlord advise me to put steel plating on my front door. What's the difference?
Software over the complexity level of a simple command shell is going to have bugs. It will have undiscovered exploits. It will not be perfect. Yet we still rely on testing to discover an eliminate bugs, even though testing cannot possibly find more than a fraction of them. If you've ever done any commercial software development, you know that the most insidious and intractable bugs are those found by the customer out in the field two years after the software was released.
Can high level languages solve this problem? No! High level languages have complex, buggy, and insecure interpreters. Is Free Software and a thousand eyes the answer? No. It may be the answer to some problems, but not this one.
One solution is to stop demanding new software and new features on existing software, and accept the current state of the art, in hopes that in ten or twenty years today's software will get all the wrinkles out. But that's extremely unrealistic.
The only solution I can see is to accept the fact that all software is buggy, unstable and insecure. I can accept the fact that anyone with a sledgehammer can break down my wooden door in spite of the deadbolt. I also need to accept the fact that anyone determined enough can break into my system despite all the work I've done to secure it.
That doesn't mean I give up, however! It means I have to change the way I think about things. Even as recently as this Tuesday I almost got burned by failing to backup my data. I wasn't thinking in terms of "I could lose it all". My behavior would have been very different if I had. What I need to also do is start thinking "my security could be breached."
Once the general public understands that all software is crap, the industry (and hobbyists) will start releasing software of a different nature. It won't be more secure or less buggy, but it will take into account that it isn't.
Don't know about OpenBSD, but FreeBSD-5.2 runs just fine on my Compaq Presario 2591. Everything but the winmodem worked out-of-the-box. I've never used it, but the FreeBSD GEOM system supports an encrypted filesystem.
My FreeBSD contains a glibc that came bundled in with the Linux compatibility package. No one actually wants to use this thing, but for some strange reasons there's these commercial Linux binaries that require it.
Do you want to go around threatening people? Then continue to use the GPL. On the other hand, if it's just not worth your time to police your users' behaviors, then stick with a freer unrestricted license.
Bob (resembles Pyro but with Luke Skywalker's whiney voice): "Waaah! They're dropping Redhat!"
Tom (resembles Emperor Palpatine but with Magneto's charm): "Come to the dark side, Bob!"
Bob: "The dark side? What's that?"
Tom: "BSD."
Bob: "But that's evil! All my penguin friends tell me so!"
Tom: "You're friends are flightless waterfowl that smell of herring. You are better than that. You have the potential."
Bob: "But it's not under the GPL!"
Tom: "Just pretend it is. There's nothing in the BSD license preventing you from fully and completely treating it as GPL."
Bob: "But it wouldn't really be the GPL. I would know and wouldn't be able to live with myself."
Tom: "We have gcc..."
Bob: "You do?"
Tom: "...and all the other GNU software in ports. Even glibc."
Bob: "Wow, I never knew. No wait! You're trying to trick me! I happen to know that BSD is development in a 'cathedral' like environment, instead of the politically correct chaos of the 'bazaar'."
Tom: "Words, words, just words. Yes, we have some procedures we adhere to, to prevent random code from entering the system, but is that any different from Linus holding the keys to the Linux kernel repository?"
Bob: "But BSD users are elitist!"
Tom: "Yes, we are. But you are worthy to join us. Look in your heart. You know you are better than flightless antarctic waterfowl."
Bob: "Hmmm, I guess you're right. But what about the software? What about my GNOME and MPlayer?"
Tom: "We have them too."
Bob: "But what about my NVidia card?"
Tom: "We have NVidia drivers."
Bob: "Opera? Java? Oracle?"
Tom: "Yes."
Bob: "Well okay then. I guess I'll switch."
Tom: "Fine. First I need you to sign this contract in your own blood. Then you need to renounce all that is good. Finally, you have to wear these horns..."
Back when I was in University computers were still a relatively new thing. There weren't any entrenched ideas about how it should be taught. And Microsoft was a decade away from a monopoly.
Consequently, we were taught computer science. No programming, not server administration, and most definitely not Windows. Very first class was Pascal, just to teach use the basics of programming. The next was assembler to learn the low level stuff about how computers worked.
Then the very next class was Algorithms and Data Structures I. We were to use C on BSD UNIX, neither of which we had been exposed to before. The first assignment was due in a week. This sink-or-swim method taught us two important lessons. First, language wasn't important. Second, it taught us the real-world skill of learning new stuff on our own.
