FreeBSD Project Falls Short of Year End Funding Target By Nearly 50% 245
TrueSatan writes "Perhaps a sign of our troubled times or a sign that FreeBSD is becoming less relevant to modern computing needs: the FreeBSD project has sought $500,000 by year end to allow it to continue to offer to fund and manage projects, sponsor FreeBSD events, Developer Summits and provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers. But with the end of this year fast approaching, it has raised just over $280,000, far short of its target."
Finally.... (Score:3, Funny)
After many long years on Slashdot, can I be the first one to actually confirm that FreeBSD is dead?
Re:Finally.... (Score:5, Funny)
No. Only Netcraft is allowed to do that.
Re:Finally.... (Score:5, Funny)
It's. Not. Dead. Yet.
It'll return as a zombie... process?
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See the donors page [freebsdfoundation.org] for some of the big donors. NetApp gave $100,000 this year (they had to invent a new category of sponsor for them. Juniper gave somewhere in the $10-25K region, but they've also started pushing a lot of code upstream and employing people to work full-time on FreeBSD, which is more valuable (in terms of code, Juniper has contributed more than all of the Foundation-funded developers in the past year, the advantage of the Foundation is that it can fund work that doesn't give anyone enough
Never met anyone who uses it. (Score:3)
Re:Never met anyone who uses it. (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I know people who use FreeNAS which is based on FreeBSD. I think the thought behind the BSD license is telling. It basically says you can take the code and nothing in return is expected, which is exactly what they get.
Re:Never met anyone who uses it. (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I know people who use FreeNAS which is based on FreeBSD. I think the thought behind the BSD license is telling. It basically says you can take the code and nothing in return is expected, which is exactly what they get.
I know from personal experience that at least some big mega-corps do give stuff back to the BSD's.
I worked at a place that spent loads of money improving one of the BSDs. They gave back everything for the purely selfish reason that they could either keep maintaining their changes at a high cost or send the changes to the project and get maintance for free. The improvements to the BSD were publicly known but who funded them never was.
Re:Never met anyone who uses it. (Score:5, Informative)
Having worked on FreeNAS and its commercial counterpart, I can tell you that iX Systems, the folks behind FreeNAS, give quite a lot back to FreeBSD. There is much code flowing back into the project from them, they sponsor many FreeBSD developers to attend various events, they leverage their buying power to get cheap/free servers for the project.
Juniper Networks did a port of FreeBSD to mips, and contributed it back, as well as substantial support for different arm and PowerPC platforms.
Yahoo has contributed many things back to the project over the years.
And the lest goes on and on. There is a mutually beneficial relationship between the community, the corporations that use it and the project. To speak otherwise shows a woeful ignorance of reality.
Re:Never met anyone who uses it. (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously you've never met me (well, most likely you haven't), but I used to use FreeBSD in the early-to-mid-2000s, back before I went to OS X. I always liked it a lot--more than any of the *nixes I used, with the possible exception of Arch.
Re:Never met anyone who uses it. (Score:4, Funny)
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FreeBSD was very popular 10 years ago. In my opinion those were its golden days.
BSD Unix golden days were 4.2 - 4.4 where TCP/IP was developed back in the early 1980s and Sun's Gossling worked on the kernel. Its freeBSD counterpart golden days were 4.0 - 4.12 before it went to shit and Linux/Ubuntu took over.
10 years ago FreeBSD was ahead of Linux and it drove me nuts to see slashdot down all the time (not so common now) as Linux couldn't scale for more than 2 cpus and crashed or halted when it had a shitlo
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Example man /etc would talk about that directory where no such entry was in Linux.
Maybe it just isn't necessary. Even BSDs get some things completely wrong:
$ man woman
No manual entry for woman
$
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FreeBSD 4.0 - 4.12 will always have a place in my heart right there with the Windows fan boys loving XP as its golden age.
