Happy 20th Birthday, FreeBSD 220
mbadolato writes "FreeBSD celebrates its 20th birthday this week. On 19 June 1993, David Greenman, Jordan Hubbard and Rod Grimes announced the creation of their new fork of the BSD 4.3 operating system, and its new name: FreeBSD." And in the time since then, FreeBSD hasn't exactly stood still; it's spawned numerous other projects (like DragonFly BSD and PC-BSD), as well as served as the basis for much of Mac OS X; there's even a Raspberry Pi build.
Well... (Score:5, Funny)
Given enough time, Netcraft will confirm...
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If it is not in `cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.history` on a FreeBSD box then I refuse to believe it happened.
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You have to check that file on a Xenix/SCO UNIX system. It will probably have Netcraft credits at the bottom with the copyright.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well I do, and moreover I personally have written ~30 thousand lines of code for NetBSD which has been used in other OS projects (the other BSDs, and OpenSolaris at least - see Bluetooth code) in varying amounts, and I am certainly not the only one to have had code re-used. The NetBSD libc is being used for Android now, I believe.
Also, many companies [netbsd.org] do use it, though they don't always advertise that fact.
The licence is liberal, and companies are not obligated to mention their usage.
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Well it's a regular UNIX-like distribution so anyone can use it on their desktop or server if they want, and some do. It's also used in some embedded systems, Apple's networking equipment uses it for example.
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Seriously, after 25 years in the business I've never seen or heard about anyone using NetBSD in production ever.
Either you are in the wrong business or you aren't looking very hard. NetBSD runs on almost anything, and is widely used in embedded systems. It is likely that some little black gizmo in your own home or office is quietly humming away with NetBSD inside.
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Honest question, who uses NetBSD?
+ FreeBSD is used in certain hardware appliances, and some ISPs use it for shared hosting etc.
+ OpenBSD seems to be the security nerd's choice when they're setting up a really, really secure router. Or so they say.
+ NetBSD? Ummmm. I guess you can install it on some 1990s RISC hardware and brag to slashdot about it? (Except you have to go back to your x86 to run a browser.)
Seriously, after 25 years in the business I've never seen or heard about anyone using NetBSD in production ever. Is this a real legit OS, or is Netcraft just being lazy?
The most important area is probably providing the base for the Darwin kernel. It's good for other commercial products too as the BSD license doesn't require the source to be redistributed and thus you can better protect your intellectual property. But on the other hand, for many BSD setups, Linux would do the job just as fine. It's nice to have variety though.
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I'll give you an example Danger, who made the HipTop (T-Mobile's version was the sidekick) one of the earliest innovators for smart / feature phones was based on NetBSD server software. So there you go
It just works (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:It just works (Score:4, Insightful)
It works without issue. I've used a BSD on and off since the days of Jolitz's 386BSD which came with a compressed image with a number of utilities on a 1.44MB floppy disk. Before this, if a person wanted source code to look at, they would have to pay a good mint to BSDI or a company like that... and of course, if you wanted SVR4 source... good luck with that.
Ahh... memories.
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It works without issue.
Lets not wax TOO poetic about it. Wasnt there an issue in 8.1 which caused reboot loops if u had a USB keyboard plugged in?
Re:It just works (Score:4, Informative)
I recall frequent kernel panics while booting that were related to the Intel Ethernet chipset on a SuperMicro H8SGL-F board (not exactly the least common hardware) in a released version (I think it was 8.2 or 8.3), which was probably this [freebsd.org]. Rather annoying.
There have been other problems, too (off the top of my head), like
So sometimes I ask myself whether this OS is really ready for prime time
But enough of the rant. I've been sticking to it since 2000 and for most of the time it just runs and does its job. It's got some nice coherent documentation too.
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Back around 1990, we had a 486 system running "US Army BSD". (Whatever that really was.) Apparently our University paid AT&T enough money that this was free to use, at least on-campus.