After that the core classes were more data structures and algorithms, programming language concepts (where we learned lisp, prologue, ada and smalltalk, among others), and compiler design and construction. Others outside of the core included networking, operating system principles, etc.
I felt it was a well rounded curricula. But when I talk to recent University graduates, they're learning tech-school stuff like Windows, CISCO routers and Linux administration. While these are important skills, they're not computer science. If you want to learn a trade, go to a tech-school. Real colleges and universities are for education. Knowing the technical details of Windows might serve you for the next five or ten years, but learning the underlying principles of operating system design will serve you for a lifetime.
Aeronautic engineers don't go to school to learn about Beechcraft and Lear, so why are software engineers being taught CISCO routers?
Slashdot Mirror
It only got 1MB Cache and a rather slow harddisk. And it can't take more then 4GB ram so I really can't imagine what kind of task it would be good at.
It's a workstation! It doesn't need more than 4GB of RAM! It's not supposed to be a supercomputer or a server or a kiddie's game box. It's a freaking workstation!
If a hardware manufacturer would give back his changes to you, that would change your life (a little bit).
What's hilarious is that FreeBSD supports my hardware better than Linux does, on both my desktop and my laptop. If someone had told me this would be the case before I got the hardware, I would not have believed them.
Yet fewer manufacturers are "giving back" to FreeBSD compared to Linux. Official manufacturer support doesn't seem to be the issue.
This is what I meant with "island".
It may be an island, but there's lots of bridges off of it! If Microsoft manages to come out with a M$BSD that sucks away all of the FreeBSD developers, there's still NetBSD and OpenBSD to fall back on. Heck, there's still Linux! But this is an unrealistic hypothetical situation. It's not going to happen.
I didn't say it bothered me. I wasn't only responding to you who said that it didn't match your experience. It might not match your experience, but it matches some people's. I don't find it hard to believe that the grandparent post discovered a "sea" of Linux users all busy compiling, rebooting and repeating.
Only recently could you. As little as two months ago Solaris for x86 wasn't free beer.
Yeah I know. He submitted the article to freebsd-advocacy early this week, and we all told him to tone down the condescension. Matter of fact, he did. You should have seen it before! It would be a great article once it runs through a few edits to eliminate the underlying bias and to correct a few misfacts.
I might appreciate your opinion of linux better, if you could set up a BSD box that can withstand a slashdoting...
It's not like Slashdot has never taken down a Linux webserver. Nope, never has. Well, at least not in the last hour...
1. BSD would be anarchy. You can do whatever you want with whatever you want, whenever you want to. Murder your own mother? Nobody cares, you're free to do so! It's anarchy baby!
Hardly. Actually, you're entire analogy of using government sucks. This is software. It's a completely different domain with nothing in common with systems of government. You might as well be comparing licenses to brands of beer, for as much sense as it makes.
Before you guys start hauling out the firearms and killing each other, why don't you go back reread the article, particularly the page on ports. The emphasis the author makes is that philosophy behind ports is a significant difference from the philosophy behind packages. Even though with most systems you can choose to use source (SRPMS) or packages (RPMS), with their intendent updating mechanisms (apt-get, uprmi), the underlying philosophy of how things work is much different. Rather than write a twenty or thirty seperate articles comparing each Linux distribution to FreeBSD, he chose to write one. Just because Gentoo uses a source-based packaging system is no reason to discount the entire article, because it is still an apt comparison between FreeBSD and Redhat, Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, etc, etc.
People with his pretentious attitude make up a sizable portion of the FreeBSD community.
Unfortunately, people with similar pretentious attitudes make up significant portions of the vocal Linux community as well. You don't believe me? Go read though the comments on this article! It's easy to see elitism in the other guy's camp, but it's very difficult to see it in your own.
Your copy, yes. But you're not alone in the world. You need a community to help you (seems like many BSD folks think they are an island).
FreeBSD has a community. So does NetBSD and OpenBSD. I don't need to achieve "world domination" in order to get good software. No matter what Microsoft does with it's copy of FreeBSD, my copy is still intact, along with the copies of those who develop it. It would change nothing in my life.
If the majority starts to use a closed branch of your code, then you lose something beyond the code - relevance in the real world.
This isn't a popularity contest. I could care less what the majority does. This isn't a zero-sum game. I only need enough people working on my chosen software to keep it going.
Last I checked, FreeBSD was growing fairly rapidly. It might not be growing as fast as Linux, but frankly, who cares? I have no worries that it's going to disappear in the next few years.