Yes I do remember installing MS Windows XP when it first came out and getting a virus when I forgot I was connected to the Corporate network although I never had any issues when installing a distribution of Linux. :)
Today Linux has suceeded it and can now scale to 64 processors.
With the 3 kernel Linux can scale to 512 processors.
Linux has a journaling file system now
Linux has had a journaling file-system for many years now such as ext3 (approx 2001). Of course I should also mention ext4, JFS, XFS and even BtrFS to name a few.
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Today Linux has suceeded it and can now scale to 64 processors.
With the 3 kernel Linux can scale to 512 processors.
Try bumping the setting and recompiling, m'kay?
Linux has had a journaling file-system [...]and even BtrFS to name a few.
Actually, btrfs doesn't use band-aids like a journal (except for the fsync log): copy on write means you don't need to write the same thing many times. Take a look at log-structured filesystems for an even cooler solution.
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I had to programming jobs that used freebsd. and one that used netbsd. but that was many years ago. these days, all I'm seeing are linux this and linux that.
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I have never met anyone in person who uses it. I know some must.
Dammit. I use it, I was using it 10 minutes ago. I can't be alone.
I store lots of data on FreeBSD 9.0 using ZFS because I really like ZFS. I also run BackupPC for my personal stuff on it.
I also really like the handbook. One simple accessible document for most of everything is so much easier than the Linux distros.
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I use it all the time. I also use Linux variants.
FreeBSD is really a powerful, well-documented system that brings a lot of stuff to the table that's not possible, not production ready, or simply broken in Linux.
Off the top of my head: standardized networking commands, ZFS (in kernel), GEOM framework, devd, pf firewall is huge, RAID trim support, lagg (link aggregation/hot failover) and CARP (common address redundancy protocol...share IP for multiple servers).
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Well, most large ISPs use it for multiple things. It's the base used for most firewalls and load balencers. It is the fastest TCP/IP implementation on the planet.
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Currently using FreeBSD (in the form of PCBSD [pcbsd.org]) on my home workstation. It works quite well with the latest KDE, Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, etc... Nvidia card gets perfect 3D acceleration via the FreeBSD driver, audio works great (I much prefer FreeBSD audio to Linux audio).
Also using FreeBSD on my cloud hosted webserver: one main instance of FreeBSD hosted via KVM, running several jails, so I essentially get VMs inside my VM. Performance is great, and I sleep much better at night managing a FreeBSD
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I strongly prefer to have a different operating systems on my front-end (Apache) and database/storage (PostgreSQL) layers just to make it a touch more difficult to pull a copy of the DB.
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CentOS is my organization's standard, but sometimes there are compelling reasons to use something else.
I have no knowledge of your situation. Maybe it was just someone using what they knew best in your case.
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I use it *without* knowing on my router http://www.pfsense.org/ [pfsense.org] and my NAS http://www.freenas.org/ [freenas.org]
Pendantic mode - How do you know you use it without knowing? Besides the boot messages are a dead giveaway.
I used to use pfsense. It worked fine but it did seem annoyingly limited in some respects and everytime I asked how to do a thing I was told I should pay for a bounty to add some feature in the next release. It annoyed me so much I changed to OpenBSD and now write pf rules in vi. Now I know exactly what my firewall is doing, it runs a more recent version of pf, I have way more flexibility to do other t
Is this newsworthy? (Score:5, Insightful)
My first instinct is to think so what? Shouldn't non-profit foundations have ambitious fund raising targets that they fall short of most of the time? Is FreeBSD in danger of ceasing to be a viable operating system because the target wasn't met?
Re:Is this newsworthy? (Score:5, Interesting)
My first instinct is to think so what? Shouldn't non-profit foundations have ambitious fund raising targets that they fall short of most of the time? Is FreeBSD in danger of ceasing to be a viable operating system because the target wasn't met?
