Wind River lays off FreeBSD developers; Q&A 397
In the interests of full disclosure. I'm also nik@freebsd.org, although not a WRS employee. I was employed by BSDi in Europe, before the European team were laid off as part of the WRS acquisition. These questions were answered by WindRiver's PR department.
Q: WRS has already been through two rounds of layoffs in the recent past. Why this third set of lay offs now? Are the FreeBSD developers the only ones affected?
Wind River has only had two rounds of layoffs. During the second round Wind River decided to divest itself of the FreeBSD project. We spent several weeks looking for a suitable corporate sponsor but did not find any company with sufficient interest and financial capability in this challenging economy. This week's layoff of the FreeBSD employees is therefore Wind River's "final option" in executing the plans set in motion by the second round of layoffs.
Q: WRS currently own the trademark "FreeBSD". Do WRS plan to retain the trademark? If so, why? If not, will WRS let the trademark lapse? Or are there plans to transfer it to a third party, such as the FreeBSD Foundation?
Wind River plans to ensure continuation of the altruistic, open stewardship of the FreeBSD trademark. We feel strongly that the FreeBSD project must be protected and encouraged and that a FreeBSD trademark in the wrong hands could be very detrimental. We continue to search for the best solution. No specific third-party has yet been determined, but transfer to a suitable third-party is the leading option being considered.
Q: WRS own the "bsd.com" domain. Will that be retained?
Possibly. Wind River will continue to invest in BSD/OS and participate as a highly interested member of the *BSD community. As such, the bsd.com domain may be important for Wind River. We are weighing this against the needs of the *BSD community and hope to resolve the issue later this month.
Q: What's happening to the "FreeBSD Mall", at freebsdmall.com?
freebsdmall.com continues to operate and take orders, and all new and existing orders from customers for FreeBSD 4.4 or other products will continue to be fulfilled. Wind River is still evaluating its long term options and strategy for the FreeBSD Mall, but plans to maintain its presence and service either internally or externally.
Q: As part of the BSDi acquisition, WRS will (presumably) have picked up customers who had subscribed to the BSDi CD sets of FreeBSD. Will WRS continue to service those customers, or are their subscriptions now cancelled?
Like all customer contracts, subscription orders will continue to be fulfilled.
Q: BSDi (and, it seemed, WRS) had made some headway in producing additional FreeBSD boxed products to go in to the retail channel. Will WRS continue to do this?
Wind River is currently continuing activities to promote FreeBSD 4.4 through the retail channel. Future FreeBSD releases will probably not be produced or distributed by Wind River.
Q: Will WRS continue to produce the usual 4 disc CD sets of FreeBSD, including one for the recently released FreeBSD 4.4?
Yes, for FreeBSD 4.4.
Q: WRS had been funding work on the FreeBSD Handbook, in order to print the second edition in the near future. [ Disclaimer, I'm co-editor of this work, along with your employee, Murray Stokely ] Will WRS continue with plans to print the second edition of the FreeBSD Handbook?
Wind River will encourage any stewards that emerge to take on FreeBSD publication to complete and publish this work.
Q: WRS houses the "FreeBSD Test Lab" at its Alameda campus. Will WRS continue to host this facility?
No. Some equipment from this lab will be transferred to Yahoo! which hosts much of the build structure equipment for FreeBSD, as well as the primary CVS source repository and main FreeBSD mail server. Wind River does not plan to maintain the FreeBSD test lab at its Alameda, CA headquarters.
Re:What happens after FreeBSD 4.4 then? (Score:4, Informative)
It is and will remain a volunteer project.
The matter that corporations decide(d) to employ certain developers full-time to work on FreeBSD was only for the corporation's own benefit.
For god's sake people, it is not like the people they laid off now cease to exist.
Re:The future (Score:4, Informative)
We have 5.0 standing for November 2002 [this was changed from November 2001 due to the fact that we weren't quite satisfied with the current state and thought things were missing].
Until we release 5.0 in 2002 we continue to work on 4.x, so we will most likely see 4.5, 4.6, 4.7 and possible 4.8.
Releases will very probably be going through DaemonNews, since it looked like WRS shows no interest of doing so after 4.4.
So possibly all of you subscribers might want to look for a new distributor.
Re:What happens after FreeBSD 4.4 then? (Score:5, Informative)
Hmm, no.
FreeBSD is still very much alive, and development of both 4-STABLE and -CURRENT continue as ever. AFAIK, none of the people being laid off are core team members or even really active source developers. Most of them work(ed) on documentation and improving the FreeBSD product line (CD box sets, etc.).
At the moment the release date for 5.x has been pushed out until late next year, partly because we've lost a few developers to real work, but also because we bit off more than we could chew... Rewriting the kernel for preemptive fine grain threading is a big task.
Other aspects of the project continue to be very actively developed. The Ports collection [freebsd.org] is almost at 6000 ports.
It is really sad to see people laid off, but this is just a side effect of the dotcom crash.
Regards,
-Jeremy
Re:merge back to NetBSD or OpenBSD? (Score:5, Informative)
FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are operating systems and split off for various reasons and now serve their own niches.
Linux is only a kernel. It becomes an operating system only due to the fact that people created their own distributions.
And if we look at the distributions, there are over 100 distributions (at least).
So ask yourself, which part is more ripe for consolidation then?