There are (were) a million-billion variants of Unix. For a while, everyone and their mom was writing [a bad] one or doing [usually a mediocre and never-updated] BSD port. The original RISC machine (IBM RT PC, with the ROMP architecture) had a BSD4.3 port called AOS and later got a 4.4-lite port. A friend had a SAGE machine which ran a Unix called IDRIX. Etc etc.
Re:It just works (Score:4, Interesting)
HAS THIS BEEN CONFIRMED BY NETCRAFT ?? (Score:2, Funny)
Well has it !!
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Nonono, in Soviet Russia, *BSD confirms Nyetcraft. Jeez, get it right.
Congrats FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
FreeBSD is a great example of open source working. Not only has it been successful, but it has spawned a lot of other open source projects such as GhostBSD, PC-BSD, DesktopBSD, DragonFly, pfsense, freenas, nanobsd, and my own MidnightBSD.
There are a lot of people who have donated a lot of time to FreeBSD. This wouldn't have happened without all the committers and folks offering patches to the project. FreeBSD and all the other projects I mentioned wouldn't be here without the. Thanks!
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And a lot of closed-source things: FreeBSD != GPL, so one is free to bottle up a bunch of their compiled stuff and sell it without interference.
I, personally, am quite OK with this. (I once owned a TV that I strongly suspect ran FreeBSD; it worked well.)
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I think ftp.exe from NT 3.51 or even 4.0 was BSD based and that was about all. For something as mature and tested as a simple FTP client why bother re-inventing the wheel? It was legally licensed as well.
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I think it still does in Win7:
C:\Windows\system32>strings ftp.exe | grep -i regent
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
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I think ftp.exe from NT 3.51 or even 4.0 was BSD based and that was about all.
There is substantial evidence that the entire TCP stack in win2k was lifted from FreeBSD based on its behavior. One of the RCs would even fingerprint as FreeBSD.
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Re:Congrats FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely. And you can see that by noting that:
gcc compatibility C++ source
gnu make's -o extension
Qt API's as a standard for mobility cross platform
Linux kernel API as a standard for emulation (mainframe, supercomputing, mini...)
Wordpress as a blogging standard
Sword standard for bibles
Guile as a standard Scheme
Blender API for 3D modeling
etc...
aren't standards. Oh wait.
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Absolutely. And you can see that by noting that:
List of completely unrelated things
aren't standards. Oh wait.
If you'd bother to think a second before posting, what the OP meant was that you won't see the code of a GPL project being used as a general implementation reference standard. It wasn't a slam against the GPL, simply pointing out that the BSD license allows anyone to read and use the ideas in the code without much in the way of limitation or requirements. For example, a Microsoft engineer could read over the code for the BSD TCP/IP stack and then implement one for Windows using those ideas as a reference.
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"For example, a Microsoft engineer could read over the code for the BSD TCP/IP stack and then implement one for Windows using those ideas as a reference. That would never happen with GPL'd code because the license is more restrictive (again, not necessarily a bad thing)."
You are wrong. Anyone that wants to is free to read any GPL code they want and then implement those ideas themselves, using that code as reference. The GPL very explicitly limits itself to copyright law here (which does not prohibit anyone
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That's not true. Copyright extends to the expression of an idea. Studying code to apply the ideas, that is the expression is covered by copyright. That's why
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Expression and ideas is right in Chapter 1 and goes through the entire copyright act: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.pdf [copyright.gov]
Yes it is copyright law. You make not like copyright law but that doesn't change how broad the law is.
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'Studying code to apply the ideas' is not 'the expression covered by copyright'.
Ideas are not covered by copyright. Functionality is not covered by copyright. Only the creative, original expression is covered. Using the black box approach is a way to avoid the argument about what is functional, what is expressive, what is copied, what is original, etc. Trial lawyers love to argue, but clients want corporate lawyers to help them avoid the trial.
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I understand that in theory one can study code and avoid expression. In practice though it is complex and people far too easily end up copying expression without realizing it. Expression is a bit broader than line for line copying. See The Wind Done Gone case.