Last year their target was $400k and they reached $426k so they're not intentionally making too ambitious targets. That this is an annual campaign and they're $146k short of matching last year indicates interest has dropped significantly. Looking at their donors it's now practically run by Netapp that's moved up to double platinum ($100k+), accounting for more than a third of their total donations. The more disturbing part for them should be that the donor [freebsdfoundation.org] list is much, much shorter than last year.
Re:Is this newsworthy? (Score:5, Informative)
Also considering that the year is not over yet, and that a third of the money usually gets raised during the last month of the year, I'd say their fundraising effort is still going pretty smoothly.
For 2011, we set a fundraising goal of $400,000 with a spending budget of $350,000. As of this publication we have raised $210,000. By this time last year, we had raised $195,000, but ended the year raising a total of $325,000. We are hoping that you, the FreeBSD community, will help us finish the year strong by making a donation this month. http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/2011Dec-newsletter.shtml#Fundraising [freebsdfoundation.org]
Who wants to bet that this year, they'll have fundraised $400,000 by the deadline, and that for next year -- they'll raise the target to $650,000.
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no, but less bsd nerds will get to travel on that dime.
I'm thinking maybe freebsd should add a huge banner to appear! think wikipedia.
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My first instinct is to think so what? Shouldn't non-profit foundations have ambitious fund raising targets that they fall short of most of the time?
Actually, the FreeBSD Foundation has never missed a funding target and, given late donations in previous years and unannounced pledges by a few companies looks like it should meet it this year too (which is nice, as it's 25% higher than the goal for last year).
Is FreeBSD in danger of ceasing to be a viable operating system because the target wasn't met?
No. The project lasted for a long time without the Foundation and could continue to do so. The Foundation does a number of useful things for the project,
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The question wasn't whether BSD was itself newsworthy.
And don't refer to it like it's only historical.
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FreeBSD... actually BSD is very newsworthy as it holds an integral part of computer history. Like other important pieces of history such as VMS, IBM 360, and other gone technologies BSD will be part of it that we owe a gratitude for.
Actually, neither BSD nor VMS are gone - OS X is a BSD-flavored OS at the UNIX layer, and DEC^WCompaq^WHP are still selling VMS [hp.com] IBM haven't made S/360's for a while, but they are making their (64-bit) descendants [ibm.com], which still run a descendant of OS/360 [ibm.com], a descendant of DOS/360 [ibm.com], a descendant of CP/CMS [ibm.com], and even a descendant of the Airlines Control Program [ibm.com]. And, yes, it runs Linux [ibm.com], although I don't know of any BSD ports.
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VMS and CP/M have nothing to with BSD.
Neither does CP/CMS, which, for that matter, has nothing to do with CP/M, either.
Some of my most reliable servers are FreeBSD... (Score:5, Informative)
Hopefully the front page posting will encourage other FreeBSD users to donate. There's certainly more servers in production, especially some of the more reliable ones, that are using FreeBSD according to Netcraft.
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.. FreeBSD person here.
Which ports in question? I was under the impression that PHP/apache ports are kept up to date in the ports tree.
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he may also just be referring to how easier it is to install on Ubuntu just small things like installing a server will have it properly configured already meanwhile I'll install some things from a port then need to edit for what seems like forever to get things up and running assuming I can find the conf files as they aren't necessarily put in a logical place like in ubuntu
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Care to give an example of conf files being placed illogically in FBSD?
the directory structure is explained here:
http://www5.us.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/dirstructure.html [freebsd.org]
and every port is required to follow that structure.
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I never recommend compiling from source in 2012!
SOmething complex with lots of dependencies are just going to cause problems as who the hell knows what .config files will change and crap being spewed all over the file system.
The official ports patch everything and it has to pass the FreeBSD QA and integrates with it well into the system. .deb files are similiar
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The conf files are in absolutely logical and consistent places, they are merely not in the place where you expect them nor in the same place they would be on ubuntu.
Like someone else said, read the handbook.