Re:merge back to NetBSD or OpenBSD? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, the most basic reason is that there are three different objectives, which aren't easily met in a single operating system:
BSD/OS is a proprietary implementation of BSD by Berkeley Software Design, who's name coincidentally enough has the same initials as Berkeley Standard Distribution. They're a commercial organization, so you get support etc. from them, whereas the others are ad-hoc. This doesn't mean there's no support and no product upgrading of course, just that they tend to proceed according to the developer's wishes rather than contractual obligations.
Re:merge back to NetBSD or OpenBSD? + emBSD (Score:3, Informative)
There is another small BSD offshoot in the name of emBSD [embsd.org]. It is a stripped down version of OpenBSD and its primary objective is to create a firewall and/or router using as little hardware as possible (ideally with not moving parts like a hard drive).
Re:HP/UX, FreeBSD (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Differences (Score:4, Informative)
NetBSD grew out of FreeBSD during an uncomfortable time when the FreeBSD regents, the individuals who guide FreeBSD's growth in a kind of guiding council, were focussed on ix86, and only ix86 for their OS. The NetBSD team's goal has been portability above all else, and can be likened to rabbits. You name the platform, the NetBSD guys are already installed there, or working on a distro for it.
OpenBSD grew out of NetBSD, as certain individuals wanted a stronger emphasis on security. OpenBSD inherited a fairly wide platform base from its NetBSD foundation, but their primary goal is security by default.
If you needed a system to sit exposed to the internet, I cannot recommend OpenBSD strongly enough. If you need a system to serve data quickly using inexpensive hardware, FreeBSD has many performance advantages, even over the linux 2.4 tree. And, if you want Unix on your Atari Falcon, go grab NetBSD, you nutcase. =)
Oh, and if you want a Unix your grandmother can be comfortable with, go get OS X.
Re:preface.. (Score:5, Informative)
Who volunteers for FreeBSD anymore?
The numbers are amazing.
FreeBSD developers chase off anyone who doesn't already have extensive experience.
That's definately not true. I have gained most of my experience during my years as part of the developers.
Furthermore, criticism isn't necessarily meant as discouragement, but don't forget that if you mention ideas to the BSD developers (speaking in general, not just the committers) that most of these people have made a living in programming and Unix before most people even heard of Linux or BSD as alternative to Windows.
There is a difference in age and mindset between the BSD community and the Linux community. I often see the BSD community to be geared around 30'ish whilst the Linux community seems to have people around 20'ish in there. Of course, both have their exceptions on the old and young ages.
Furthermore, what I noticed (and I have touched a lot of different Unix systems in my past, including different Linux distributions) is that the mindset in the BSD community seems less focused on hacking up stuff, but more on adding well-tested code -call it more mature code if you like-.
Again, this has its exceptions on both side.
And do note, I am not saying that either is technologically more advanced than the other, I am merely saying that for my wishes and desires BSD was better in that it was a full operating system with a mature way of development behind it. YMMV.
By the time someone has extensive experience, they're usually working on Linux already.
Quite possible. But everyone is allowed to send patches to the BSD projects, just make sure you take all comments merely as sharing of experience on how to approach things. I know my C skillset improved by getting `lectured' time and time again about things. And not just C, but also the ability to develop things as a team, do maintenance work, technical writing, and the list goes on.
It is quite possible that the bar to entering and hacking on Linux might be lower, but does it, in the end, make it more stable or faster or..? Do not forget, most subsystems, VFS, VM, drivers, are pretty specialist kinds of source code which do verge a lot of knowledge. Not to mention designing APIs. That's the beauty of peer review. Either people confirm my idea is sound and solid or they tell me I should recheck my understanding of things. But it is in the human nature to take most criticism as a scolding.
Re:Differences (Score:2, Informative)
FreeBSD runs on i386, and Alpha.
Btw, just for information: Sparc64, PPC and IA-64 are being worked on and committed to the sourcetree.
Re:Differences (Score:4, Informative)
NetBSD and FreeBSD simultaneously grew out of the 386BSD project which was headed by Bill Jolitz. It was a project that ported 4.4BSD to the i386.
There's no such thing as "FreeBSD regents". You're thinking of the Regents of the University of California, who owned the (open source) license to BSD. They're a bunch of university administrators and have nothing to do with operating system development.
In fact, NetBSD is technically older than "FreeBSD", as FreeBSD was then just a handful of people (4 or 5) who started releasing patches to 386BSD called the "386BSD Patchkit".
You're right about the rest.
For your (and anyone reading this) review, see
Re:fsck (Score:2, Informative)
And to ansewr nvrrobx's question of Apple buying up the FreeBSD crew; Let me point out, Jordan Hubord, now works at apple, and let me also point out he cares about the people who worked under him at WC CDROM/BSDi/WRS, and I know of at least one possable "offer" there. Im sure there were others made also. I think its officaly under the Darwin Project, I donno, I don't keep tabs that much.
I'm just a blabber mouth
Re:Differences (Score:2, Informative)
Though true, it also was due in part to a conflict of personalities. Pretty much anyone who knows (or of him, I've never met him personally) Theo de Raadt see him as immensely talented, but also fairly abrasive. This had about as much to do with him leaving and forming OpenBSD as anything else.
This is not to disparage Theo. He has contributed a lot to not only OpenBSD, but other systems as well. There is a lot more code sharing among the BSDs than most people realize. Any holes found in OpenBSD get notified elsewhere. I know that the USB stack is fairly common across all systems, in facet the code has CVS ident strings for both FreeBSD and NetBSD.