FreeBSD 4.5 NOT Released (Updated)

Jordon Hubbard writes: "The latest release in the FreeBSD 4.X branch has been released after an extensive release engineering process. Important bugfixes for the TCP stack and NFS are included in this release. You can view the release notes and find a mirror here." Update: 01/24 21:42 GMT by Hemos :Fake submissions, not really released. Yah. Comedic value provided for the day.

Twelve Days of Codefreeze

[kenneth_martens]

On the very bottom of the FreeBSD 4.5 Release page, there the following: "It's been pointed out that this table is rather boring. Bruce Mah gave a slightly more interesting rendition of the 12 days of Code- Freeze. [freebsd.org] ".

An excerpt from that poem:

> As promised we've now entered the code freeze for RELENG_4. Please
> submit all MFC requests to [e-mail] before committing to this
> branch.

For your hacking and/or holiday pleasure, I give you: "The Twelve Days of Code-Freeze"

Sung to the tune of:"The Twelve Days of Christmas"
Words by:[e-mail]

On the first day of code-freeze, my -hackers gave to me:
A bad patch in the src/ tree.

On the second day of code-freeze, my -hackers gave to me:
Two flamewars,
And a bad patch in the src/ tree.

On the third day of code-freeze, my -hackers gave to me:
Three bikesheds,
Two flamewars,
And a bad patch in the src/ tree.

On the fourth day of code-freeze, my -hackers gave to me:
Four broken worlds,
Three bikesheds,
Two flamewars,
And a bad patch in the src/ tree.

Check this [freebsd.org] page for the rest.

*BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying

Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

Recently, Slashdot confirmed that FreeBSD has been bucked away by WindRiver to FreeBSD Mall, for a carton of Winston's and a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. This only serves to confirm the fact that FreeBSD is unwanted, doomed to be passed around like a harelipped orphan from one foster parent to another.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

Fact: *BSD is dead

It's not dead!

[La1d]

It is now official - Slashdot has confirmed: *BSD is alive and thriving

Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered AC crowd when Slashdot reported that FreeBSD has released a new version. This comes right on the heels of freeBSD going home, when Wind River and FreeBSD Mall Inc. published a joint press-release today announcing the sale of Wind River's FreeBSD assets to Bob Bruce, founder of Walnut Creek CDROM--the company that in 1993 first published FreeBSD. This was the company that almost a decade ago declared to the world that *BSD is alive and thriving!

The FreeBSD Mall web site has been redesigned, with many new products, including FreeBSD CDs, books, polo shirts, microfiber jackets, boxer shorts, bumper stickers, lapel pins, several different styles of t-shirts, mouse pads, travel mugs, buttons, sticker sheets, plate logos, denim shirts, CD cases, and paid support options.

FreeBSD and its close relatives NetBSD and OpenBSD all are open-source projects, meaning that anyone can see, change and distribute the underlying source code.

With the main FreeBSD distribution back in the hands of the record holding Free Software distributor Bob Bruce, trolls posting that *BSD is dead had better keep the "anonymous" in "anonymous coward."

Re:Erm, OK, this is bizarre...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why's everbody always picking on you?

I remember one day at Fry's there was a sign saying "Linux Day! Guest speaker Jordan Hubbard!"

I just wanted to curl up and die after that. So I attended the Video Conference, and some dumb lady kept bugging you abou getting her Epson printer working in Linux. I was about ready to tell her to shut the "F" up.

FreeBSD is a great OS, and I wish OSX the best of luck in bettering the computer world.

Re:Erm, OK, this is bizarre...

[Anonymous DWord]

Finally, my first name is spelled "Jordan", like the river. A sure sign that this was a hoax. :)

Well, I don't know. That's what gave it validity, I thought. If it had been spelt correctly, on the other hand, there's no way I'd believe it!

Don't you mean...

[sulli]

from the yhbt-yhl-hand dept. ?

I just killed my 4.4 download, you bastards!

[warpSpeed]

I was half way done with a 4.4 ISO download. Saw this, said "whoohoo", clicked cancel. Then I read it was a fake.... yeah real funny.

Re:*Linux is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD is dying! If you look at the number of curly braces in the code you'll see that linux and solaris have a lot more. Why? Because they make more code blocks. If FreeBSD has 2.03x10^5 '{' characters, and OpenBSD, because they're so anal, have twice as many, then that means that *BSD only has a few hundred thousand when you put them all together. This, coupled with the fact that the Taliban have collapsed and NATO is still together leads one to the unavoidable conclusion that Windows is dying!

I mean, BSD.

News verification team, come in please...

[Vexler]

So I guess the earlier /. news article about the Irishman solving the zero-point energy problem was actually true? *grin*

Yeah. The oh well guy again.

[rice_burners_suck]

I'm running FreeBSD 6.8-RELEASE, and it's the greatest piece of software ever made. As an operating system, it's a lean, mean serving machine. For example, my 386 SX with 4 megs of RAM typically serves about 10,000 FTP users simultaneously. And X Window System, running KDE and GNOME simultaneously, along with about a thousand highly intensive applications, continue to run and function with perfect responsiveness. In fact, I could probably run twice the load, and it would make everything execute even faster.

"This is because I'm from the future. I came here in a time machine that you invented. Now I need your help to get back to the year 1985."

"Hmmm... Mr. Anderson. You disappoint me."

"You can't scare me with this gestapo crap. I know my rights, I want my fluxcapacitor back."

"Well, tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a fluxcapacitor, if you're, unable, to flux?"

***** OK! OK! JUST KIDDING! *****

The release of FreeBSD 4.5 is just around the corner. The good folks in core are doing a marvelous job, and I am confident that this release will be the best yet, and that as always, the next one following this will be even better.

As it is, amazing improvements have been made to the system since 4.4-RELEASE. I know because that's what my production servers are running right now, but for my desktop, I like to use -STABLE, which is pretty darn good.

Oh well.