BSD (Berkely System
Distribution)
was a research operating system based on the
original AT&T Unix, developed by the University of Berkeley, California. It has
been Open Source right from the beginning, and after the university lost
interest in developing it further, several community projects started up (the
very first ones were NetBSD and FreeBSD in the early nineties) to continue
developing BSD. Anyway, Linux was born roughly at the same time, but a pending
lawsuit about copyright infringements prevented the BSD projects to become as
successful as Linux (though you could argue about the exact reasons).
This led to Linux having great media coverage, while the BSD projects – though
still having fresh innovations and being actively developed – except for new
releases rarely make it to the press.
Community
As already covered on OSNews
there was a debate about increasing incompatibilities of third party tools
with BSD. This has always been an issue, especially for everything but FreeBSD,
which has some coverage by hardware vendors as it is often used in servers.
Though this was raised on an OpenBSD mailing list, developers are frustrated
everywhere. But to understand the reasons for the concern, it’s important to
understand the different philosophies of BSD and Linux developers. BSD guys are
conservative folks, and they have to be: Every decision they make will
immediately influence the whole operating system, as the whole BSD userland is
bundled together and developed by the same persons and teams. Thus they tend
to discuss more of the decisions part of any technical design.
With Linux, you don’t have this problem. The GNU/Linux world consists of many
independent software projects and distributions bundling them. A distributor
can easily decide not to adopt a special version of a tool, but rather stay with
an old one in order to preserve compatibility.
So the major issue in this case is not only that there are incompatibilities —
it is a general technical refusal of several implementations, but at the same
time being forced to implement things to be compatible with the rest of the
Open Source world (and especially desktop environments).
As an example, just browse a random BSD board, mailing list or chat, and search
for discussions about systemd. You’ll most probably find the worst trolling
and ranting about it, while the Linux world in most cases took it with a shrug.
DragonFlyBSD
DragonFlyBSD is a fork of FreeBSD after the core
developer of DragonFlyBSD, who was a FreeBSD developer at that time, didn’t like
the technical decisions taken in the project and decided to found his own one.
In 2012, DragonFlyBSD released two new versions: 3.0 on February 22nd, and 3.2
on November 2nd.
The ongoing work to improve SMP and clustering support resulted in exceptionally
good PostgreSQL benchmarks also
beating Linux, but there were also several other important changes:
-
VFS accounting/vquota — DragonFlyBSD introduced a quota subsystem in their
VFS (Virtual File System) layer, which is the subsystem used for accessing
the real filesystem modules. Thus, they are able to have quotas on any
filesystem, no matter if the filesystem supports it or not – but with the
current implementation, those quotas are only stored until the machine is shut
down. -
TRIM support — DragonFlyBSD now supports the TRIM command to improve
communication of the operating system with their solid state drives. -
USB4BSD import — The USB4BSD USB stack originally written for FreeBSD was
imported to DragonFly, allowing easier maintenance and a broad range of
drivers, including XHCI (USB 3.0) support. -
TrueCrypt/tcplay — TrueCrypt, a disk encryption tool, though being Closed
Source, gained a wide distribution among computers due to its ease of use and
cross-platform compatibility. DragonFlyBSD developers decided to write a
compatible Open Source implementation. This implementation has already been
ported to Linux and imported into some distributions, e.g. Fedora.
When it comes to filesystems, DragonFlyBSD is famous for its
HAMMER filesystem, which, informally
speaking, is something like a ZFS, but with DragonFlyBSD’s more powerful vfs
layer. In February 2012, with the conclusions and experiences gained from
HAMMER, the development of
HAMMER2 started.
While DragonFlyBSD currently uses pkgsrc, the package
system primarily used by NetBSD (but being cross-platform), there are
intentions to introduce a new
system.
It is named DPorts, providing binary packages on top of FreeBSD’s packaging system,
ports. Though it is rather experimental for now, the final goal is to make binary
packages and the new pkg tool from FreeBSD the
default for coming releases. Users won’t be forced to compile packages anymore.
FreeBSD/PC-BSD
FreeBSD is by far the most active BSD when it comes to sheer numbers, having the
largest user and developer base (roughly 80% of the whole BSD community).
