Well, if we're talking about people who have _contributed_ to FreeBSD (i.e., had their work committed, as opposed to having the ability to directly check in submissions by themselves or others) you want this URL: http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/contrib-additional .html
I really can't be bothered counting all those names, but there are several hundred there at least.
This raises important points. I have seen a lot of people getting excited about the recent spate of companies announcing "support" for Linux in some form.
In much of this, I think an important point has been missed:
These companies are not supporting linux (e.g., SGI releasing XFS) for the good of mankind - they're doing it to try and increase their market position, bring down Microsoft in their market niche, to make money off of the trend, or to prop up a failing company (arguably the tactic of SGI).
To continue with SGI as an example - they haven't exactly been doing great in recent years by most measures. What we are seeing now from them is quite plausibly just the action of "throwing a few trinkets" to the crowd for the benefit of allying themselves with the media spotlight, and thereby, hopefully, hitching themselves to the Linux bandwagon and saving their skins by winning the hearts of the drooling linux masses (not a flame, all "popular" movements have these kinds of people). They seem to have been fairly successful so far without even a working XFS port.
Open Source Software has become an important buzzword - in order to appear "modern" these companies must make token gestures to support "the movement".
I seriously have my doubts about their long-term commitments to open-source: the struggle right now is to bring down Microsoft's near-complete dominance of the computer industry, and when/if that is achieved, we'll suddenly see each of these companies positioning themselves for the nice vacant spot at the top of the food-chain.
The moral: take what you can from the big companies, but never turn your back on them:-)
> Linux, of course, has struck a nice balance (MY > OPINION, NOT NECCESARILY YOURS). Each stable > tree doesn't change things too much (as is > proper), ie: 2.0.0 kernel and 2.0.38 kernel run > same programs (or should), unless overwise > stopped by a bug. The development series is > here people get to throw around ideas, and hack > things up.
This is exactly the concept of FreeBSD 3.2-stable, vs. 4.0-current. The only things which go into -stable are bugfixes and incremental (well-tested, backwards-compatible wherever possible) changes.
In the past, there has been a long turnaround between major revisions (those which are not fully backwards-compatible and which contain significant feature changes), but this is changing. 4.0 is due out in (I believe) Q1 2000.
No more trolling than the person I responded to was.
Sure, Linux is just a kernel, but the kernel isn't what applications see - they see a complete operating system environment.
I know from personal experience that binaries (especially packages) from Suse, Redhat, debian, et al will not all run interchangably - they expect different things in different places, with different library versions, etc.
Sure, there are quite a few differences between the three BSDs. I claim there are as many, if not more, differences between the linux distributions.
Methinks you should be subscribed to freebsd-security, which is the first place security patches for FreeBSD normally show up.
Bugtraq isn't the proper forum for 0-day exploit fixes for a free OS (if nothing else, it's moderated, so things only get through when Aleph1 is awake and online).
I'm curious about why having a team of, oh, 100 or so people (http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/staff-committers. html) who have privileges to DIRECTLY COMMIT CODE INTO FREEBSD means it's harder to get code in than Linux, which has only a single person who can touch the official source code.
By subscribing to cvs-all@freebsd.org you'd see that a large proportion of the above regularly do exactly that - commit source code changes into the official base system.
For the record, "-core" is simply a management body for arbitrating technical disputes and so forth. They're not a commit bottleneck through whom all changes must be passed, or we'd get nothing done.
Note that I'm talking about Linux, i.e., the kernel - the various distributions (sensibly) do have larger committer teams.
Now, not everyone on the above list is allowed to go playing around in every part of the system, but surely the equation "100 > 1" must mean something to you?
> BSD Licence promotes fragmentation by allowing > changes to be made without these changes being > released back to the "open changes pool", > this will cause multiple groups to have their > own little *BSD.
I see. This must be why 3 BSD distributions is "more fragmented" than 20 Linux distributions.
Mathematics in your world must be based on some interesting axioms:-)
> What I want to know is why there isn't a ton of > distributions of *BSDs all over the place. The > BSD license is more permissive than GPL, so > what's the problem?
Good point. Linux fans like to flame *BSD for being "fragmented", while ignoring the fact that there are only 3 largely co-operating BSDs, compared to over 20 largely co-operating Linux distributions.
Personally, I think it's because people are quite satisfied with what they get with at least one of the three BSDs, so see no need to go and create their own MyBSD to do things their way. Contrary to what we see posted a lot on Slashdot, this indicates/stability/ of the BSD camps in that they don't keep splitting off every time someone has a new idea they want to implement.
I think the way the three BSDs direct themselves has got the spectrum of "interests" fairly well-covered: security, portability, general-purpose (for want of a better term). Most users fit quite comfortably into these categories, so do their development work for there. And of course, many of the changes are cross-pollinated between the three species
Most commercial unices contain BSD code: AIX, SunOS, etc. There has been some interesting discussion about this on the freebsd-hackers mailing list in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
There was an article just the other day about this on slashdot - search for "Head Transplants".
Kris
Not quite as bad as that. Check the PGP FAQ which talks about the relative merits of the different algorithms.
