One of the main developers of FreeBSD, Jordan Hubbard, announced today that the next release of FreeBSD, version 5, will be delayed until November 2002. Jordan said that “Unfortunately, a lot of the features on the TODO list for 5.0, such as SMPng (next-generation symmetric multi-processing), KSE (kernel scheduler entities) or support for a new architectures like the PowerPC, SPARC64 or IA64 (Itanium) are nowhere close to being complete. Without these features, there’s just not a lot of reason for 5.0 to exist in non-snapshot form and it’s therefore been decided that rather than release 5.0 prematurely, we’re going to give ourselves the time we need to finish it properly.” Jordan also talked about the general economic down-turn and the decline in resources which various companies have had available to donate to such efforts.
FreeBSD 5.0 Delayed For One More Year
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Good things come to those who wait. 🙂
Regards,
Jason “Maverick” VanDerMark
I agree. Some people around me (ex-Be engineers
said that FreeBSD 5 will be an even more exceptionally good *Unix*.
Eugenia, do you still have your BeOS binary of expat lying around? The BeBits (http://www.bebits.com/app/1687) link goes to BeNews, so it’s kinda down….8(
Hmm… I don’t think I have it actually. Only 5-6 of my 70+ applications I have published on BeBits I have them still on my hard disk (low disk space in my BeOS partition you see).. I have uploaded them all on the BeNews server thinking that they will be safe there…
I _really_ hope that BeNews will be back up soon.
Hey Eugenia… would it have been a big problem to burn your apps on to a CD? Many people seem to be doing it these days… 🙂
I don’t have a CD burner. Only a DVD drive. Plus, I developed all these apps in more than a year of time, so I could not have think back then so much about the whole thing.
Hi,
Before I start, this *isn’t* a flame, and I am not trying to start a flame war, its an honest question you just can’t ask in an IRC channel without it degrading into a major arguement!
I took a look at FreeBSD a while ago, circa 3.4-release, and found it to be a better Open Source OS than Linux. Things just seemed to be done right. I soon moved back to Linux though, due to support for hardware and software.
Many commercial products are comming out for Linux, and don’t even mention FreeBSD, many Open Source products such as KDE have quite a large lag between the Linux release and the FreeBSD port.
Whilst many of us don’t like it, it is clear that just like Micrsoft is the king of closed source Operating Systems, Linux is fast becoming the king of Open Source Operating Systems (I know many servers use FreeBSD still, but for how long??). Why should I move my workstation or servers to FreeBSD? I am not talking about the fact that it seems to be technically superior to Linux (I don’t know if it is). I am talking about the fact that it seems to be a distant second to Linux now that IBM and other large companies are pushing it.
Thanks in advance.
Andrew Edward McCall
Andrew asked: “Why should I move my workstation or servers to FreeBSD? I am not talking about the fact that it seems to be technically superior to Linux, I am talking about the fact that it seems to be a distant second to Linux now that IBM and other large companies are pushing it.”
I’d say the answer is that in the area of open source OS popularity and backing by big companies are less important than they are for closed OS (I’m not saying that they are completely unimportant).
For example, it is nice that Linux supports the Foonly Megadrive, due to the help from IBM now also runs on /390 mainframes, and has new KDE releases every week; but if you personally have neither the Megadrive nor a mainframe, spend most of your time in bash anyway, and don’t have the time to update your installation every wek, then the perceived advantages of Linux become void.
It’s as always the question of using the right tool for the right job: there is no single ‘best’ tool, and the most popular tool might not be the right one for you.
Hm, it´s hard to wait for FreeBSD5 another year… But hey, it will supprt my G4 PPC – no need to use NetBSD for having *BSD on PPC-Platforms anymore…
I´m really happy ´bout this message…
Yeah, Linux is getting more hardware and software support than FreeBSd, however FreeBSD can run Linux apps…
Having a tightly controlled code base is one reason – there’s only one distro of FreeBSD. A rock-hard tcp/ip stack, jailed processes, easily updateable, highly scaleable, doesn’t swap, swap swap, an excellent security record, has a very easy installation architecture, runs the World’s busiest websites, and has a licence that is practical rather than political are a few more. I like Linux – especially Mandrake, but FreeBSD is craftsmanship. I was looking forward to 5.0 for the new SMPing, but I’d rather they took the time to get it right. Part of me wishes for a 6 month delay nevertheless.