Flame bait: Why BSD is dying, or How I learned to stop worrying and love Linux

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I believe most of the frustration around Linux is related to the big suite of different distributions and their goals, design philosophies and ways of solving problems. I have hard to believe that the regular anti-linux person actually has had any huge problems with the kernel and the base GNU tools.
I can see why some people don't like the license since it force all developers to write explicit for the community. So it is somewhat anti-capitalistic and against the idea that an idea in it self should be obscured and sold as a product.
 
Good clarification of the matter, the truth is that a good license must be written for all cases, and the modification of its clauses must be tailored to the needs of developers. Provides legal guarantees demanded at the time, and should stay that way.

Currently the FreeBSD Project suggests and uses the following text as the preferred license scheme.
The FreeBSD project strongly discourages the so-called "advertising clause" in new code. Due to the large number of contributors to the FreeBSD project, complying with this clause for many commercial vendors has become difficult. If you have code in the tree with the advertising clause, please consider removing it. In fact, please consider using the above license for your code.

The FreeBSD project discourages completely new licenses and variations on the standard licenses. New licenses require the approval of <core@FreeBSD.org> to reside in the main repository. The more different licenses that are used in the tree, the more problems that this causes to those wishing to utilize this code, typically from unintended consequences from a poorly worded license.

Project policy dictates that code under some non-BSD licenses must be placed only in specific sections of the repository, and in some cases, compilation must be conditional or even disabled by default. For example, the GENERIC kernel must be compiled under only licenses identical to or substantially similar to the BSD license. GPL, APSL, CDDL, etc, licensed software must not be compiled into GENERIC.

Developers are reminded that in open source, getting "open" right is just as important as getting "source" right, as improper handling of intellectual property has serious consequences. Any questions or concerns should immediately be brought to the attention of the core team.

Every good project should have a good legal cover.
 
Until I can get perfect Windows ACLs on Linux, FreeBSD will be what I look to first for a long time.

BSD dying? After trying it out, I've actually considered throwing out all of our Apple, Windows, and Linux servers and replacing them all with FreeBSD.
 
wpostma said:
consumers just consume content in walled gardens that turn them, and the rest of the members of their herd, into automatons who simply shell out coins the way us kids used to pump quarters into Space Invaders machines at the arcades in the 80s.

Dude, not everybody wants to mess with source code.

Some people just want tools to get other things done. Computers are a means to an end for them, and time not spent screwing around with the command line or a compiler is time they can spend being more productive at what they actually do.
 
throAU said:
Dude, not everybody wants to mess with source code.

Some people just want tools to get other things done. Computers are a means to an end for them, and time not spent screwing around with the command line or a compiler is time they can spend being more productive at what they actually do.

The Ports system "screws around" with a compiler behind the scenes, not you. The choice whether or not you want to mess with the source code vs. just installing a specific port and being done with it is entirely up to you.

My experience with FreeBSD vs. the different Linux distributions is that FreeBSD has a much clearer and more logical system structure. For example, I think it is completely unnatural to throw the operating system specific and third party applications all together in the same file system namespace, where with FreeBSD the operating system is stored in / and third party applications get placed in /usr/local.

I also had more problems with Debian or Ubuntu release upgrades than with freebsd-update(8) or simply rebuilding world, and there are much less 'gotchas' because the FreeBSD base system is a centrally tested self-contained set of software... Things like this upgrade guide: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html makes me really hesitant to just upgrade a box quickly, while with freebsd-update(8) the process is much simpler because it does not touch any of your third party software at all, only the things that the FreeBSD team is distributing.

The way things are being developed in FreeBSD land also seems more professional to me, I really like the "release when it's ready, not when it's time" motto... backed up by the very small number of errata problems after a release finally happens. I actually feel much better about putting a new FreeBSD -RELEASE in production the day that it comes out compared to release upgrading to a new Ubuntu the day it comes out.
I also don't like the speed with new features are being added to the Linux kernel with one line of development, leaving the actual production QA process in hands of the distributions (the previous stable (even) and testing (odd) Linux kernel branches were much better in that respect imo).

Btw, the lack a lot of desktop oriented things like drive automounting are not entirely FreeBSD's fault, because desktop environment developers tend to use a lot of Linuxisms in their code or depend on Linux-only services by default (DeviceKit anyone?). This will get ported over by FreeBSD porters eventually, but that takes time and sometimes needs new operating system features to work correctly.
 
throAU said:
Dude, not everybody wants to mess with source code.

Some people just want tools to get other things done. Computers are a means to an end for them, and time not spent screwing around with the command line or a compiler is time they can spend being more productive at what they actually do.

Half of my soul agree with you, at this time few people are able to appreciate quality. I'm a Windows user, so for most of *nix (including Linux) serious programmers/users I'm a 'basic consumer', but I think FreeBSD (perhaps all *BSD systems) is a 'rare quality peace' despite the user interface approach (console and what related). Perfection doesn't exists in this universe, *BSD systems are well designed and developed, nothing is left to chance.

Really, FreeBSD is 'the unknown giant'. I'm always rude talking about Linux. Linux is a respectable kernel but Linux distributions cannot be compared to a real OS like FreeBSD or (i guess) any *BSD systems. FreeBSD is a unique peace of quality art.

So, rhroAU you are right, people want something that works and it's easy to use and maintain, but few peoples known the effort and passion behind jewels like FreeBSD. If people spend few time to get into it, they will discover a 'unique peace of art'.

At least, this is my feeling.
 
I'm not saying people "want" to mess with source, or that they "should".