In 2012, a new minor version of FreeBSD 8 (8.3-RELEASE in April) was released,
as well as a new major version (9.0-RELEASE in January) and its first minor
release (9.1-RELEASE in December).
With 9.0-RELEASE, there came a long list of changes:
-
HAST — HAST, the Highly Available STorage
is an easy way to mirror block devices over the network and create high
availability solutions with them. Essentially, it’s a RAID with
synchronisation which is geared for networking. -
Capsicum — The capabilities framework
Capsicum has been
added to FreeBSD but tagged experimental. It enables applications to use
fine-tuned capabilities. There is a dedicated developer for Capsicum, being
funded by Google (which is apprently interested in using it for Chrome). -
Softupdates journaling — FFS now supports softupdates
journaling,
enabling you to use softupdates
in conjunction with
journaling, which have
been two competing technologies until now. -
bsdinstall — The new
bsdinstall(8)
replaces the old installer which got a bit rusty in the end, not supporting
many of the features FreeBSD introduced in the last years.
bsdinstall provides more functionality and is more extendable by just being
a bunch of sh scripts with dialog(1). -
NFSv4 — FreeBSD 9.0 supports the fourth version of the network file system
NFS. Though it has been specified in 2000 (and again in 2003), there were
only few implementations so far. -
Playstation 3 — FreeBSD now officially supports the Playstation
3 game console. This might be a bit late, but the Playstation 3 has been
useful for several number crunching applications due to its processor and its
low price. -
RACCT — A new Resource Accounting framework (RACCT) has been added:
rctl(8)
now supports limiting the resources on a per-jail, per-user, per-process or
per-login-class model, but not percentual CPU time yet. -
gpart — The ancient tools for labeling disks (fdisk, *label) have been
dropped in favour of
gpart(8),
though they will remain in base for compatibility reasons. The new tool
should mainly be used with GPT partitions, the old types (MBR and disklabel)
are not endorsed anymore. -
Clang/LLVM — In FreeBSD 9.0, the new compiler has been imported.
It is not used for building 9.0, but in November 2012, all platforms were
switched to use Clang by default, i.e. FreeBSD 10.0 will build with Clang
instead of GCC by default.
With 9.1-RELEASE, there was a change indicating an interesting development:
ZFS changes from Illumos were pulled in. Maybe there is hope for an
Oracle-independent development of ZFS?
As many Open Source projects do, FreeBSD had a
fundraising campaign at the end
of the year, this time achieving a record result: About 750k USD were collected,
showing the commercial size of FreeBSD well in comparison to the other BSDs.
The money is spent for maintaining infrastructure and funding new projects, some
of which promise interesting results:
-
standard ARM platform — A standard ARM platform, the Genesi Efika MX
SmartBook and SmartTop (ever heard of it?) with an ARM Cortex A8 SoC was
determined, and developers got free devices to start development for. -
NAND flash — The goal of this project is to improve the support for
devices running on small NAND flash memory, i.e. a filesystem, a driver
framework for controllers and memory chips and tools shall be developed. -
growfs — The tool for enlarging filesystems shall be modified to be able
to grow filesystems online. Until now, growfs is only capable of handling
offline filesystems, i.e. unmounted filesystems.
For FreeBSD, there were two unpleasant events in 2012: First, the security
advisories
on
the
best
possible
date,
23rd of December (the day just before Christmas holidays, when most administrators
had already left). And second, there was another broad security issue this year:
a security breach, published
on November 17th. Administrators might have noticed that for about one week, there
were no portsnap updates to ports trees. The reason was that one week earlier,
the security team found an SSH key of a developer compromised as of 19th of
September, with access to two ports development machines.
Eventually, the security team announced they didn’t find anything security-relevant, but
still recommend not to trust binary package installations made in that time
frame. In December, everything was completely back online.
NetBSD
NetBSD is the oldest BSD derivate still under development. A few years ago, its
developers mostly focused on supporting many platforms and providing a good
abstraction to achieve this. Nowadays, the focus slightly shifted to provide a clean operating
system. Here, clean means that code should be clean, and new features should be
introduced thoughtfully, not just to be removed again after some releases or break
compatibility.
