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FreeBSD Changes Hands Again
Posted by
michael
on Tue Jan 15, 2002 09:31 AM
from the hot-potato dept.
from the hot-potato dept.
wackysootroom writes: "On January 14th, Wind River Systems, Inc. agreed to transfer its sponsorship of FreeBSD to FreeBSD Mall, Inc.
This should be a good thing, since general pessimism abounded when Wind River took over Walnut Creek's BSD sponsorship. Here is the full story." There's also a story on news.com. We published a note about this in the BSD section but it deserves front-page treatment.
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Awesome. (Score:3, Insightful)
How About Apple? (Score:4, Informative)
Darwin 1's "BSD layer" was based on FreeBSD 3.2 (and to be fair, signifigant chunks of NetBSD and OpenBSD).
Since then Apple engineers have kept sync with individual packages with a goal to be able to keep in step with more and more of the OS until they are A) using the latest stable branc and B) able to incorporate entire new releases with about 3-months of lag time.
ANYWAY, I am surprised that Apple hasn't stepped in to assist the FBSD group... It's where they get a lot of their OS bits & pieces from, and they have hired / are currently employing several FreeBSD coders.
BSD subscriptions - what good are they? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:BSD subscriptions - what good are they? (Score:5, Informative)
Not a whole lot in general, some of them give money back though. It's cheaper just to download the ISO and send your money directly though.
There is also a DVD subscription, which again contains nothing you couldn't download. However it has all the tar balls for the ports, and the full CVS history of the distribution. That's pretty cool. Still if you have all the bandwidth in the world it isn't anything you can't fetch on your own.
I'm not aware of any that have pre-built ports (other then the normal packages stuff), but there are multiple places selling subscriptions, so who knows.
Parent
Re:BSD and Hope..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Linux has a benevolent dictator with many, many contributors, FreeBSD has a larger number of dictators with fewer contributors. I suppose you could say that Linus operates like a beloved king and FreeBSD operates like Athenian democracy - it's democratic if and only if you can become a citizen, but even that moderate democracy seems to keep people happy, and may even be considered a more advanced political structure than Linux has; what happens if Linus gets run over by a beer truck? A crisis of succession. Probably Alan Cox, but every succession becomes more dicey. So it goes with dynasties. FreeBSD actually has more power centers and formalized political procedures, so it's pretty resistant to nonsense like these changes of sponsorship.
Parent
Re:BSD and Hope..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's see, in the past while "FreeBSD" has been moved from Walnut Creek CDROM, to BSDi and then to Wind River, and now back to Walnut Creek CDROM (aka FreeBSD Mall). This has had one big influence on the design of FreeBSD, and that was the fine grained SMP locking for 5.0-CURRENT. BSDi released the source code of BSD/OS to FreeBSD developers, so that the kernel hackers could get into the niggly details of how they implemented their locking, which was known to work well on SMP systems.
Wind River had little influence, although they did a lot of work on getting the FreeBSD handbook into a state where it could be published.
The main design influences come from personal coders. The biggest recent influence on the design (remember the OS is not new) has probably been Whistle Communications, who have a number of people working on FreeBSD and have contributed a number of interesting subsystems, like NetGraph, and the kernel threading code going into 5.0-CURRENT. Yahoo! have a big influence on bug fixing, because they tend to work their boxes hard.
But on the whole, most of the code comes from individuals, although the most productive coders are those being paid to work full time. There were a number of such people at WC/BSDi/Wind River. Discussions occur on the mailing lists (mostly freebsd-arch).
Bandwidth has been a problem with the moves, because the main FreeBSD servers were on Walnut Creek CDROM servers. When Wind River bought BSDi, they didn't buy the CDROM bussiness, which lead to the downfall of ftp.freesoftware.com (aka ftp.freebsd.org), which used to be ftp.cdrom.com. Hopefully this change will lead to that coming back... ftp.freebsd.org is currently hosted in the Netherlands.
The problem now is that because of the 'official sponsor' vacumn created by Wind River when they announced that they were dropping FreeBSD, two other groups stepped forward. The first was the FreeBSD Foundation [freebsdfoundation.org], which is a non profit established to fund FreeBSD (see recent announcements concerning Java for FreeBSD), and the second is Daemon News [daemonnew.org], who recently announced their own FreeBSD CD distribution, via "BSD Mall". Confused yet? How big a problem this is is yet to be seen, but anyway, the only real reason for CD's is to give them to Linux users... ;-)
FreeBSD has always been a one stop OS, and this is going to confuse things. If you're a Linux geek, try FreeBSD. You'll find that a one stop OS is nice; you don't have to hunt for patches, or wait till your distribution gets the latest kernel, or worry about matching glibc with your kernel... With FreeBSD you decide if you want to run -STABLE or -CURRENT, and you just track it. The only time you have to worry about versions is with external packages.
Regards,
-Jeremy
Parent
Re:BSD and Hope..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Updating FreeBSD is done entirely with CVS. With one command, you can update the source for everything including all applications installed through the Ports collection. (Well, technically it updates the list of files to download, but it works the same)
In one command, "make buildworld", you can then recompile everything on the base system using custom compiler flags for a large increase in performance. In another command, "Make installworld", it all installs and replaces the old stuff.
