Some Original Berkeley Unix Pioneers Still Work On The FreeBSD Project (www.tfir.io) 35
Slashdot reader sfcrazy writes:
The Linux Foundation hosted the executive director of the FreeBSD Foundation, Deb Goodkin, at the Open Source Summit in San Diego. In this episode of Let's Talk, we sat down with Goodkin to talk about the FreeBSD project and the foundation.
"How did they let you in?" jokes their interviewer.
"They didn't realize that FreeBSD was not a Linux distribution," the executive director replies. "No, but seriously, they've been very welcoming to the FreeBSD community and wanting to include our voice in conversations about open source." FreeBSD is about five and a half million lines of code, versus 35 million for Linux, so "If you want to learn, it's a great way to learn... Someone said they believed that they were a great Linux sys-admin because of knowing FreeBSD."
Founded in 2000 in Boulder, Colorado, the FreeBSD project is a 501(c)(3) -- a public charity -- where the Linux Foundation is a 501(c)(6) -- a trade association. They have 400 committers, and "We're known for excellent documentation," the executive director says in the interview, describing how the community works to welcome new-comers and mentor new contributors. "We actually descended from the original Berkeley Unix. Some of those original people who worked on Berkeley Unix are still involved in the FreeBSD project. They're very approachable. So these young people go to conferences, and here you have Kirk McKusick, who developed UFS and still works on file systems, and he's there, and he's telling stories about back in the day, when he was at Berkeley working with Bill Joy, and he is really interested in helping these new people contribute."
Companies using FreeBSD include Netflix and Apple -- and according to Phoronix, the number of FreeBSD ports has increased to nearly 37,000 packages.
"How did they let you in?" jokes their interviewer.
"They didn't realize that FreeBSD was not a Linux distribution," the executive director replies. "No, but seriously, they've been very welcoming to the FreeBSD community and wanting to include our voice in conversations about open source." FreeBSD is about five and a half million lines of code, versus 35 million for Linux, so "If you want to learn, it's a great way to learn... Someone said they believed that they were a great Linux sys-admin because of knowing FreeBSD."
Founded in 2000 in Boulder, Colorado, the FreeBSD project is a 501(c)(3) -- a public charity -- where the Linux Foundation is a 501(c)(6) -- a trade association. They have 400 committers, and "We're known for excellent documentation," the executive director says in the interview, describing how the community works to welcome new-comers and mentor new contributors. "We actually descended from the original Berkeley Unix. Some of those original people who worked on Berkeley Unix are still involved in the FreeBSD project. They're very approachable. So these young people go to conferences, and here you have Kirk McKusick, who developed UFS and still works on file systems, and he's there, and he's telling stories about back in the day, when he was at Berkeley working with Bill Joy, and he is really interested in helping these new people contribute."
Companies using FreeBSD include Netflix and Apple -- and according to Phoronix, the number of FreeBSD ports has increased to nearly 37,000 packages.
Should always be room (Score:4, Insightful)
There should always be room for different ideas and approaches to various subjects. To claim there is one true way is folly.
Re: Should always be room (Score:3)
Absolutely. That's what's wrong with the religious wars over tech that spring up on a regular basis in tech. There's always room for alternatives, and having them keeps us on our toes. When Microsoft killed Netscape the first thing they did is announce they where not going to put much more effort into improving IE now that it was king of the castle. The emergence of Firefox forced them to innovate again. Having only one option for *anything* is compromising not just to consumers but producers because it mea
Re: (Score:2)
There should always be room for different ideas and approaches to various subjects.
Except when Company-you-don't-like does it, of course.
Great work (Score:5, Insightful)
I love running any of the *BSDs because of their more minimal and clean approach. You don't have to worry about /etc getting clobbered between releases because half the config files have changed. And to repeat, their documentation is top notch. Its also nice to run tools like ifconfig and route without being told they are legacy and please use the new tools with the same functionality but different syntax.
Re:Great work (Score:5, Informative)
Slim pickings? All the normal stuff most people use runs on BSD. That's true for server as well as desktop.
On desktop, the major window managers run, libreoffice, thunderbird, calibre, chromium and firefox, vlc and mplayer, sympy and maxima
On server, apache and nginx, postgresql and mysql, samba, postfix and sendmail, bind
Re: (Score:2)
I think we just proved you're a weirdo running weird stuff
But does it run System D? (Score:1)
That is the critical question.
BSD with System D is what the world needs.
Re: (Score:2)
BSD with System D is what the world needs.
There is a special place in hell for people like you ;-)
Re: (Score:3)
even less software available for it than Linux, which is already slim pickings
That's what you read on the internet 20 years ago and you're still repeating it.