I hope that you recognize that this analogy doesn't make any sense. A proprietary derivative of a law has no significance for anybody.
The analogy was meant to demonstrate that no matter how much one changes their own copy of a document, the original document is unchanged.
Take another example. "Alice in Wonderland" is in the public domain. It is not copylefted. So along comes Microsoft and exploits it. They change the wording, the plot, dumb down the puns, etc. Then they release it under a proprietary license, charging a fee to read it (not merely a fee to purchase the paper it's printed on). Further, let's assume that their version of AiW becomes more popular than the original. Does this change anything? No, not really. It's sad that so many people are choosing to read the bastardized version rather than the original, but the original is still there and unchanged. There are no restrictions in place anywhere that prevent people from accessing it. Anyone who wants to can go get it and read it. It's still in the public domain.
Any version of the csh. Its faults as a scripting language are well known.
It's not there to be a scripting language. If you check, none of the scripts that come with OpenBSD are written in csh. They're written in bourne shell instead (also included in the base install). csh is there to be a user shell. The advantages of csh over bourne shell from the *user* perspective are legion. It's a crappy scripting language, but a very decent shell, especially in it's tcsh incarnation.
I obviously didn't know BSD well enough to make that system reliable, but with Linux, it has been a rock.
That's the key. A well administered Linux firewall, even running Lindows, is better than a poorly administered OpenBSD firewall.
That experience might not resemble yours, but it resembles a lot of people's experience with Linux. Especially if they're using a source based distribution. I've seen people who download, compile, reboot, and repeat for EVERY single Linux kernel every released. They upgrade on Monday, but if a new minor version comes out and Wednesday they upgrade all over again.
This is not universal, far from it. But it's common enough in some Linux subcultures that it is noticable.
But I notice that you aren't commenting on the "sea of crashing Windows machines." I seriously doubt that these machines crash often enough to be considered a "sea." I do know that they crash however. It's entirely possible to me that in his environment Linux machines are unnecessesarily upgraded just as often as Windows machines crash.
Indeed. And Microsoft, SCO and Sun also charge you for the GNU stuff they have used over the years as well. For example, Sun uses a lot of GPLd software in Solaris. But Mr. McNealy still isn't going to give a free copy of Solaris. You still have to pay for it. And until you've paid for it, you are not a party to the GPL.
It really is about liberty. With BSD there are no restrictions imposed by a king, despot, president or committee. It's liberty as in "you're free, so don't come asking for a book of rules on how to run your life."
It cannot be enslaved, because it's *software*! No matter how much your fold, mangle or mutilate your copy of it, my copy remains unscathed. It cannot be stolen, shackled or hidden away.
If this doesn't make sense to you, consider this analogy: "But the US Constitution wasn't released under the GPL! There's nothing to stop Microsoft from making it proprietary then charging us a fee to exercise our speech, press and religion!"
Then change the name! Taking a cue from a recent /dot article on software nomenclature, I propose "bFree". Even RMS would switch just to be use an OS of that name!
I'm starting to come to the opinion that no software over a certain level of complexity will ever be secure. And that level of complexity is pretty low.
The state of software engineering is starting to collide with the real world. Taking a look at the real world, I see that a simple sledgehammer will force entry into my home, regardless of the number of locks on my door. Unauthorized entry into my automobile is similarly trivial. I have IT managers screaming at me that their security audit managed to crack my login password in only 46 hours, but I have never had any landlord advise me to put steel plating on my front door. What's the difference?
Software over the complexity level of a simple command shell is going to have bugs. It will have undiscovered exploits. It will not be perfect. Yet we still rely on testing to discover an eliminate bugs, even though testing cannot possibly find more than a fraction of them. If you've ever done any commercial software development, you know that the most insidious and intractable bugs are those found by the customer out in the field two years after the software was released.
Can high level languages solve this problem? No! High level languages have complex, buggy, and insecure interpreters. Is Free Software and a thousand eyes the answer? No. It may be the answer to some problems, but not this one.
One solution is to stop demanding new software and new features on existing software, and accept the current state of the art, in hopes that in ten or twenty years today's software will get all the wrinkles out. But that's extremely unrealistic.
The only solution I can see is to accept the fact that all software is buggy, unstable and insecure. I can accept the fact that anyone with a sledgehammer can break down my wooden door in spite of the deadbolt. I also need to accept the fact that anyone determined enough can break into my system despite all the work I've done to secure it.