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That's a much more specific statement. I don't think it is my job to read his mind if he meant something that narrow he should have said it. Certainly that narrow statements is true.
Wordpress is used
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Most infrastructure runs Cisco IOS neither BSD nor Linux.
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We're currently in an era where lawyers have fought to extend copyright law into some sort of generic Intellectual Property law, and then make that ambiguous enough that their company could win two cases back to back on exactly opposite claims. The GPL can easily be abused in this way, as can all the alternatives. Blaming the GPL, or any other license, is a mistake, when the real problem is widespread legal abuse by powerful corporations.
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Like I said above. That's fine. That's a standard code base. I would agree BSD allows for a standard codebase. But that's a different claim then saying the GPL apps don't allow for standards. That's a different claim.
____
Now addressing that much weaker claim, I also don't happen to agree with you that the BSD license does this. Because there is no sharing the proprietary vendors end up creating non standard extensions of the BSD codebase rendering the free one more or less worthless. The history of X
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Mac OSX comes with a compiler. For years it was gcc. Now it is gcc and LLVM, they are transitioning.
Re:Congrats FreeBSD (Score:5, Informative)
There is a little bit of truth hiding behind your words but your statement is still very misleading.
GPL is much more 'truly open' precisely because no 'proprietary' implementation of a standard with a GPL reference implementation will be able to simply lift the code (legally.) *Proprietary* being the keyword here - you said commercial, and that is simply false. You can make a commercial implementation of a standard with a GPL reference implementation, and furthermore you can simply copy that reference implementation to do it!
Proprietary != commercial. Slackware, RedHat, Ubuntu, etc. are all commercial. GPL is perfectly fine with commercial. It's only proprietary that it objects to (and for good reason!)
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I will second that. And beyond just the fact that FreeBSD is a great OS and has spawned a number of derivative systems is the fact that it participates in the *BSD ecosystem in which useful ideas and developments are shared among the many BSD based distributions. (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD.....n) That makes for a lot of innovation and experimentation that benefits much of Unixland, and beyond.
Re:Congrats FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
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Let's not forget OSX which got some of its code from FreeBSD as well.
Had AT&T not sued BSDi (Score:4, Interesting)
We might be talking about FreeBSD as we do Linux these days.
FreeBSD's developers CHOSE to not be popular (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:FreeBSD's developers CHOSE to not be popular (Score:5, Funny)
They openly mocked on their mailing lists the feature of being able to boot into the OS from a floppy drive... The FreeBSD developers CHOSE to not be popular.
... and here it is umpteen years later and NOBODY boots from a floppy. Sounds to me like they were just ahead of their time.
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This is debatable. Booting from a CD is really booting from a floppy image written on the CD, so the feature is still in use worldwide for installers and for livd CD or live DVD environments.
Few modern kernels and boot environments fit on a single 1.44 Megabyte floppy image anymore.
Re:FreeBSD's developers CHOSE to not be popular (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree, as far as real adoption goes. Yes, booting Linux from a floppy using a MSDOS filesystem did enable a lot of people to get exposed, but the race was lost before those people made a difference. Had BSD development not stalled for two years, many of the early commercial and big site adoptions would have gone to BSD instead. Many started with BSD and then jumped to Linux because that is where the momentum was. Red Hat's IPO sealed the deal.
BTW, I introduced Pat Volkerding to the Church of the SubGenius, and pioneered a lot of the early work with Linux at Fermilab. I know a little about these things.
Re:FreeBSD's developers CHOSE to not be popular (Score:4, Interesting)
Red Hat's IPO was in 1999. The Linux :: BSD ratio was already massive by then.
I don't agree with you about 1994. I don't think it was losing time. I think the BSD community was hostile to people like me (Windows Power Users and Unix users -- non admins) who became the people who pushed Linux into corporate America during the 1990s and early 2000s.
