FreeBSD to Celebrate 10 Year Anniversary in SF, CA

Dan writes "A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...in the early part of 1993...the last 3 coordinators of the 'Unofficial 386BSD Patchkit' would go on to start the FreeBSD project that has grown to be used by millions of websites and installations around the world. Murray Stokely is talking about Jordan Hubbard, Nate Williams, and Rod Grimes. Looking for a catchy name, David Greenman suggested FreeBSD and it stuck. With the help of Walnut Creek CDROM, the first CDROM distribution, FreeBSD 1.0, was released in December of 1993."

Any Necraft data?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any netcraft surveys on the spread of BSd available?

Re:Any Necraft data?

[Dark_Planet]

Netcraft data [netcraft.com]

Re:Learning from BSD's mistakes

[John Sokol]

One word, Linux wouldn't be what it is, or even the entire internet for that matter, if it were not for BSD. BSD was until reciently been considered a research OS and the TCP/IP stack was prototyped there.
Much of early linux borrowed from Net2 and 386BSD and later replaced this code.

Linux also had similar growing pains but lack the copyright problems that held back BSD allowing Linux to capture the lions share of the market before BSD was able to be officialy free of AT&T.

Linux has also has simi

Moderation

[horcy]

I think it's time that the slashdot staff has to take action against those lame BSD posts... Every single news fact about BSD gets these empty headed posts.

Re:Moderation

[Homology]

Well, yes, there are so many immature Leanux kiddoes that can't handle the fact that a *BSD is actually a mature OS, and not just another kernel+patch.

Re:Moderation

[merdark]

Earth to Linux zealot. XFree86 is BSD software. That's right, it's under the BSD license, and has *nothing* to do with Linux! Wow.

Furthmore, you can't credit Linux with GCC either. GCC is worked on by many many people using many different systems. By your logic, you should be kissing Apple and Sun's butts since they infused quite a bit of help into GCC and GNOME. You should also kiss Troll Tech's butt for QT which let's KDE exist. And of course you should kiss SGI's butt for giving you GLX (part of XFree n

Re:Moderation

[merdark]

Yes, Linux could disappear tomrrow with no problems. Any one of the BSD kernels could take over the duties performed by the Linux kernel. All those "Linux vendors" would them immediatly be "BSD vendors".

You cannot credit Linux with the open source movements achievments. Sorry, try again.

The only reason the corporations are using Linux is because of the hype. The only reason Linux is the more popular kernel is due to the AT&T lawsuite that existed when both Linux and BSD were new.

Sure, companies make

Re:Moderation

[tarius8105]

No problems? The Linux kernel has a far broader range of features being put to good use, and you couldn't just switch to FreeBSD's kernel without losing a large amount of functionality and having to make many sweeping changes.

You are correct if you mean in for the average desktop user. However, FreeBSD has been known to blow linux out of the water with speed. Further more, try on a 2.4 kernel compiling 4 different apps at once, it slows the machine down to a crawl if not locks it up. You'll never see t

Re:Moderation

[merdark]

Please list this "far broader range of features" that Linux has.

Journaling file system? BSD has an equivalent. ACLs? BSD has em. Sure, some drivers may be missing, but people could port those over to BSD fairly quickly if the so cared.

The only *critical* feature that you'd be missing is enterprise volume managment. Which again, is a feature born from the corporations, and just happens to have been put into Linux by those corporations. ALSA is also pretty good, but again, this could be ported to BSD as ker

Re:Moderation

[cpeterso]

Slashdot could add a new lameness filter to prevent people from posting comments that contain the words "BSD" and "dead". How often do you really need to use the word dead in casual converstation?

I was originally going to just joke that any comment that contained the word "BSD" should be filtered, but the idea of filtering "BSD AND dead" is not that bad an idea.

Re:Moderation

[pyrrhonist]

How often do you really need to use the word dead in casual converstation?

How about:

"I can't log into the BSD box!"

"That's because it's dead."

Oh, wait, that's never going to happen in a billion years.
You're right, it won't come up in casual conversation.

Re:Binary patches? Please?

[Vint Cerf]

Yes [google.com].

Re:Binary patches? Please?

[cperciva]

Or, more usefully: FreeBSD Update [daemonology.net], which is also in the FreeBSD ports tree (security/freebsd-update).

Re:Binary patches? Please?

[cperciva]

Hrm, that's useful, but it still requires a machine for applying patches and rebuilding. Not sure if that guy offers the resulting binaries -- whatever the case, it'd be so much better to have them distributed via FreeBSD's main site and FTP mirrors.

I publish binary updates for 4.7-RELEASE and 4.8-RELEASE right now. I will be publishing updates for 4.9-RELEASE as well, and also 5.x RELEASES once I get some new hardware.

This will be integrated into FreeBSD more fully in the future (included in base, upda

Re:Binary patches? Please?

[cperciva]

The only problem is that not everyone will trust you -- you seem like a decent guy to me :) -- so having it rolled into the official FreeBSD Project stuff would make it perfect.

That's exactly one of the reasons I don't want it as part of the project yet. Right now, quite independent of the issue of trusting the *person* building updates, people have to trust the *machine* building updates -- which isn't exactly an ideal situation. Of course, people trust the root CVS repository, but that's something whi

Re:Troll-in-one

[Shanep]

To add to the anti Trolling...

OpenBSD 3.2, Pentium 75MHz, 32MB old 72pin EDO RAM, old narrow SCSI 520MB Seagate drive on some old Taiwanese VX motherboard I found thrown out during my local clean-up day:

Time to create 22MB file from /dev/zero: 24 seconds.
Time to copy that file to same disk: 1 min 17 seconds. (plenty of old head thrashing).

firewall# dmesg
OpenBSD 3.2 (GENERIC) #25: Thu Oct 3 19:51:53 MDT 2002
[e-mail]:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/c o mpile/GENERIC
cpu0: F00F bug workaround

Broken 1.0 releases?

[bovinewasteproduct]

So who else has contributed broken software to a 1.0 release?

I'm the reason why the mitsumi CD-ROM driver was broken, and of course Rod had just cut the gold master (and back then it was a major pain to make masters) and could not update the sources.

After about 20 patches, he just just gave me a commit bit...:)

BWP

Re:Broken 1.0 releases?

[scosol]

Whoa! I'm responsible for the broken mitsumi cdrom driver in the later releases- 2.2.x or so?
Circa 95-96 :)

Re:*BSD is not dying

[peterpi]

heheh, that is teh 1337 troll! ;)

What a useless story

[norweigiantroll]

It doesn't even contain a link to the news flash [freebsd.org]

Re:What a useless story

[scosol]

Yeah- I was just gonna say "Hey SF, Maybe I'll attend- errr where is the link to the actual story???"

Sco's gift

[OzPhIsH]

I wonder what gift Sco will be giving the BSD team... Maybe they'll donate some code enabling FreeBSD to finally be "ready for the enterprise." That or maybe they can license "Happy Birthday" for us so we can all sing it at the party! I for one can't wait to see more wild antics of Darl the Clown! WoooHooo Birtday!!!!!

Rod Grimes

[Rex Code]

Or "Grimy", as he liked to be called.