There is an excessive glut of software. There already was 20 years ago, too.
Re:Great work (Score:4, Interesting)
What are you talking about? FreeBSD has a Linux binary compatibility layer. Linux binaries run with no modification.
Who is BSD (Score:3)
and why is the government holding him/her? Where can donate? will I get a tee-shirt?
Re: (Score:2)
Free BSD 12 released (Score:4, Interesting)
The BSD-Twelve were recently released. No charges pressed. there was a slashdot story:
https://bsd.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
The BSD's have some wonderful spinoff's too... (Score:4)
Don't forget to take a look at some of the projects built on FreeBSD... Like pfSense, and some of the other firewall projects, and FreeNAS... Which just kicks a**!
the FreeBSD project should build a... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
What you can do is run android on an iphone
Re: (Score:3)
That's easier said than done. It's relatively easy to port FreeBSD or something to a phone; it's relatively much harder to get SIM/talk/text working. Those features (and usually several others) rely on proprietary firmware blobs designed specifically for the OS already on the phone; to get them working on another OS, you'd need to do some significant reverse engineering.
If you want an example of
FreeBSD Project != Linux Foundation (Score:2)
The Linux Foundation isn't what the poster thinks it is, despite the cited differences in tax exemption status. It's silly to compare the two as they aren't comparable in nearly any meaningful way.
Re:FreeBSD Project != Linux Foundation (Score:4, Insightful)
no where does the article nor summary here claim they are the same. there was only joke of FreeBSD person being invited to Linux Foundation as if it was mistake
Well, I hope they keep at it (Score:3)
We may eventually need a replacement for Linux, if things progress the same way as they do now.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. That is why I have no systemd on Linux and my employer does not either. This is still possible and not too much hassle with Debian. But the self-centered and incompetent cabal behind systemd is forever looking for ways to make it even harder to get rid of their malware and hence that may eventually not really be a possibility anymore. That will be the point when I switch to FreeBSD.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
BeOS (Score:4, Interesting)
BeOS 5 was totally awesome for it's time. It was blindingly fast. You could from the BIOS handoff to fully operational desktop in about 10 seconds - this on a Pentium MMX (166 MHz) IBM. You could also change from a static IP to DHCP without a reboot. Only the network module would reboot. For comparison, a IP mode change in Windows 95/98 would require a reboot. I still have a BeOS 5 Pro edition disc in my bookcase. The only issue I personally had with BeOS was the extremely limited hardware support.
Fun Be factoids: originally BeOS ran on its own custom PPC hardware (BeBox, with a pair of PPC 603-66 or 603e-133 MHz processors), and it was eventually ported to Macintosh.
Rumor has it that BeOS was supposed to be the successor of MacOS 9, but that Jean-Louis Gassée wanted too much money. Additionally, BeOS had not yet been ported to x86. So instead Apple turned to Steve Jobs and the NeXTstep, instead, because they had PPC and x86 ports available. Jobs was just icing on the cake.
Re: (Score:2)
The Windows GUI has always prompted for a full reboot to update the network stack with any changes, even as trivial as the IP/netmask/gateway. However, it was never required. If you cancel the reboot prompt dialog, open a command prompt, and type "ipconfig /all", you'll see it has the new IP and everything already set.
And you could always just unplug/reconnect the network cable to force a reset of the network stack.
Saved a *lot* of time waiting around once I discovered those tricks. :)
Re: (Score:2)
We may eventually need a replacement for Linux, if things progress the same way as they do now.
The beauty of F/L-OSS projects and their code is that at any given time you can FORK them. When you wrote that we may eventually need a replacement for Linux, let me ask you this: WHY?
Simple: You do not understand the problem. The kernel is still fine. It is the distros that are the issue. And forking a distro is a bit more effort than one person can invest.
Classic linuxzealot.jpg sandwich board ref herein (Score:2)
Haven't logged into Slashdot for ages, but hi from a fellow Unix "greybeard", circa
pre- 4.3BSD, but also v7 and v6, too, i.e. the Ken Thompson era, when
complete shells were only seven pages of code. Anyhow, if you google search
for "linuxzealot.jpg" (I dunno if URLs are allowed here yet or how to do them
[that would be post http: era]), you'll get the snarky attitude from Linux
carpetbaggers to the Berkeley Unix world. Notwithstanding, BSD rules, mos def
Re: (Score:2)
Used Unix V7 and BSD 4.1 and 4.2 at UCSC back in the early 80s.
Barebones (Score:2)
*BSD is dying (Score:4, Funny)
It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead. /s....couldn't help myself; this is /. after all....
Re: (Score:1)
Beat me to it.