That doesn't mean I give up, however! It means I have to change the way I think about things. Even as recently as this Tuesday I almost got burned by failing to backup my data. I wasn't thinking in terms of "I could lose it all". My behavior would have been very different if I had. What I need to also do is start thinking "my security could be breached."
Once the general public understands that all software is crap, the industry (and hobbyists) will start releasing software of a different nature. It won't be more secure or less buggy, but it will take into account that it isn't.
Don't know about OpenBSD, but FreeBSD-5.2 runs just fine on my Compaq Presario 2591. Everything but the winmodem worked out-of-the-box. I've never used it, but the FreeBSD GEOM system supports an encrypted filesystem.
FreeBSD's support policy, at least according to their handbook, is 12 months of fixes for each -RELEASE.
Where the heck did you get that number? From the Handbook, "We can not continue to support old releases of FreeBSD forever, although we do support them for many years."
My FreeBSD contains a glibc that came bundled in with the Linux compatibility package. No one actually wants to use this thing, but for some strange reasons there's these commercial Linux binaries that require it.
Do you want to go around threatening people? Then continue to use the GPL. On the other hand, if it's just not worth your time to police your users' behaviors, then stick with a freer unrestricted license.
Bob (resembles Pyro but with Luke Skywalker's whiney voice): "Waaah! They're dropping Redhat!"
Tom (resembles Emperor Palpatine but with Magneto's charm): "Come to the dark side, Bob!"
Bob: "The dark side? What's that?"
Tom: "BSD."
Bob: "But that's evil! All my penguin friends tell me so!"
Tom: "You're friends are flightless waterfowl that smell of herring. You are better than that. You have the potential."
Bob: "But it's not under the GPL!"
Tom: "Just pretend it is. There's nothing in the BSD license preventing you from fully and completely treating it as GPL."
Bob: "But it wouldn't really be the GPL. I would know and wouldn't be able to live with myself."
Tom: "We have gcc..."
Bob: "You do?"
Tom: "...and all the other GNU software in ports. Even glibc."
Bob: "Wow, I never knew. No wait! You're trying to trick me! I happen to know that BSD is development in a 'cathedral' like environment, instead of the politically correct chaos of the 'bazaar'."
Tom: "Words, words, just words. Yes, we have some procedures we adhere to, to prevent random code from entering the system, but is that any different from Linus holding the keys to the Linux kernel repository?"
Bob: "But BSD users are elitist!"
Tom: "Yes, we are. But you are worthy to join us. Look in your heart. You know you are better than flightless antarctic waterfowl."
Bob: "Hmmm, I guess you're right. But what about the software? What about my GNOME and MPlayer?"
Tom: "We have them too."
Bob: "But what about my NVidia card?"
Tom: "We have NVidia drivers."
Bob: "Opera? Java? Oracle?"
Tom: "Yes."
Bob: "Well okay then. I guess I'll switch."
Tom: "Fine. First I need you to sign this contract in your own blood. Then you need to renounce all that is good. Finally, you have to wear these horns..."
So I was playing this song... you know... when my computer starts going "bleep bleep bleep"...
Back when I was in University computers were still a relatively new thing. There weren't any entrenched ideas about how it should be taught. And Microsoft was a decade away from a monopoly.
Consequently, we were taught computer science. No programming, not server administration, and most definitely not Windows. Very first class was Pascal, just to teach use the basics of programming. The next was assembler to learn the low level stuff about how computers worked.
Then the very next class was Algorithms and Data Structures I. We were to use C on BSD UNIX, neither of which we had been exposed to before. The first assignment was due in a week. This sink-or-swim method taught us two important lessons. First, language wasn't important. Second, it taught us the real-world skill of learning new stuff on our own.
After that the core classes were more data structures and algorithms, programming language concepts (where we learned lisp, prologue, ada and smalltalk, among others), and compiler design and construction. Others outside of the core included networking, operating system principles, etc.
I felt it was a well rounded curricula. But when I talk to recent University graduates, they're learning tech-school stuff like Windows, CISCO routers and Linux administration. While these are important skills, they're not computer science. If you want to learn a trade, go to a tech-school. Real colleges and universities are for education. Knowing the technical details of Windows might serve you for the next five or ten years, but learning the underlying principles of operating system design will serve you for a lifetime.
Aeronautic engineers don't go to school to learn about Beechcraft and Lear, so why are software engineers being taught CISCO routers?
Old Fart signing off...