FreeBSD 9.0 Released 418
An anonymous reader writes "FreeBSD 9.0 has been released. A few highlights include: A new installer, bsdinstall(8) has been added and is the installer used by the ISO images provided as part of this release, The Fast Filesystem now supports softupdates journaling, and Kernel support for Capsicum Capability Mode, an experimental set of features for sandboxing support."
Re:Clang/LLVM in FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
People with entitlement complexes and inability to understand simple instructions get surprised when someone gets angry after they take code that says "You can use this as long as you make the result GPL" and use it without making the result GPL.
They could have written their own or taken someone else's code with a more permissive license like BSD, but suggesting this causes them to react like the guy who defends his use of TPB for his movie watching by declaring he has some sort of right to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, without having to pay for it.
You want it, you follow the rules to get it buddy. If you don't like the rules, nobody's forcing you to get it.
Re:Clang/LLVM in FreeBSD (Score:1, Insightful)
What's wrong with GPL?
It annoys the minority of businesses who feel entitled to the free labor of strangers and don't want to give anything back. You see, some people are childish and the most visible mark of childishness is a sense of entitlement. This causes them to feel somehow cheated if you place a few conditions on code that is otherwise free, that no one is forcing them to use if the conditions don't suit them. I think phrases like "you mean I have to actually HIRE my OWN PROGRAMMERS if I really must insist that everything be done exactly the way I want?!" are often uttered with outrage during their corporate meetings.
I mean hey, launching a commercial product with most of the work already done for you, for free, is a nice racket if you can get it. But if the developers intend to allow this, they wouldn't use GPL, they would use a BSD-type license. For reasonable people, this is not a problem. Reasonable people think either "hey, this code is available for free and we have no problem complying with the license, so we can enjoy all the effort that has already been done for us and build on that", or they think "the terms of that license aren't compatible with our business model, or we're afraid of how a court may interpret them, so we can't use that code, oh well, this has not harmed us in any way so we really have no complaint".
For everyone else, there is a need to demonize whatever it is that doesn't perfectly suit them even though they are under no obligation to use it. Sort of like the Puritannical types who want to shut down "offensive" shows that no one is making them watch and criminalize victimless behaviors among consenting adults that no one is forcing them to participate in. The mentality is never this direct and honest, and always covers itself up with a phony excuse, but if not for that its motto would be "it's not good enough that *I* don't do something I don't like, oh no, I have to make certain no one else can do it either!"
Re:woohoo (Score:3, Insightful)
I used NetBSD and/or FreeBSD between 1995 and 2005 and Linux between 1996 and today. By around 2000 Linux was far from a basement project of amateur code, being built primarily by full time developers. The stability of the more mature distributions (go Debian!) matched or exceeded the BSDs, the latter fast losing any remaining technical advantages.
As to "no comments or documentation", you've just revealed that you haven't tried writing in kernel space for either. Linux has been superbly documented for those who, say, wish to write a device driver, while last I gave up on the BSDs it was still a matter of "copy existing code". This works excellently as long as you've decided to throw all engineering principles out of the window and don't understand the difference between stable interface and implementation dependence. Like I said, the BSDs have remained deliberately cliquish, like some stupid nerdish club: to contribute effectively you have to catch the eye of and be guided by existing team members, who will fill in the details for you.
Whenever Stallman irritates me, I remind myself of what freedom's really about: the particular license wording is only an implementation detail, and what is really required in principle is people who are prepared to be open and to share. The BSDs simply don't have this.
Re:Clang/LLVM in FreeBSD (Score:3, Insightful)
You won't be able to, because they all signed NDAs as part of the deal, but we know that the file system is one area - memory is another, and BSD doesn't use the same algorithms.
Re:Clang/LLVM in FreeBSD (Score:2, Insightful)
You wouldn't even be on the net today if it weren't for BSDs networking stack, which both linux and microsoft use.
Re:Clang/LLVM in FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
What's wrong with GPL?
It annoys the minority of businesses who feel entitled to the free labor of strangers and don't want to give anything back.
You misspelled "everything" as "anything".
