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.
I wish them luck. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a good "Put up or shut up" moment for BSD. For all the whining I hear about "Viral" and "Anti Business" licenses the various *BSD projects sure do have a meager adoption (Buisness, home, free or otherwise) compared to their GPL counterparts (Linux). I think an aggressive, forward looking BSD project would be great to have.
Granted, not all the most popular open source projects have "Viral" licenses (Eg - Most Apache foundation projects), but maybe.. Just maybe Linux's success is in part due to the GPL.
Some people feel the GPL is stealing something that they're somehow entitled too. In reality, it's more of an exchange. You give up the ability to have a certain business model, and in return you get the collective work of everyone else who's made the same agreement. You give up exclusive control of your source in return for a world-class, flexible, free, operating system with widespread uses. For free. With a BSD style license you're able to opt out of that "collective work" provision. You can take, but you don't have to give. As a result, the project does not grow.
It's probably in your long-term interest for the project to grow. I think the success of Linux proves this.
no SPARC support? (Score:2, Interesting)
I only used OpenBSD for SPARC hardware and it really belongs to the "big iron". Is this project aiming for the desktop? embedded platforms? Well, good luck with device drivers then. We already have linux for all that and you can't beat it in hardware support. So what's the point?