Re:FreeBSD's developers CHOSE to not be popular (Score:4, Interesting)
It wasn't just something specific like floppy boot, it was the entire attitude that Linux was for "Peecees" or "Windoze" users, while *BSD was for the Sun Workstation Master Race (who couldn't actually personally afford a sun workstation). Just as an example, *BSD thought "real workstations use SCSI (period)". While Linux had all sorts of workarounds for your buggy IDE chipset and support for your proprietary Soundblaster CD-ROM drive.
And while the Net/Open/Free factions were flaming each other on the maillists, there was this persistant attitude that Linux was vastly inferior thing, even after the "the battle was over", and Linux had clearly won. When the history is really written, the story of *BSD has little do with AT&T and is more about how arrogance and personal politics alienated a entire genration of users.
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Honestly it was worse than that. Linux also had the "I wish I could buy a Sun workstation but can't afford one" crowd. BSDs were focused on Unix admin types they didn't want Unix user types with light admin knowledge.
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Great example of what was different between the BSD and Linux culture of the mid 1990s.
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The BSD people keep telling themselves that but no. The BSDs never made an attempt to appeal to Windows Power users and Unix users who didn't do administration. They focused on providing a classic Unix admin experience. They were harder to install, harder to configure, less tolerant of various hardware.... BSD failed because it never made an attempt to appeal to the group of end users that became the Linux desktop users of the 1990s and the Linux admins of the 2000s.
They lost a few months due to the la
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That's true. There are huge advantages in avoiding popularity. But that desire to not lower standards by educating or working with people with lower skills is what killed BSD not those missed months.
I d
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We might be talking about FreeBSD as we do Linux these days.
Well no. The difference is that I could get a stack of floppies and simple install instructions and actually install Slackware and get it running within one day. Whereas with BSD, asking for install help was pretty much guaranteed to leave you with the mark of the idiot for the remainder of time.
Cheers! (Score:2)
Here's to the other kind of free, and another 20 years for both!
What's the difference with Linux ? (Score:2, Interesting)
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As a regular user you don't see any difference. The same software works on both.
The main differences are in the kernel, and in the way the systems are developed. In Linux land the kernel and most other operating system components are developed in separate projects, and the distributions are responsible for packaging them so that they work together as one cohesive operating system. In FreeBSD everything is developed by essentially the same team as one big project. That's why we often don't speak about BSD di
CopyRight, CopyLeft, CopyFree (Score:3)
That's a good description. I would add that each develops with a different open source philosophy; Linux under GPL, the BSD's under the BSD license.
Proprietary software companies use CopyRight to preserve power for themselves.
The GPL answer to it is CopyLeft, (I'll share with you, but only if you agree to share with everyone else).
The BSD answer is CopyFree (I'll share with you. Period. I have faith that some good will come out of it).
Perhaps both approaches in parallel are needed to prevent CopyRight holde
Re:What's the difference with Linux ? (Score:4, Informative)
Hmmm.. last used for any length of time: FreeBSD 2.2.2 with FVWM95 (serial mouse!), back in '00 or thereabouts. (At the time, FreeBSD was reliable; Linux was not. Corel Linux--remember that, anyone? Urg. Red Hat? flaky, at the time. Mandrake Linux: slightly less flaky.)
But the culture hasn't changed much, from a recent scout-round. I'd say your impression is correct. Here are some random thoughts:-
*BSDers will say *BSD is more like "real Un*x", but as far as I can tell the OS has been riddled with schisms since the '70s. The "real Un*x" is a nostalgic fantasy (or an artefact of Stockholm syndrome, take your pick).
*BSDers will say *BSD is reliable. That hasn't been a problem for Linux for a decade. (Except for Intel's video drivers...grrr.)
Differences...apart from being behind the times hardware-wise (which you can do with Centos 4, if you want), the main difference is: only one "distro". (Although there are a few derivatives of FreeBSD and NetBSD, only their creators use them, pretty much.) BDSM submissives enjoy OpenBSD; no-one'd dare fork it.