If they want to give 90% back - which is common behavior for proprietary derivatives of BSD licensed codebases - they can't. They have to give back 100%, or stay out.
I mean hey, launching a commercial product with most of the work already done for you, for free, is a nice racket if you can get it. But if the developers intend to allow this, they wouldn't use GPL, they would use a BSD-type license. For reasonable people, this is not a problem. Reasonable people think either "hey, this code is available for free and we have no problem complying with the license, so we can enjoy all the effort that has already been done for us and build on that", or they think "the terms of that license aren't compatible with our business model, or we're afraid of how a court may interpret them, so we can't use that code, oh well, this has not harmed us in any way so we really have no complaint".
If you can't see how the GPL dominating a market can do harm to groups of people that can't use the GPLed version but needs customisations - then you've not thought hard enough about the problem. Think about monopolies and "embrace, extend, extinguish", just performed with software given away gratis with restrictions.
Re:Clang/LLVM in FreeBSD (Score:3, Insightful)
Use the ZFS file system on SD-cards for compatibility with Windows? Great idea. Except, of course, Windows can't read ZFS, and neither can any other popular desktop OS. So basically, you suggest using an SD-card file system that's totally unsuitable for SD-cards and compatible only with FreeBSD and Solaris, to save a couple of dollars per phone on patent licensing.
You must be some kind of idiot genius.
Re:Clang/LLVM in FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
If they want to give 90% back - which is common behavior for proprietary derivatives of BSD licensed codebases - they can't. They have to give back 100%, or stay out.
And if that's not to their liking, the only thing they miss out on is the gratis skilled labor of strangers. They are still free to write their own code under any license they want. I just don't see the problem, unless of course there is a sense of entitlement to something no one actually owes them. That's the only explanation for why anyone would experience any distress over this.
If you can't see how the GPL dominating a market can do harm to groups of people that can't use the GPLed version but needs customisations - then you've not thought hard enough about the problem. Think about monopolies and "embrace, extend, extinguish", just performed with software given away gratis with restrictions.
How does GPL "dominate" a market? By that I mean: what's stopping these hypothetical groups from hiring their own programmers to write their own software that is licensed any way they like? A patent could definitely do that, but the GNU Public License is not a patent. If I am a developer who uses the GPL, how am I "doing harm" to you by not giving you my work for free? Again, only a false belief that you are entitled to my labor would make you feel "harmed" in any way.
What non-patented feature can you name for me in a GPL'ed project that an independent commercial project could not also implement? They would have to write their own code, sure, but if you really believe that constitutes "embrace, extend, extinguish" then you don't really understand what that term means. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" is not possible without closed source and/or patents.
That's too bad (for them only) some people feel offended that they can't just copy-and-paste someone else's code into their project, but nothing is stopping them from using their own original code to match every feature found in any non-patented GPL'ed project.
Re:Clang/LLVM in FreeBSD (Score:3, Insightful)
No, actually.
It annoys and horrifies the thousands of developers that develop for platforms where the GPL is incompatible with libraries they must use or is not allowed by the platform rights holder.
There are many projects that used to be GPL/LGPL that are heavily used in the game developer community that are now BSD/MIT/zlib licensed, and they see even more contributions than they did before because more developers are able to use them for projects. (See Ogre3D, SDL for just of many two well-known examples.)
The GPL may be an appropriate license for some developer communities, but in others, it actually *reduces* the number of contributions and users of a project.
Like most things, one size does not fit all.
Re:Clang/LLVM in FreeBSD (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the 21st century. Please get with the program.
Re:Clang/LLVM in FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
So what do e.g. Oracle, SAP and Google if not proprietary software? Cheese?
Of course they use Linux, because they're not ignorant and know they can run proprietary software on it without having to touch their licenses. The GPL only affects derivative works, which userland applications running on the Linux kernel aren't considered to be.
Re:Clang/LLVM in FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
If they want to give 90% back - which is common behavior for proprietary derivatives of BSD licensed codebases - they can't. They have to give back 100%, or stay out.
And if that's not to their liking, the only thing they miss out on is the gratis skilled labor of strangers. They are still free to write their own code under any license they want. I just don't see the problem, unless of course there is a sense of entitlement to something no one actually owes them. That's the only explanation for why anyone would experience any distress over this.