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..but for our needs having an up to date php and apache are very useful things.
You might want to lookup nginx. Apache is so 2000-late.
Not to late (Score:2, Insightful)
You know it is not too late to chip in. Fortunately 2012 isn't over yet.
Reallocate and re-prioritize. (Score:3, Insightful)
...the FreeBSD project has sought $500,000 by year end to allow it to continue to offer to fund and manage projects, sponsor FreeBSD events, Developer Summits and provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers.
Hmm...
Problem solved.
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Oh certainly, that can probably solve things for a year or two, depending on just how they were gonna allocate that 500k, but long term you have to remember that FreeBSD is a community project and, in the long term, sponsoring those things is part of how you make the community grow and thrive.
just spend the money on beer for the summits.
people will come if you promise them free hats and beer.
have them in the summer, so you'll save on rent on a warm place(outdoor drinking in the arctic in the winter sucks, even if the beer is cold).
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Agreed, this is management 101. I'm not sure the funding gap reflects a loss in relevance for the platform. I chose it specifically as a platform and its suited my needs and even met them. I've never managed a better put-together *nix system. Nice when the man pages all match the software and are up to date, and the ports system is lovely. I'm not sure I'll build another Linux server again after the good experience I had with BSD (It's dictatorshandbook.net by the way, a VPS run by rockvps.com - also
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get real, no need for travel. summit can be held online. meetings and forums can be done online. development can be done online.
I just saved FreeBSD a cool half million.
FBSD opportunities (Score:3)
Technically, FBSD seems to have done a fine job, but they need to be more proactive in proliferating the market. For one, they could partner w/ server manufacturers of various platforms. One that comes straight to mind is HP w/ the Itanium, and here, FBSD's only competition would be Debian and HP/UX. Given all the OSs that have abandoned the platform, this is one golden opportunity for FBSD. Others would be to get into the AVL of major server manufacturers, be it HP, Dell, IBM and so on.
The other thing FBSD can do is try selling itself against Linux. Here, they can adapt a 2 pronged strategy - offer FBSD to any server vendor considering Linux as a server, and offer other alternatives, based on the target applications. If it requires good SMP support or a special file system, consider DragonFly BSD. If it's for routers and firewalls, promote pFsense or m0n0wall. If it's for desktop or laptop use, promote PC-BSD. If it is for embedded applications, consider Minix, or maybe one of the other BSDs. The main marketing strategies should focus on all technical advantages of FBSD and FBSD based distros over Linux based distros. Things like backwards compatibility, stable APIs and ABIs, and so on. Use the licensing advantage only as icing on the cake. While some Linux shops may be dug in, others may be more open to such alternatives.
One thing I wonder - if FBSD, heaven forbid, goes under, what would be the effect on all the other projects - pFsense, m0n0wall, PC-BSD, et al? Will they automatically fold, or will they just be forks from 9.1? I do think a less onerous alternative to GPL is needed, which is why I'd hate to see BSD go under.
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Isn't the compiler for HP/UX GCC? Even if it's not, various Linuxes, such as Debian, RHEL, Ubuntu did at one time exist on Itanium, so GCC support for that had to have existed, and for that to exist, GCC would have had to have had Itanium's optimizations. Now, that was w/ Itanium I & II. With Itanium III coming out, I dunno whether HP has been making that an HP/UX only platform. It would be a shame if they did.
That was a part of what I was suggesting - that HP/UX provide all the EPIC compiler opti
Accepting Donations: They're doing it wrong (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.freebsd.org/donations/ [freebsd.org]
Great start! The home page has a Donate link at the top, it takes you to a clear, simple URL.
Then it all falls apart...
95% of the page is about everything other then cash donations. The simple PayPal Donate button? No where to be found. The Network For Good Donate link? Again, AWOL. In fact there is only one small paragraph buried 2/3rds of the way down the page about cash donations...and it just tells you to visit the FreeBSD Foundation page. Even worse, it doesn't link you to the Foundation's Donation page...it links you to the home page where you again, need to dig down and find the real donations page.