Three years after the last major NetBSD release (5.0), NetBSD 6.0 was finally
released on October 17th. The NetBSD 5 branch was updated to 5.2 on 3rd of
December and NetBSD 4.0 support was dropped five years after its initial release
in 2007.
Nearly three years after the last release, there are a lot of changes for 6.0:
- apropos — During the Google Summer Of Code (GSoC) 2011, there was a
project to rewrite
apropos(1)
to not only have a dumb full-text search, but a relevance-weighted search.
This apropos is now included in NetBSD 6.0. -
posix_spawn — POSIX finally decided to specify an interface to spawn a new
process, named
posix_spawn.
In a GSoC project, this was implemented and is now part of NetBSD. -
netpgp — Due to many large dependencies GnuPG has, and the fact that it is
GPL licenced (remember: BSD folks don’t like that), there was a rewrite of
PGP/GPG, named
netpgp. The
implementation is not yet as feature-rich as gpg, but it is being further
developed and is already capable of doing basic encryption and signing. -
v7fs, chfs — The ancient Unix 7th Edition file system has been
reimplemented. The reason behind it is to have a very small filesystem
alternative to FAT, and to be able to read old disks from PDP-11s.
On the other hand, there is a new filesystem named CHFS which is intended to
be used on small flash devices. -
npf — In NetBSD 6.0, a new firewall solution named npf
was introduced. It was written as a replacement to overcome the
problems with the two which were already implemented (ipf and pf).
Recently, Antti Kantee (pooka@) provided two more nice applications of his
rump anykernel concept: He ran NetBSD
kernel modules on
Linux and
even in a
browser,
using JavaScript.
In July, there was an interesting post on a mailing list from a Google
developer.
It addressed the bionic C library used in Android devices, which apparently uses
many parts from several sources.
The goal of the developer was to merge the code used by Android back with
upstream, eventually taking one single C library, and not several different
ones.
Though the discussion just ended without a result (at least without a public
result), it is still nice to see how many projects are actually using parts of
NetBSD’s code somehwere.
This is also the case for MINIX. On March 7th, MINIX
3.2.0 was released.
As the developers of MINIX are mainly researchers who want to use MINIX for
researching, and not for developing software, and their userland was fairly old,
they decided to use another one: NetBSD’s.
Thus, from MINIX 3.2.0 on, there are large parts of the ordinary NetBSD
userland as well as pkgsrc, the package management from NetBSD contained in
MINIX.
OpenBSD
OpenBSD is a fork of NetBSD after personal issues between the now-OpenBSD main
developer and the rest of the development team back in the nineties. Nowadays,
OpenBSD is famous for its focus on security and its radicalness in not
accepting Closed Source software, leading to the development of common tools like OpenSSH.
As every year, OpenBSD released two new versions (5.1 in May, 5.2 in November) – they have a fixed periodic release schedule.
OpenBSD releases always have a motto and an accompanying release song, sometimes
also with a story behind it. 5.1 had the generic motto Bug Busters, while 5.2
had the motto Aquarela Do Linux, referring to the problems Marc Espie pointed
out as mentioned before (see “Community”).
The major changes in 2012 were:
-
NAT64 — OpenBSD 5.1 introduced NAT64
for their packet filter pf. -
Books — The preorder of Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition, a famous
book about OpenBSD, started. -
pthreads — Until then, pthreads in OpenBSD had been user-level only.
This year, rthreads were introduced, mapping pthreads of a userland utility
directly to kernel processes, improving SMP capability and speed, now making
better usage of multicore machines.
In June 2012, the project Bitrig forked from OpenBSD.
Their philosophy, as opposed to OpenBSD, is mainly about being less
conservative. Its developers want to drop the main focus on security and
supporting old platforms, but focus on
- using Clang as their default compiler (OpenBSD uses GCC),
- providing better KVM (virtualisation) support,
- providing filesystem journaling by porting NetBSD’s WAPBL,
- supporting only x86 machines (i386, amd64),
- improving OpenBSD’s SMP support.
Note
You should have in mind that I’m part of the FreeBSD and NetBSD community
myself, so this report might have been biased towards these two.
I also excluded all the general improvements operating systems go through over
time: improving performance, adding drivers, becoming more stable.