The FreeBSD man pages were better. Way better, as I recall. That's in part because they tried to avoid all that dubious GNU stuff. Can't say they were wrong about info(1), but I can say they were wrong about make(1).
Filesystems. Linux and *BSD have *FAT*, NTFS, and ZFS in common. That's about it. FreeBSD has had ZFS for a couple of years longer than Linux.
Culture. For a long time the *BSDs' attitude was "compile it from source, and fix the dependencies yourself". Like combining the bad parts of old-time Slackware and Gentoo. Might be better now; I've only tried Live CDs.
Startup: I like the rc.conf startup configuration approach. (Way better than System Five initscripts. "Fragile" hardly begins to describe that approach.) I used Arch Linux for a long time because it had the closest approximation to rc.conf, but it also had drivers for USB and stuff. You know, the hardware I had attached to my PC. Not much, back in the day; but I wanted to use it. Arch was a pretty good compromise.
Now, Arch Linux has moved away from an rc.conf-ish approach to using systemd. I've been getting progressively more annoyed with all the Sieved Poots appearing in linux, so I recently tried PC-BSD, which is supposed to be an end-user friendly porcelain on top of FreeBSD. Unfortunately, it's dire. Bug after glitch after missing object. On both my PCs, the typography is eyewatering. Worse than Windows 3.11.
You're better off with FreeBSD. I might be going back there soon. Probably, though, it won't have support for my USB wifi stick. If you never see me comment again, you'll know what's happened.
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Correction: That was FreeBSD 2.2.26.
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Filesystems. Linux and *BSD have *FAT*, NTFS, and ZFS in common. That's about it.
Strange, I expected a lot of common pieces between the two. The source for most things in /bin/ is the same, right ? Or are all options to, say, 'ls' different ?
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They are similar but not the same. Most Linux distributions uses the GNU user land, where FreeBSD develops its own. Programs like ls will still fulfill the same task, but the options will be different and some features might be missing. You can still install the GNU user land on top of FreeBSD if you want it.
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ZFS appears to have a performance advantage under BSD. Or am I out of date again? In any case, I use BSD as a cheap NAS for precisely this reason. It can saturate gigabit ethernet on a cheap slow system.
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Filesystems. Linux and *BSD have *FAT*, NTFS, and ZFS in common. That's about it. FreeBSD has had ZFS for a couple of years longer than Linux.
Last I looked, Linux supported BSD disklabels and filesystems.
FreeBSD has had ZFS for a couple of years longer than Linux
Doesn't in-kernel ZFS still lead on BSD, too?
Re:What's the difference with Linux ? (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason I switched for FreeBSD around 2001 is that in-kernel sound mixing Just Worked. Two apps could write to /dev/dsp and get working sound. I'm now writing this while watching a DVD on the FreeBSD box connected to my projector and 5.1 surround sound system and I didn't need to do any configuration.
The other big difference is ZFS, which makes a huge difference to how you manage storage. Creating a new volume is as easy (and fast) as creating a new directory. You get compression, deduplication, constant-time snapshots, and a load of other things via a very easy administration interface.
If you're doing development work or running servers, jails give you a way of deploying a complete system that's got almost the same isolation as a VM but with much lower overhead. With ZFS, you can create one stock install and then clone it into a new jail in a few seconds.
The base system is maintained as a whole and the developers take the principle of least astonishment (POLA) seriously. User-visible changes are minimised and new configuration utilities are expected to follow the pattern of existing ones.
For firewalling, there are a number of choices, but the most sensible is probably the fork of OpenBSD's pf, modified to have better SMP scalability.
For security, there's the MAC framework, which is roughly equivalent to SELinux, that the sandboxing on OS X and iOS are based on, and also Capscium, which provides a capability model that is better suited to application compartmentalisation. An increasing number of the system daemons use Capsicum for privilege separation.
That's probably most of the user-facing things. You'll notice that GPU drivers (except for the nVidia blobs) tend to lag Linux somewhat. For Intel it's not so bad, for AMD it's quite a way behind (catching up, but not there yet).
