OpenBSD Fork Bitrig Announced 178
With the goal of bringing more experimental development to the OpenBSD
code base, a few developers have announced a fork named
Bitrig. According to their FAQ, Bitrig aims to build a small system
targeting only modern hardware and "be a very commercially friendly code base by using non-viral licenses where possible." Their first step toward that goal was removing GCC in favor of LLVM/Clang. The project roadmap shows their future goals as adding FUSE support, improving multiprocessing, porting the system to ARM, and replacing the GNU C++ library with LLVM's.
Re:Theo is going to me sooooo mad (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think he will be mad about that. Mad about the devs leaving, sure, but not about the commercial fork. If they contribute back to the main trunk, then I think all is well.
Seriously, Theo may be a bit aggressive, but he's not an idiot, the BSD license allows this more clearly than anything else out there short of public domain.
-nB
Re:could be interesting... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Theo is going to me sooooo mad (Score:4, Informative)
The double edged sword of the BSD License. I'm sure they will probably contribute back but unlike the GPL there is nothing legally to compel them to.
That is not a problem from the perspective of the BSD people. In their experience, code being contributed back only because of legal reasons is so rarely of the quality that anyone would consider merging it back to the original OS that it does not matter to worry too much about that code. Anyhow, there are companies that choose to contribute some of their changes back without legal obligation, which tends to be of better quality, since they want to have it included for whatever reason (for example not to have to maintain their own fork in rapidly changing regions of the code), while they do not consider working on GPL code for their own reasons.
It might be different for different projects.
Re:i386 (Score:5, Informative)
"i386" is OpenBSD-speak for the architecture variously known as "x86", "x86-32", "i686", "IA-32", and "32-bit Intel". Just as "amd64" is OpenBSD-speak for the architecture known to others as "x64", "x86-64", "IA-32e", "64-bit Intel", "Intel 64", and whatever VIA calls it.
Re:I wish them luck. (Score:5, Informative)
In the sense that it runs twice as many servers as Windows, roughly the same about of desktops as Macs (according to Steve Ballmer), and more mobile devices than any other OS in existence (where, btw, it is outpacing its rivals by a wide margin and now selling more units than desktop devices per year as nearly a million new linux-based (yes, Android is based on linux) mobile devices are activated every day. That sounds pretty successful. And it doesn't even include the embedded market, which you clearly know nothing about. So many embedded devices in use in many industries (the cable industry for instance) run Red Hat Linux and other distros.
As of June 2010 the operating systems used on the world's top 500 supercomputers were: Linux 91.0%, Unix 4.4%, Hybrid Unix/Linux 3.4%, Windows HPC 1.0%, BSD 0.2%
That metric works for me. You apparently prefer ones with pretty pointy-clicky thingies.
Re:i386 (Score:5, Informative)
As others have said, though I'll add a bit more depth, is that i386 is the catch all for anything x86, with the exception of ensuring that it distinguishes from the 286 and below. The 386 was a major step up from the 286 and below due not only to being 32-bit, but also allowing protected mode and virtual mode operations, in addition to paging.
Virtually no modern software is adaptable to a 286 processor, whereas nearly all of them are adaptable to a 386, hence the common usage of "i386". As a matter of fact, intel actually didn't stop producing the 386 until around 2007. It was still widely used for embedded applications long after it was already obsolete.