I wish Linus never wrote that kernel and BSD would have been more popular. Today we would have better OSes since BSDs are much better integrated than Linux.
We all wish things, I wish you hadn’t written that stale flame bait. Alas…
Better integrated? They already have their incompatibilies between them and have to “cross-polenize” each other on the points where they lack of innovation/functionality. I love BSD but i disgree when people say that BSDs just create a fork when is needed. They created some forks when could be avoided:
– Matt creater DragonFly because he was tired of people putting “band-aids” on FreeBSD, that should fix at one side and break other. This and the desire of have a better “cluster native OS” created this wonderfull piece of software.
– Bitrig is a OpenBSD less conservative. I still se no other than “lego play” utility to this. I know that OpenBSD guys works hard, but their decisions tend to make all thing difficult, and create this fork.
– PC-BSD = Lack of a stronger desktop initiative by the FreeBSD guys. You know, if they have a installer for “desktop fluffy things” this could be avoided.
Some “BSD decisions” would not change, if Linux didn’t existed.
The previous poster meant integration at the system level, not between projects. FreeBSD for example is responsible for the kernel, kernel modules, userland, toolchain, and installer, they are all managed, developed and tested together. Compare to linux where the kernel comes from one place, the userland from another, and they are integrated downstream from the initial developer.
They are as about badly integrated project wise as the 100s of Linux distros, but there are only 4 or 5, so that is an easier problem to deal with.
While I agree with you point in theory, your examples are pretty terrible:
Dragonfly is one of the more distinctive variants of BSD. It has a whole boat load of features not seen in FreeBSD.
Unless things have changed significantly recently, PC-BSD isn’t really a fork of FreeBSD, it’s more a “distribution”. It’s point was to give users a no-fuss desktop ready version of FreeBSD. And as PC-BSD is 100% FreeBSD compatible (after all, it /IS/ FreeBSD), I think it deserves it’s place as it takes any pressure off the FreeBSD devs from having to cater their limited resources to a multitude of different users expectations (or in layman’s terms, FreeBSD can focus on building a solid base and PC-BSD and focus on shipping FreeBSD with the desktop preinstalled and configured to run perfected out-of-the-box).
Yeah. It started with just the desire of make the Operation System more scalable and “cluster oriented from roots”, and today we have wonderfull features in it.
Yeah. I´ve used bad example here, sorry. PC-BSD helped a lot with docs. I could use bitrig and mirOS here. Both of them want a more “permissive” or less “Theo centric” version of the ol´good OpenBSD
You assume too much in your statement.
1. One cannot assume that if Linux was never made that the BSD’s would take its please in terms of popularly.
One could as easily argue that the BSD’s popularly owes its success to Linux, and without Linux the BSD’s today would be even less popular.
2. Why would we have better Operating Systems? Having a integrated and userland and kernel/system does not a good operating system make.
It’s hard to say. I once read Linus Torvalds saying that if he was aware of the 386BSD project that he wouldn’t have started writing the Linux kernel. So all that would be needed to have a BSD parallel universe would be for someone to go back in time and give Mr Torvalds a subscription for Dr. Dobbs Journal. Frankly there is no way to know how things would have turned out. Linux not existing does not mean that BSD would have automatically filled the void. It is very possible that free operating systems would have never been as successful had Linux not been on the scene. Also, without the existence of Linux the outcome of the USL lawsuit may have been different.
Isn’t this also the year FreeBSD became publicly available on Amazon AWS?
The package build system isn’t yet up. Certain FreeBSD 9.0 binary packages are older than what’s available in ports, and 9.1 doesn’t have any binary packages available yet.
And that’s a real PITA. It’s like releasing a car without wheels. But who cares? the car is there …
Do your sh#t thoroughly, then release. Never the other way around. Otherwise you’re heading to disaster [or Linux].
Except the packages produced by the build system aren’t part of the release, while the wheels are part of the car. This isn’t semantics; even when extra packages were included on the install disks, they were referred to as “third-party” packages.
I hate car analogies for computers, but a better analogy would be “The car is ready, but it’ll be a while before after-market add-ons are available.”