Simply that what is good is that computers remain accessible, and open, not opaque black boxes.

I guess that makes me a "Hacker" in the old MIT/BSD sense. {I am not a hacker in the sense of the word where it means someone who breaks into computers. bah.}

Warren
 
UNIXgod said:
That's some new info for me. At least my impression is that the FreeBSD community is getting bigger. The FreeBSD forums is a great initiative since not so many people uses mailing lists and usenet anymore. The way to communicate is changing. Every way has it's own pros and cons.

"I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes"
http://bsd.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=164582&cid=13741084

This seems common around old projects consisting of low level hackers. My impression is that the retro computer scene has the same problem. Still the same people who grew up with the computers writing their assembler.
It's like it's a huge gap between users, power users and core hackers if you see what I mean. A somewhat elitistic approach saying We're not keeping this simple. You need to learn the hard way, because we did". The result of this is poor documentation requiring loads of background knowledge. It's easy to end up reading Richard Stevens books from the 70s with lost of inspiration and motivation on the road. I'm not aiming at the "for dummies" approach, but maybe something in between. As with writing software you'll probably avoid assuming stuff. A documentation method approaching the same could be a good idea.
At least this is my experience. I've been tinkering around with C for several years, and still using it for quite simple tasks.
 
Stop worry about this. We can find all this stuff, day by day. A lot of people want to change this concept of fight, very absurd of course. Others can change this theory and show that is possible. Try to learn with the best members of this great community is a gratefully opportunity.
 
If you do not want to mess with the FreeBSD internals, you can always install a derivative as GhostBSD or PC-BSD and forget about them. PC-BSD has a nice installer, automatic GUI setup, self contained applications (PBI), easy printer setup and other goodies as meta-packages for desktop environtments. It is par with all "xbuntus" and alike regarding to user easiness.
 
Martillo1 said:
If you do not want to mess with the FreeBSD internals, you can always install a derivative as GhostBSD or PC-BSD and forget about them. PC-BSD has a nice installer, automatic GUI setup, self contained applications (PBI), easy printer setup and other goodies as meta-packages for desktop environtments. It is par with all "xbuntus" and alike regarding to user easiness.

YEah those projects are cool in their own right. I don't feel going directly to FreeBSD the traditional route( even if your installing X11) is really messing with internals. Though the aforementioned projects provide a quick and easy way to determine weather you have multimedia capabilities quickly (i.e. gfx card support)... Might be nice for a new user to take to a store and boot a laptop with before purchase.
 
UNIXgod said:
YEah those projects are cool in their own right. I don't feel going directly to FreeBSD the traditional route( even if your installing X11) is really messing with internals. Though the aforementioned projects provide a quick and easy way to determine weather you have multimedia capabilities quickly (i.e. gfx card support)... Might be nice for a new user to take to a store and boot a laptop with before purchase.
Multimedia? LOL What is your concept of Multimedia? Serious Multimedia and games never ever exists in the FreeBSD world. There is no new hardware support in FreeBSD. If you stay with FreeBSD, even PC-BSD, you don't need a modern system with modern multimedia devices (like top video cards, tuners and so on) becouse simply FreeBSD can't take advantage from them.

FreeBSD was a server OS in the past. Now they can't even maintain the schedules for new releases and it is like oine year and a half that kernel do have memory leaks and they never ever had the ability to fix it.

In my environment FreeBSD is pretty much dead. Scan the web and see how many company runs FreeBSD servers for Apache and production: they are like one to one millions.

So, yes, FreeBSD is pretty much dead but for geeks living out from the real production world.
 
BSD needs more developers to help, we can see from number of check-ins, architecture support, features, etc. But all these can't tell the quality of the OS since number of check-ins is quantity only, not quality.
 
I can't tell about FreeBSD as a desktop system, but we are running more and more FreeBSD servers all over. In our case Linux is dying, FreeBSD is more than alive.

Our FreeBSD servers outperform Linux in almost every aspect. The advantages have been listed. Love or don't love it. For desktop-use I would consider something else.
 
piggy said:
So, yes, FreeBSD is pretty much dead but for geeks living out from the real production world.

Care to backup your absurd claims? Yandex, Amazon, Rackspace, Pair, Yahoo and many Russian companies are using FreeBSD on their servers. Also, many companies don't reveal which OS they run on their servers due to security concerns, however, most of them are using FreeBSD or Solaris especially banks, investment and insurance firms. There are too many Linux distros to count and they're different from each other. With every major Linux upgrades, something breaks so I don't bother with it. FreeBSD has been extremely stable and I am using it on my production servers.

I don't consider Linux to be a true UNIX system since it didn't originate from AT&T UNIX. Linux is a kernel and RedHat, Suse and many others just add their own stuff to it to make it look like a UNIX. If you write a script for RedHat Linux and then try to run the same script on Suse Linux. 50-50 chances it will fail.

I work in IT industry in Moscow Russia.
 
Remington said:
Care to backup your absurd claims? Yandex, Amazon, Rackspace, Pair, Yahoo and many Russian companies are using FreeBSD on their servers.
So does Netflix.
I don't consider Linux to be a true UNIX system since it didn't originate from AT&T UNIX.
With all the new stuff, like systemd and Wayland and other things, I'm starting to think Linux has pulled itself further away from Unix, too.
 
From another point of view GPL3 is a hook - take a look on MySQL, it happily grabbed from community by Oracle and commercialized.
 
It is alive and well. Not for everyone certainly, and will probably never be a mainstream factor. But it has it's own niche and a lot of people / businesses count on it.
 
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