Stick the PayPal Donate box (found here [freebsdfoundation.org]) on the top of the main FreeBSD.org page and I guarantee they'll easily quadruple their donations without doing anything else whatsoever.
I love, love, LOVE FreeBSD, but yah...they've never been particularly good at tooting their own horn. :-/
not that great for home servers anymore (Score:2)
I've been using FreeBSD on my home servers since 2.1 until recently when I tried Ubuntu on the new server I was building. It's just drastically better at initial configuration. Most of the servers I would want to use are either installed by default or are very easy to install or configure with little intervention. There are too many hoops to jump through on FreeBSD.
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Agreed. I've been using FreeBSD off and on since 2.2.2. Despite some really eye watering bugs with Ubuntu (especially their ec2 instances), FreeBSD is just more tedious and more frustrating to use. But... FreeBSD has the one killer feature for me: ZFS. It's portable in a pinch and ensure a decent amount of data integrity. Hammer, BTRFS, etc don't offer that kind of flexibility.
For the upgrade from 7.x to 8.x I used "freebsd-update". I forgot to disable the cron task, so after falling asleep the machin
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FreeBSD has the one killer feature for me: ZFS. It's portable in a pinch and ensure a decent amount of data integrity.
In theory.
In practice, a normal RAID10/RAID1 array is more reliable ...
I went through the same thing. I waited until freebsd 8 to try zfs after watching some videos about how awesome it was. I had been running multi TB storage arrays on lvm + raid1 on linux for years and decided to try and switch to ZFS. The lack of an fsck really shows when you get data corruption issues while resizing a pool. ZFS also lacks the capability of downsizing a pool, so when the upsize fails half way, you're fairly fscked. The recovery tools are just immature compared to even things like ext3.
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Most of the servers I would want to use are either installed by default or are very easy to install or configure with little intervention.
From a security standpoint, I prefer the FreeBSD model. Nothing extra running, and very secure by default. Anything that's running is there because I made it to do so, and nothing more. The hoops are generally there to make sure the system stays secured.
Misleading Story (Score:5, Informative)
Managing Expectations (Score:2)
Apparently the FreeBSD developers have seldom met their own schedule estimates. They don't really think it's important to do so. They estimate October, by December if you ask them when it will be released, they answer, "when it's ready". Their setting of fund raising goals may be similar to their scheduling. They're not good at managing expectations. I don't think FreeBSD will be going away any time soon. How many Linux distributions have failed to meet their fund raising goals from time to time and yet are
FUD (Score:2)
FreeBSD tends to do a funding push for short iterations. I don't think this one has been going long. I've only seen posts on it recently. Often, they get many donations from a few select companies that use it. For example, ixsystems, cisco, and juniper.
As someone that runs a very small project, I think they're lucky to have the funding support that they get. Several of the regulars have gotten day jobs or contract work out of their involvement too. I think FreeBSD is a great example of a successful op
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The real problem is many folks don't donate to open source projects. I've donated to OpenSSH via OpenBSD in the past as I use it all the time. If everyone donated even a few dollars to their favorite projects, it would make a huge difference.
I don't know if that's a real problem. There are a lot of ways you can help a project. Contributing code. Using it and filing bug reports and feature requests. Even just talking about it can be helpful.
As for donations, I think there have been cases where getting more money into the project has hurt rather than helped (sorry, I don't have links and don't remember the specifics). At the very least, that means it's not clear that donating money is the best way to help a project. Of course, some things cost mo
Still relevant (Score:2)
I split my Unix derivative loyalties between Arch and FreeBSD, usually with the lNeverputt runs smoother on it than it did on my Arch install.
atter for servers on really old hardware. Recently, I've found Arch upgrading has become more and more of a pain in the ass, especially on rigs with ATI cards. I carried on with it, but the recent removal of the awesome little installation program (I'm lazy when it comes to installers) made me think twice about switching.