Even when packages are available, I find myself building from ports frequently, just for the greater control, and I’m willing to bet that anybody that administers FreeBSD systems professionally will rely on ports much, much more.
Packages build for 9.0 should also work perfectly on 9.1, but the packages build for 9.0 aren’t being updated at the moment, either (Though, the ports tree is).
I enjoyed the summary of what all has been happening in the BSD world. Here’s to hoping for many more years of progress.
Yes great article indeed! I would like to see more OSnews Originals like this.
OpenBSD summary seems like an afterthought, but not much of a surprise since the author states his bias/preferences at the end.
Nothing new, but a good primer for people unfamiliar with the BSDs, I suppose. Thanks for sharing.
Yeah, OpenBSD doesn’t get a lot of love.
Good solid OS, lacks features for sure.
Hey!… i give him all my love and two machines (my homeserver and my netbook).
Maybe you can help me with a question.
I recently installed FreeBSD on a free partition in order to learn more about it. I’m using 9.1. I’m confused about packages.
I can install software using the ports tree, but I’d like to install binary packages to save time. As far as understand it, pkgng is still non-existant because of the security breach and pkgadd is deprecated in 9.1. Is that correct?
What is the “best” or “most correct” way to install software in FreeBSD?
The way I understand it, the package build infrastructure isn’t back online yet (at least not as-of the end of January), so there are no packages for 9.1 yet, since it was released after the breach.
Additionally, packages for 9.0 may be outdated compared to their ports version for the same reason.
Thank you, that makes sense. I’ll go ahead and continue using the ports tree and compiling. I kind of like it since it feels like the most “FreeBSD” method.
By using NetBSD or OpenBSD instead
By deleting it from your hardrive.
RTFM, FreeBSD has a fantastic documentation, follow it.
You just need to install the initial ports tree, and then it is just a simple matter of “make install clean” from the directory of the port you want to install.
Keeping the system up to date is a bit trickier than the software installation process, though. In FreeBSD there are usually n-ways of doing the same (installing ports, upgrading the system, etc) action. Which I think it’s what may be confusing you initially.
Edited 2013-02-15 18:51 UTC
Did you just tell me to read the manual to learn how to install software using the ports tree after I said I know how to install software using the ports tree?
You also were asking “what is the best way to install software in FreeBSD,” so it seemed obvious to me that your proficiency with the ports system was not that good. Which is why I directed you to RTFM: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/ports.html
Edited 2013-02-16 03:54 UTC
…which brings me to another question. I’d heard for many years about how strong the documentation is for FreeBSD, and assumed that extended to the handbook as well. But while reading through the handbook, I kind of got the impression that something was just a little… off. I couldn’t tell what was current and what was out of date because of my lack of experience wih the OS. But then I got to this part:
“By far, the most popular X11 MP3 player is XMMS.” (freebsd.org/doc/handbook/sound-mp3.html)
And literally laughed out loud. Even so, I’m about to install XMMS (first time in about a eight years) just so I can be like “the FreeBSD guys”.
Is it appropriate to follow the handbook as the best documentation for installing and configuring FreeBSD 9.1?
Thank you for your guidance!
Lol. Some parts are kinda old, but any technical details should be valid. They do a good job of updating the handbook when things change.
Pity XMMS is down, because they had a little rant about how XMMS is still being used.
Great little amp like the Winamp 2 series before > version 2.81 (they started adding all the useless library features).
Winamp.com still makes 8 million a year last time anybody highlighted it.
Edited 2013-02-18 16:07 UTC
I have been using Linux since 2001. Every year or so I give BSD a test run. There is a lot to like but for me it just isn’t there yet. Too many issues to resolve when trying to get everything working as a daily use machine. When it “just works” after installation like Linux Mint I will give it serious consideration. Here is hoping…
Which BSDs did you try?
Have you tried PC-BSD?
Ultimately though, there’s more to an OS than whether your desktop does compositing out of the box.
Edited 2013-02-15 15:26 UTC
If you want something where you just click next, next, next to install and will auto detect hardware and install necessary drivers and media codecs, you can give Pc-BSD a try. It is as user friendly as Linux Mint.