Well, if we're talking about people who have _contributed_ to FreeBSD (i.e., had their work committed, as opposed to having the ability to directly check in submissions by themselves or others) you want this URL: http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/contrib-additional .html
I really can't be bothered counting all those names, but there are several hundred there at least.
This raises important points. I have seen a lot of people getting excited about the recent spate of companies announcing "support" for Linux in some form.
:-)
In much of this, I think an important point has been missed:
These companies are not supporting linux (e.g., SGI releasing XFS) for the good of mankind - they're doing it to try and increase their market position, bring down Microsoft in their market niche, to make money off of the trend, or to prop up a failing company (arguably the tactic of SGI).
To continue with SGI as an example - they haven't exactly been doing great in recent years by most measures. What we are seeing now from them is quite plausibly just the action of "throwing a few trinkets" to the crowd for the benefit of allying themselves with the media spotlight, and thereby, hopefully, hitching themselves to the Linux bandwagon and saving their skins by winning the hearts of the drooling linux masses (not a flame, all "popular" movements have these kinds of people). They seem to have been fairly successful so far without even a working XFS port.
Open Source Software has become an important buzzword - in order to appear "modern" these companies must make token gestures to support "the movement".
I seriously have my doubts about their long-term commitments to open-source: the struggle right now is to bring down Microsoft's near-complete dominance of the computer industry, and when/if that is achieved, we'll suddenly see each of these companies positioning themselves for the nice vacant spot at the top of the food-chain.
The moral: take what you can from the big companies, but never turn your back on them
> Linux, of course, has struck a nice balance (MY > OPINION, NOT NECCESARILY YOURS). Each stable
> tree doesn't change things too much (as is > proper), ie: 2.0.0 kernel and 2.0.38 kernel run > same programs (or should), unless overwise
> stopped by a bug. The development series is
> here people get to throw around ideas, and hack
> things up.
This is exactly the concept of FreeBSD 3.2-stable, vs. 4.0-current. The only things which go into -stable are bugfixes and incremental (well-tested, backwards-compatible wherever possible) changes.
In the past, there has been a long turnaround between major revisions (those which are not fully backwards-compatible and which contain significant feature changes), but this is changing. 4.0 is due out in (I believe) Q1 2000.
No more trolling than the person I responded to was.
Sure, Linux is just a kernel, but the kernel isn't what applications see - they see a complete operating system environment.
I know from personal experience that binaries (especially packages) from Suse, Redhat, debian, et al will not all run interchangably - they expect different things in different places, with different library versions, etc.
Sure, there are quite a few differences between the three BSDs. I claim there are as many, if not more, differences between the linux distributions.
Methinks you should be subscribed to freebsd-security, which is the first place security patches for FreeBSD normally show up.
Bugtraq isn't the proper forum for 0-day exploit fixes for a free OS (if nothing else, it's moderated, so things only get through when Aleph1 is awake and online).
I'm curious about why having a team of, oh, 100 or so people (http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/staff-committers. html) who have privileges to DIRECTLY COMMIT CODE INTO FREEBSD means it's harder to get code in than Linux, which has only a single person who can touch the official source code.
By subscribing to cvs-all@freebsd.org you'd see that a large proportion of the above regularly do exactly that - commit source code changes into the official base system.
For the record, "-core" is simply a management body for arbitrating technical disputes and so forth. They're not a commit bottleneck through whom all changes must be passed, or we'd get nothing done.
Note that I'm talking about Linux, i.e., the kernel - the various distributions (sensibly) do have larger committer teams.
Now, not everyone on the above list is allowed to go playing around in every part of the system, but surely the equation "100 > 1" must mean something to you?
Cool, you should run the "uptime" client on that box to submit stats.
:)
http://uptime.hexon.cx/
I'd like to encourage everyone who has a long-lived box to participate in the project.
Currently the BSDs are doing very very well in the stats. Go team!
> BSD Licence promotes fragmentation by allowing
:-)
> changes to be made without these changes being
> released back to the "open changes pool",
> this will cause multiple groups to have their
> own little *BSD.
I see. This must be why 3 BSD distributions is "more fragmented" than 20 Linux distributions.
Mathematics in your world must be based on some interesting axioms
> What I want to know is why there isn't a ton of
/stability/ of the BSD camps in that they don't keep splitting off every time someone has a new idea they want to implement.
> distributions of *BSDs all over the place. The
> BSD license is more permissive than GPL, so
> what's the problem?
Good point. Linux fans like to flame *BSD for being "fragmented", while ignoring the fact that there are only 3 largely co-operating BSDs, compared to over 20 largely co-operating Linux distributions.
Personally, I think it's because people are quite satisfied with what they get with at least one of the three BSDs, so see no need to go and create their own MyBSD to do things their way. Contrary to what we see posted a lot on Slashdot, this indicates
I think the way the three BSDs direct themselves has got the spectrum of "interests" fairly well-covered: security, portability, general-purpose (for want of a better term). Most users fit quite comfortably into these categories, so do their development work for there. And of course, many of the changes are cross-pollinated between the three species
Most commercial unices contain BSD code: AIX, SunOS, etc. There has been some interesting discussion about this on the freebsd-hackers mailing list in the past.