So I went with FreeBSD on an old ThinkPad A31.
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I split my Unix derivative loyalties between Arch and FreeBSD, usually with the lNeverputt runs smoother on it than it did on my Arch install.
God, I fucked that up.
FreeBSD and Debian (Score:2, Interesting)
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Year End Donations are the Norm... (Score:2)
Last year they aimed at $300k and got over $400k. This year, they asked for $500k and got $250k thus far...
Except that every year, sponsors hold out until the end of the year. Seeing 50% of goal before the major corporate donations is great. Last year they were far from their goal at this time.
Sorry, but this is a bit of doom saying by a Linux fanboi. There isn't even an article attached, just the donation link (thanks for spreading the word) and a some conjecture about what being only half way implies.
The
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps they should ask Apple to fund them. Good luck.
Perhaps they should ask Apple to sue them.
It might get them some sympathy donations . . . ?
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Perhaps they should ask Apple to fund them. Good luck.
Apple already funds developers working on projects that are contributed to FreeBSD. Just a few examples are LLVM, OpenBSD and Libdispatch.
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a sign that BSD is becoming less relevant to modern computing needs
Obligatory remark about how Mac OS X and iOS are BSD and are used by tens of millions of people everyday, blah, blah, blah.
With the obligatory remark about how they never give back to the community.
(Next post please add the link to the source code that Apple releases in order to refute my anti-fanboish trope)
(With any luck we will trap all the anti- and pro- Apple rants in this one thread!)
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
*whoooosh*
Why can't you just check apples web site for your self? Moron?
Obligatry Response with slight disgust (Score:5, Insightful)
a sign that BSD is becoming less relevant to modern computing needs
Obligatory remark about how Mac OS X and iOS are BSD and are used by tens of millions of people everyday, blah, blah, blah.
...and that does not refute the point. Mac OS took code one way; the main developers...and gave out free laptops to the others. Its an example how the spirit of sharing from BSD is not as strong as having a license enforce it. When a company gets involved with Linux the ecosystem gets stronger...not sort of meander into obscurity [and no throwing money it at in a PR stunt is not the answer]. The only sick thing is the amount of Apple users promoting BSD.
Re:Obligatry Response with slight disgust (Score:5, Insightful)
a sign that BSD is becoming less relevant to modern computing needs
Obligatory remark about how Mac OS X and iOS are BSD and are used by tens of millions of people everyday, blah, blah, blah.
...and that does not refute the point. Mac OS took code one way; the main developers...and gave out free laptops to the others. Its an example how the spirit of sharing from BSD is not as strong as having a license enforce it. When a company gets involved with Linux the ecosystem gets stronger...not sort of meander into obscurity [and no throwing money it at in a PR stunt is not the answer]. The only sick thing is the amount of Apple users promoting BSD.
Emphasis mine. That's only your definition of strong. Have you considered the fact that maybe, just maybe, some people might not have the same definition as yours?
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OSX has user land components from FreeBSD, not Net
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Hundreds of millions, you mean.
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Interesting)
Either it is Opposite Day in whatever land you come from, or you are a total idiot who doesn't know up from down.
The overwhelmingly obvious trend in the last 12 years has been the decline of restrictively licensed ("copyLEFT") projects in favor of genuinely free ("copyFREE") [copyfree.org] software. There's a sole noteworthy exception [slashdot.org] to this rule trend, which is the software component that produces the greatest lock-in: the Linux kernel. (I suggest you read that last linked thread in full - it has many links to details.)
GNU (1984) and Linux (1991) arrived many years before BSD became permissively licensed (1999 [wikipedia.org]). During that gap, Linux attracted a lot of attention, attained technological superiority, and, by the end of the century, it was considered the obvious choice in open source UNIX. Linux managed to capitalize on the collapse of proprietary UNIX and attract a lot of corporate support. It beats the BSD's on almost every performance benchmark. Kudos to Linus T - he got there first, made a thousand good decisions, and beat us fair and square!