PC-BSD has the same hardware issues as FreeBSD. For example, in order to enable Atheros 9285 wireless support, you have to edit /boot/loader.conf as root and add if_ath_load=”YES”. This is not something most folks would not feel comfortable doing.
Well, duh!
PC-BSD is FreeBSD. Thus, all hardware support for PC-BSD comes from FreeBSD.
ath(4) is part of the GENERIC kernel in FreeBSD 9.1. No loader.conf editing required.
Unless the BSDs get a proper top-to-bottom binary package management working, they will be a OS just for techies and servers. They tried that with pkgng and … well …. lets see if that works … has not yet.
I run FreeBSD on several servers for lots of network packet analysis but run Linux and OS X on the laptop/desktop. Severs is great since I do not have to compile and install from ports a lot of packages so no broken ports on the core stuff. But won’t trust that on the desktop.
Heres hoping to see FreeBSD on the desktop soon.
2013 should be “the year of binary packages” for FreeBSD.
You can already upgrade the base OS via freebsd-update(8).
And the PKGng project will allow you to do binary upgrades of your 3rd-party software (aka ports) with the ease of Debian’s apt-get. All the pieces are in place for 9.0 and 9.1, and PKGng is now the default on 10-CURRENT. All that’s missing is for the package-building cluster to be brought back online to build binary packages on a regular basis. The cluster is being rebuilt due to the security incident last fall.
However, one can use ports-mgmt/poudriere to create their own package-building system, and use PKGng to manage everything on their own systems.
That’s what we’ve been working on for some time in MidnightBSD. Our mport package management tools were covered in a BSD Magazine article if you’re interested.
I’m planning on doing the 0.4 release with the package tools this year. You can actually use an early version in 0.3 as an option, but it doesn’t have all the polish one would expect.
How current is your project in relation to FreeBSD (using them as a touchstone)? I noticed you started the project from FreeBSD 6.x. Are your packages now current with FBSD 9.0, or what? The project looks interesting and I’d like to try it. Will it run in VBox? I’ve tried past versions of FBSD and I could not get them to boot in VBox…
There is also ghostbsd.org. I installed it once, but the next time, it failed to install. (xfce beta 3 version.) Not a problem here, it was for disk formatting anyway, as I run Freebsd natively.
To more respond to this post, you may wish to try any of the several ways of dual-booting [carefully, following a guide, etc…] That was how I first ran FreeBSD for a year or so. If it had any major problem at any time, I’d just boot into Windows98 and check on how to fix it, configure it, etc.
If you really want to use virtualbox, there is a freebsd.org forum which has probably many posts on the subject. I’ve read many posts, announcements, but only
speedily as I never expect to have time for virtualization as far as I can ascertain. [I run more than one FreeBSD machine, and it takes all my computing time per se to keep current of the OS developments, aside from normal email, browsing, etc. ]
Another BSD variant trying to provide an user friendly desktop, beside PC-BSD, is GhostBSD.
GhostBSD is based on FreeBSD and comes as an installable live CD. It has two desktop flavors, LXDE and Gnome 2.
http://ghostbsd.org/
Thanks for a great article. Useful summary, I learned a lot.
My first experience with any of the BSDs was I downloaded FreeBSD (don’t recall version) via dialup (yes dialup) modem. I retrieved all the diskettes (yes diskettes) and installed it. I was intrigued but not sold on it. My last experience with it was OpenBSD on my Sun Ultra 2 Enterprise. Not long ago (last year) but now that box has Gentoo Linux on it.
Edit:
Forgot to mention that I prefer the *BSD approach to being a complete OS, not just a distro like all the flavors of Linux.
Edited 2013-02-15 19:20 UTC
I use FreeBSD for my servers and my desktop, and it does everything I need it to do.
Persons posting that FreeBSD will someday be ready for the desktop may be advised that it is fully capable now. I can use browsers, email, webmail, view .PPS and .flv and .webm; run pipe commands; upgrade the system fully; backup often; etc etc etc… the only caveat I know of is a… one may want multiple CPU (a main desktop; a build machine and/or server) and one should keep current with pending changes (pkgng default for V10; SUJ new in V9 etc etc). The forum is really helpful in that regard if one reads it daily.
………….