Updating an application installed via ports is as simple as:
"cd
"make deinstall"
"make reinstall"
While the updating system is nice, I personally feel that the biggest benefit of the system is that *everything* can be compiled easily with custom compiler flags. Running a system in which nearly everything was compiled for a 386 has always irritated me, because it was holding back the performance of the system. It doesn't matter for many programs (like vi, for example) but it surely does with many other applications. Who has the time or inclination to recompile everything manually?
That said, it does have a disadvantage. The kernel and the base system are very closely tied together. So closely, that if many of the base system's core files are improved in a CVS update, you not only "can" compile the full base system as well as the kernel--you *must* compile the whole thing. This takes a fairly long time. Fortunately, there are ways to speed this up immensely, but it still takes about 45 minutes even on a dual-AthlonMP with a 10,000RPM SCSI hard drive.
I know of many people that swore by apt-get and switched to FreeBSD after trying it--and I also know of many that have tried FreeBSD and went backto Linux. Usually because Linux is easier to use as a pretty graphical system since everything comes preinstalled on many distros.
...however... *My* Xfree86 and GNOME are compiled such that they are far faster than they would be on, say, Redhat.
Parent
Re:BSD and Hope..... some corrections (Score:3, Informative)
For one thing, don't underestimate the influence of BSDi and WRS in paying people to work on FreeBSD full time. A lot of work (good or bad depending on who you talk to) came out of that. WRS didn't have any bad intentions when they bought BSDi as far as FreeBSD, I think it was more that they didn't know quite what they were getting (at least some people thought BSD/OS was an enhanced version of FreeBSD) and once they had it they didn't quite know what to do with it. FreeBSD kept going despite that, however, but corporate sponsorship is still quite important to FreeBSD. The main reason is that companies have money.
Secondly, while developers who used to work at Whistle do have a pretty good chunk of influence, it isn't necessairly Whistle driving that. KSE (the scheduler activations stuff) was originally threshed out by Jason Evans, Dan Eischen, and Julian Elischer. Julian is the only one of those who used to be a Whistle employee. He is currently working on the implementation, but he hasn't been employed by Whistle in quite some time. If you wanted to list the key architects in FreeBSD, you would find that they come from several different companies all over the place, and there really isn't a massive concetration of them in one company relative to another. The only exception to that might be the old WC/BSDi of which half the group now works at Apple.
Thirdly, the bandwidth isn't quite so bad as you make it. The actual development servers have not been at WC for quite some time (at least 1.5 years now IIRC) and never were at WRS. While ftp.freebsd.org did have its ups and downs for a bit, the actual devel servers have worked without a hitch. ftp.freesoftare.com was already somewhat on the way out before WRS stepped in, they two events just happened to coincide.
As for the Foundation, it isn't really a competitor to either DN or FreeBSDMall. The Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit designed to accept donations. It doesn't have any plans to sell CD's AFAIK. The Foundation was first setup well over a year ago and may have pre-dated the WC and BSDI merger/acquisition, but I'm not sure of that. I don't think having multiple CD distributors will be all that bad. However, I think FreeBSDMall has an edge over BSDMall, so it might be interesting to see how that pans out. One thing I would point out is that like WC did in the "good ole days", FreeBSDMall employs the chief release engineer for FreeBSD.
Anyways, you were mostly on, but there were a few subtle things you didn't quite have right.
- jhb
Opinion on WindRiver and FreeBSD & Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
Wind River's acquisition of FreeBSD was to respond to Linux. Has to be. What other reason could have motivated the purchase? What did they really buy except a name (no real IP)?
Since the commercial threat of Linux has diminished (look at the market's reaction to Linux companies) Wind River doesn't need to maintain FreeBSD anymore.
Personally, I'm glad that FreeBSD won't be part of a marketing plan, a business model, or a competition strategy. The support structure for FreeBSD will be what it should be - developers writing code for the betterment of the code itself.
Re:Opinion on WindRiver and FreeBSD & Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
business model is to sell FreeBSD-related stuff,
including CDs, books, toys and clothes.
The difference is that it's a sensible, proven,
small-scale business model, not an underpants-
stealing model from the late 90s.
Parent
This is a really good thing. (Score:3, Informative)
FreeBSD is very much alive. If I pulled the FreeBSD nodes out of the Internet you wold not be able to read this. It is a large part of the backbone routing and firewalling. FreeBSD powers more than 25% of all web-sites visited daily. It powers all of Yahoo and the actual work behind the MS load balancers at Hotmail.
Why should FreeBSD be "controlled" by a company? (Score:5, Interesting)
The field would benefit from friendly competition, and the playing field for such competition should be level.
Alas, this is not the case. Because the FreeBSD trademark has not been transferred to the FreeBSD Foundation (as was promised more than a year ago) and will become the property of FreeBSD Mall, FreeBSD Mall has the ability to put pressure on any potential competitor by restricting its use of the trademark.
It is incumbent upon the users and developers of FreeBSD to prevent conditions so potentially destructive to competition from arising. The trademark should be transferred at once, and the FreeBSD Project should not designate either vendor as the "official" one.
--Brett Glass
Stickers? (Score:3, Funny)
Hell, I'll buy 4.5 if it comes with the stickers like the previous versions.