But that doesn't mean Linux will remain the king of the mountain forever. Linux is being written by the very people who its license was designed to hurt! It is a loose alliance of corps mostly trying to undermine Microsoft, and this contradiction cannot last. Linus T made the right choice by not switching to the newer more-restrictive versions of GPL, which should buy it some more time. And its jack-of-all-trades approach, trying to be the ideal kernel for everything from nano to desktops to supercomputers, will catch up to it eventually.
See, sometime in the last few years, people actually started to pay attention to licensing, as the disadvantages of GPL started to become obvious. This resulted in a shift away from copyLEFT all across the board. Many projects switched licenses (ex. Ruby) and got a new lease on life, while in many software categories new copyFREE projects started to gradually suck away GPL's market share. At the turn of the millennium there were no decent copyFREE compilers, desktop environments, or Web browsers. Today we have Clang/LLVM, E17, and Chromium (well, almost - that's why I'd rather use Opera for now). In the most competitive categories, like scripting languages and Web servers, GPL is almost entirely dead. PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, etc are gradually squeezing MySQL. The HTML5 stack's gains are the loss of GTK/Qt/wx/etc, as well as of FFMPEG. FreeBSD is just about finished scraping off the last remnants of copyLEFT, which would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago - now finally I can run a complete UNIX system without any GNU!
This trend is going to continue - gradually, patiently, at times with a few steps back and sideways, but moving forward in aggregate nonetheless. History takes time to play out. Maybe it will be Haiku on portable devices, and/or DragonFly BSD on large servers, and/or a completely new copyFREE OS that's yet to be initiated. Maybe the copyFREE champion Google will pull something out of its sleeve. But, sooner or later, the Penguin Empire will fall!
--libman
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I understand that some people don't see why it's important to immunize the community against for want of a better analogy I call antisocials. Ce
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Informative)
GNU (1984) and Linux (1991) arrived many years before BSD became permissively licensed (1999). [wikipedia.org]
The previous license, just above the paragraph in the Wikipedia link you provided, is basically the same and pre-dates 1988 - BSD was initially released in 1977. As a user of 4.3BSD (yes, I'm old) I remember that BSD was available to pretty much anyone with a few buck for a tape and postage. My university used it while I was there from 1981-87.
The main objection to the older license was the "advertising clause" (below), which does NOT actually restrict use of the software:
3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: .
This product includes software developed by the
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It really is impossible to legally combine GPL and original BSD licensed software. See Why is the original BSD license incompatible with the GPL? [gnu.org].
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The GPL is about the freedom of the end-user not the developer. The GPL removes the dependency of the end-user on the developer to release fixes to the code. GPL code can't be closed. BSD code can.
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
While I agree with the last two sentences, it's worth noting two points which undercut your first two sentences rather dramatically:
(1) Taking BSD-licensed code and making a proprietary fork doesn't make the previous release magically go away; it makes a new fork. If I love the open source editor FooEdit and FooEdit has a vibrant community around it, then somebody else comes along and starts selling BarEdit based on their proprietary, closed source fork, I can either choose to switch to BarEdit and accept the risks, or keep using FooEdit. (And arguably that's not a binary proposition in the first place: I can switch to BarEdit and then switch back to FooEdit.) The worst case hypothetical is that somehow BarEdit's creation kills the FooEdit community, but in reality that seems very unlikely; in practice, I can't think of a single BSD-licensed project that this has happened to. Can you? Yes, it's possible that in my scenario BarEdit would get cool new features denied to FooEdit users, but if you're deliberately choosing your software based on its "openness" then you've already decided to forgo cool features that are only in proprietary software. Furthermore, you can hardly point to BarEdit and say, "those cool BarEdit-only features would be in FooEdit if only it had been under the GPL"; the more likely case is that BarEdit would simply never have existed.