In regards to ‘how to install software’, I can recommend
“portmaster -d -B -P -i -g www/seamonkey audio/mp3blaster audio/lame ” for example. (Batch mode, more or less). Ninety percent of the time, I can run that in one xterm while browsing and email etc normally in another xterm… efficienc(ies) I’ve not seen in other operating systems.
Sorry, gotta call you on this. Every modern operating system can handle this kind of multitasking with no trouble on decent hardware. Especially with an SSD.
I take it the only OS you’ve used are FreeBSD and DOS.
I used windows98, and the shareware/freeware plethora not only resulted in BSOD’s daily, but the start menu gave scant hint of where many programs could be found, having grown in size.
I’ve used and could use Linux, howsoever, browsing the forum for one distro daily, I wonder if each poster could not do 20 to 80 percent more fixing/installing/upgrading/developing daily if the poster were running FreeBSD instead. Breakages are posted… for which dual machines… then, often “dd’d sdb rather than sda…” countless times…
My post on FreeBSD’s positives were not to put down the ones I consider less efficient, but to point out the advantages of the former, and how it can *indeed* be used as a desktop capable machine, which if I did not make it clear, was the reason for the original post, as
a counterpoint to those who said or implied that FreeBSD would *someday* be ready for the desktop.
The thing that sold me was being able to run pipe commands.
Are you by any chance friends with this guy
https://twitter.com/1990sLinuxUser
“It has been Open Source right from the beginning …”
On a historical note, early on it was not Open Source, at least as we use the term now. BSD was based on and included portions of AT&T UNIX source code, and one needed an AT&T source code license in order to get a copy. Aside from that restriction, it was, indeed, freely available to anyone (and in fact, that was a condition of the AT&T license in the first place – six years before the GPL!)
And AT&T gave you the source on tape, as they were not allowed to sell binaries.
IOW, it was OSS from the beginning, but not “Free Software”.
TrueCrypt, a disk encryption tool, though being Closed Source, gained a wide distribution among computers due to its ease of use and cross-platform compatibility. DragonFlyBSD developers decided to write a compatible Open Source implementation.
That was a waste of their time. TrueCrypt is and always has been open source. They should have just downloaded the source from http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads2 same as everyone else. Either the article has mis-described the situation or the devs are idiots.
Just because the source is downloadable doesn’t make it open source. It’s quite possible that the truecrypt license is not compatible with Dragonfly BSD’s goal and policies.
A cursory glance indicates that the license is such that it could not be included as part of any BSD.
That’s not what “closed source” means. If the article wanted to distinguish between free software and open source, it should have done so, but closed source is unquestionably the wrong one of the three terms to use.
While the license may have change since it was originally rejected it is still not recognized as ether an open source license by the OSI (Open Source Initiative) or as a free software license by the FSF.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truecrypt
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Forbidden_items?rd=ForbiddenItems#Tru…
Neither of the three terms is particularly good. “Shared source” would be probably the best description of Truecrypt.
BSD is is Berkeley _Software_ Distribution, not Berkeley System Distribution…
Really???
Systemd is a clone of Solaris SMF. The creator of Systemd heavily references to SMF all the time. Just as BTRFS is a clone of Solaris ZFS. And Systemtap is a clone of Solaris DTrace. And OpenVswitch is a clone of Solaris Crossbow. And Linux containers is a clone of Solaris Containers. It would be nice to see Linux devs create something new, and not just cloning other OSes?
Actually, there are many reasons to reject most linuxish stuff in a BSD world. The code is poor, inconsistent, revolutionary [it tends to break other things] and – many times – not needed. Systemd is a perfect example – it is a one madman’s dream in a land of sane. This man’s name is Lennart and he’s five … he likes to break things from time to time.
I dunno systemd makes my Fedora install boot up nice and fast.
Oh, and Bitrig project is there to spoil all OBSD hard work and great achievements and turn it all to dust, on their own land.
But … I shall be citing the “bible”:
“5.2 – Why do I need to compile the system from source?
Actually, you very possibly do not. ”
“5.6 – Why do I need a custom kernel?
Actually, you probably don’t. ”
and in a case you think you should fork the OS:
“It is assumed you have read the above, and really enjoy pain.”
Netcraft confirms it… BSD is living.