Different, not backwards (Score:2)
Another thing which really astonished me is it's performance on 32 bit hardware. To learn how to use freebsd I put it on a disused server full of IDE disks and it performed far better than the linux that had been on there previously. On more recent systems it behaves as well as linux
More Memories (Score:2)
Where are the BSD/Linux Distros? (Score:2)
I'm still waiting to see the BSD userland / toolchain environment spliced together with the Linux kernel. My headache with BSD was always hardware driver support. Linux, the kernel, has won that race, and rather then duplicate efforts I would like to see the best parts of *BSD merged on top of a Linux kernel. Instead of just GNU/Linux (SysV Style Linux), you could have an alternative BSD/Linux (BSD Style Linux) distribution. If you include Mac OS X, BSD style unix far an away out numbers SysV style machines
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That sound like Gentoo. You take the Linux kernel and the BSD ports systems and engineer around that. What else are you looking for?
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So basically, you want a SunOS-like directory full of BSD userland applications? It seems like that should exist already.
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I think BSD/Linux is a brilliant idea. I started off with SOLARIS and various flavors of BSD and have gradually moved over to GNU/Linux for hardware compatibility. Linux has finally reached BSDs rock solid stability, but I still miss the rc scripts, logical parameters, and well written man files of the BSD userland. Have you tried Starch Linux?
And good hard driver support is still missing! (Score:2)
Ooh! Yeah! (Score:2)
Still no Xen/Dom0 (Score:2)
Having said that, I'm not really happy about the status of Xen on FreeBSD. Sure, Xen/DomU is working, no complaints about it. But we're waiting for Xen/Dom0 support for quite some time now, basically to host various VMs on FreeBSD/ZFS clusters. Sadly, Xen/Dom0 support is nowhere to be seen.
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OpenBSD is a fork of NetBSD, and historically was never really involved in FreeBSD. Of course, all 3 share code under the friendly license.
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Since mods use Troll as a substitute for "I think you're wrong" about opinions, perhaps they're just also using it that way now for facts.
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It's arguably better in one very specific way, they find a bug in the base system about once every decade.
But, that's their focus. FreeBSD has a different focus and does quite well in its own area of focus.
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Considering pretty much nobody uses Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, is it really a problem for FreeBSD's name recognition or brand confusion?
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A predictable problem I would have expected the *BSDs to avoid. Pre-compiled packages have never been ideal. We used to rely on them simply because our systems were so slow that compiling took so long. With a modern computer you should be able to compile an entire system in about 20 minutes so why on earth would you want to invite problems by using someone elses binaries?
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Because your build environment may be subtly different than mine., or the build environment on which the software was first generated and tested. And this can seriously break the software.
The presence, or absence, of optional compilation components makes a large change in software features. A very small change in one system library, or compiler environment, added to allow one component to build, may break other live components in ways the original author of either component never envisioned. And if I patch
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Recovering from the security incident is not just a matter of reformatting the machines. You don't just turn things back on and hope. All of the code that is being used to build the packages is being audited (this is now basically done). The FreeBSD cluster is now running auditdistd, so that auditing logs of all of the build machines are preserved even in the case of a compromise. The goal is to ensure that a compromise like this can't happen again, not to rush out packages and then have to do the whole
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Android is mostly Apache license, which is very similar to BSD in nature. The kernel is more or less the only thing they ship that is GPL.
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I think so. I think that the GPL provide a way for corporations to cooperate and avoid the tragedy of the commons. Under the GPL you as a company get to use this valuable codebase for your project but in exchange you have to help a bunch of companies you neither know about nor care about. That worked much better than a situation where people were free to take without having to share.
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No. The GPL does not say you have to give back to the community, it means that you have to pass the source to anyone that you give the binary to. When Google extended Linux to run on their cluster infrastructure, most of those changes remained private. Given that 90% of all software development is in-house and not for public release, this only means that 10% of developers would be compelled to release code by the GPL. The remaining 90% are not affected, but often avoid GPL'd code because of possible fut