Or maybe, because the rest of us lose out on the 90% they would have given back?
Re:Clang/LLVM in FreeBSD (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope... The operating system in OS X is XNU. Darwin is just XNU + compilation settings and tools. XNU is Server-Client architecture operating system, instead Monolithic like Linux is.
Any system program, library, application program etc, does not work without operating system. Not even your development programs, text editors or others work without operating system.
You can download XNU operating system from Apple Open Source site. You can study code and even FSF has accepted Apple license what is used as Free Software license (still incompatible with GPL). From here http://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-1699.24.8/ [apple.com] you can download whole source code for XNU operating system. You get Mach microkernel, I/O Kit, FreeBSD parts of network protocols, filesystems and so on. The microkernel in XNU operating system is 3.0 by version.
Android is just one distribution for Linux operating system. But unlike XNU, Linux is monolithic operating system. And Open Handset Alliance (what develops Android) is currently bringing Linux back to mainline. The Linux what is used in Android has been hosted as well on Linux GIT but it has just been own branch, now it is going to be joined back.
One reason why Android has been so successful, is that people don't know that they are using Linux operating system. Same thing is with Ubuntu, where people has false believes that they use "Ubuntu operating system" while they really use Linux Operating System and distribution called "Ubuntu". If they would know the truth, they would cry and have sleepiness nights wondering what they are going to do because "Linux" is so 'difficult to use'.
It is just sad that most people are victims of marketing propaganda and they don't have a clue what technology is being used and how it works.
Re:Clang/LLVM in FreeBSD (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Clang/LLVM in FreeBSD (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's one: the GPL is hostile to the development/promotion of standards. If the original reference TCP/IP stack was GPLed, you wouldn't be posting here via TCP/IP.
Re:Clang/LLVM in FreeBSD (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, except the Linux stack and the Microsoft stack probably wouldn't have been compatible, meaning fragmented networks.
Why? There were multiple compatible stacks already before MS implemented theirs from BSD.
I don't see why exactly would MS or Linux develop a stack which wouldn't be compatible with the networks that already existed and were standards in many places. It's not like the Internet appeared after Windows 95.
And we in fact have plenty of protocols which have different but compatible implementations. Why would TCP/IP be any different?
Re:Clang/LLVM in FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
Most experts explain it as being because of the AT&T vs BSD lawsuit. Until that was decided, FreeBSD was in murky waters few were willing to go along with. And it happened at exactly the wrong time, when i386 systems were growing in popularity, and people wanted some Unix-like OS to run on it, and really wanted it for free.
Network effects kicked-in at that point. Linux got more developers because it was getting more press (and a lone student writing an OS is a better story than Berkley's largess), and it got more press because it was getting more developers, and it got more press because it got more press.
And the definitive counter-point to GPL supporters, is network services... Anyone can name a million and one network services that became defacto standards. BIND *is* DNS. Sendmail *is* SMTP. The BSD TCP/IP stack *is* the internet protocol, and it's bugs and limitations have become the standard.
The most recent example is OpenSSH. It wasn't FreSSH that gained 98% market share in a few years... Nope. And until OpenSSH, crypto was massively overdue, yet none of the alternatives caught-on... Licensing had a hell of a lot to do with that... always does.
NFS was in the same boat... Sun released NFS with an open license (not GPL'd), and it became the standard. NFSv3 was massively crufty and overdue for replacement, yet the dozens of GPL'd network file systems with modern features ever caught on... NFSv4 finally came out, with the main implementation under a free license, that finally made progress.
Re:Clang/LLVM in FreeBSD (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe his point was that BSD'ed code promotes standards by allowing anybody to easily incorporate the code. Suppose that the original TCP/IP stack was GPL'ed. Others could still have written their own TCP/IP stack, but would they have bothered to do that or would they just have invented their own proprietary standards instead of bothering with TCP/IP at all? BSD'ing the code makes TCP/IP the path of least resistance.
I don't necessarily agree with this point of view but I can see the reasoning.