(2) While the anonymous coward who responded with "ROFL" was perhaps unduly acerbic, his point is correct: an end user who can't debug and patch code is dependent on the developers to fix bugs regardless of the license the software she's using is under. As much as people don't like to hear this around these parts, I know an awful lot of end users who look for free software because it's free as in beer.
Re: (Score:2)
I think he's suggesting that *some* people like the *option* of fixing the software they use themselves. It's always nicer to get a fix for something from "upstream" somewhere, but that's not always possible. It's nice (a GPL-cheerleader might say "essential") to be able to fall back on your own elbow grease.
The relative quality of the code in question doesn't enter in to it. After all, what good is beautifully written and documented code if you'll never see it?
Re: (Score:2)
I can see the argument for why one might choose either license, but at the end of the day of the author of the code wishes that their code always remain free, and so chooses the GPL, I believe that is their right and it should be respected.
Complaining that a third party licensed their code under a particular license is just stupid. It is the same as saying that the original developer should not have had the choice to license their work however they wanted to.
If you use someone else's code then you should re
Re: (Score:3)
Indeed. The general trend has been away from freedom. The same has occured in the free software community, as more and more development is primarily driven by for profit corporations. The move from GPL to BSD licenses is a blow for freedom, like we've seen in every other realm over the past decade.
Re: (Score:2)
If Ubuntu represents the future of Linux i want none of it, I'll go back to BSD.
Who says Ubuntu is the future of Linux? It is merely one distribution among dozens. The fact that it is the most popular at the moment is neither here nor there; during the years I have been using Linux, the previous most popular distributions have been Slackware, RedHat, Debian (and possibly Mandrake). In a year's time, the crown could pass on to some other distribution I've never heard of. (For the record, my preference is now for Arch.)
But if BSD fits your requirements, then by all means use it.
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Interesting)
The BSD community must offer more assistance. As soon as BSD gets something similar to KVM I'll switch in a second. If Ubuntu represents the future of Linux i want none of it, I'll go back to BSD.
FreeBSD has native ZFS which is the one reason I'm using it at home. I thought FreeBSD could act as a xen dom0 but it seems You are right, it can't.
FreeBSD is a very nice OS and much more consistent as a whole system than any Linux distribution.
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Interesting)
As soon as BSD gets something similar to KVM I'll switch in a second.
It's already on its way. http://bhyve.org/ [bhyve.org]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Whether its a dead OS or not, in an attempt to make me feel better about using Mac OS X and iOS I donated :P
isaac@xen:~$ ping -c 2 10.0.0.107
PING 10.0.0.107 (10.0.0.107) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 10.0.0.107: icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=0.595 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.0.107: icmp_req=2 ttl=64 time=0.959 ms
It's certainly not a dead OS, it's running perfectly well.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Read the Link (Score:2)
is that 50k or 500k?
Perhaps you should look at the graphic in the middle of the linked article.
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't that $500, ¢0 ?
Slashcode is eating the cent symbol, and a comma for decimal mark followed by two decimals is common in the whole continental Europe.
Re: (Score:3)
Every time you make a donation via credit card or PayPal the organization gets dinged with fees. Typically it's a percentage and a per transaction fee. So with such a small donation, the fees might wind up costing them too much for the size of the donation.
Re: (Score:2)
Oracle's Solaris is a derivative of former Unix System Labs' SVR4. SunOS was a derivative of BSD. SunOS changed to Solaris when Sun switched from BSD to USL's SVR4.
I agree that Apple should pay them, but IBM? IBM can get by fine w/ AIX, so doesn't sound like they need something above and beyond what others are getting on the x64 platform. Unless one is talking about POWER or Z-series ports of FreeBSD.
Other things - like Universities, certificate programs, agreed. Those who use FBSD should financial