Future of FreeBSD

Status
Not open for further replies.
Today I came through a very wired topic on YouTube. A guy was saying that the future of BSD os is in danger as we have lesser developers compared to Linux and also the code quality is poor compared to Linux distros. He also stated that when a bug is reported in Linux it is fixed within few days or weeks but BSD has many serious bugs over than a decade. And also due to permissive BSD licence it is loosing it's popularity. Here is the website which has posted an article on this subject.

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3...dying-some-security-researchers-think-so.html

Now my question is if it is real or if becomes true in near future then what will happen to the diehard BSD users or common BSD fans like us? Even what will happen to those company who are using BSD for their business(WhatsApp/Netflix) or mostly to mac os as it has Darwin(based on FreeBSD) in it's core? I know that I/anyone can switch to Linux anytime but end of the day BSD is like home
 
Clickbait. According to folks like that, the BSDs have been "dying" for at least the past 20-30 years, hahaha.

Speaking for myself, with the exception of Slackware and Gentoo (which both have supposedly been dying as well, for at least the past 10 years), I have moved from Linux to BSD. Linux just seems like a big, sloppy mess to me, and the big players seem intent on making it the next Windows.
 
If all these news are not true/almost true then where and why they are coming form? Why any other will try to pull *BSD os down? Are they partial on some particular OS?
People are complaining that there is bad driver support for FreeBSD but forgetting that FreeBSD (like Linux) is a community effort and that no driver gets written by complaining but by actually writing one.
Nothing in this world comes for free but for FreeBSD it is FREE
 
I was using GNU/Linux for over the last 10 years, also I'm working as SysAdmin, using Cloudlinux (this is inherent to the company I'm working, I don't really like Cloudlinux...) But, since the day I discovered FreeBSD (2 years ago) my life as user and SysAdmin changed forever. I use FreeBSD in all my machines and servers and I'm really happy. I can see a real difference here, all FreeBSD code is clean, inteligent and easy to understand (more easy than Linux) so, I don't think that *BSD would die, never.
 
A guy was saying that the future of BSD os is in danger
*Yawn*, trolls should change their arguments sometimes. Sigh, the lack of quality arrived there too... :rolleyes:
as we have lesser developers compared to Linux
And initially Linux had lesser than Windows. :)
BSD has many serious bugs over than a decade. And also due to permissive BSD licence it is loosing it's popularity.
the code quality is poor compared to Linux distros.
MHUWAAHAHAHA! These are the best jokes of the day! :D
 
Oh. That guy. He wrote something equally outrageous a few months ago that I don't recall.

In any case, it was only a few years ago that Netflix switched all their video servers over to FreeBSD and that makes almost 40% of all internet traffic run through a FreeBSD server. Is he saying Netflix made a huge mistake and Netflix engineers are numbnuts?

Whatsapp is a 9-year old application and is hugely popular and runs on FreeBSD. Are those guys nuts, too?

Every few years someone comes here spouting about some article like this and it gets old real quick.
 
He also stated that when a bug is reported in Linux it is fixed within few days or weeks but BSD has many serious bugs over than a decade.
Really?
http://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/06/how-i-found-20-year-old-linux-kernel-bug.html
https://threatpost.com/serious-dirty-cow-linux-vulnerability-under-attack/121448/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/23/linux_kernel_gets_patch_against_12yearold_bug/
Besides these, I also dug up a number of other serious issues in the Linux kernel that were present for 2-5 years. Apparently this guy has a pretty selective memory.

Please stop spreading this FUD.
 
Today I came through a very wired topic on YouTube. A guy was saying that the future of BSD os is in danger as we have lesser developers compared to Linux and also the code quality is poor compared to Linux distros. He also stated that when a bug is reported in Linux it is fixed within few days or weeks but BSD has many serious bugs over than a decade. And also due to permissive BSD licence it is loosing it's popularity. Here is the website which has posted an article on this subject.

Have You recently used Linux? One of the things I do as a day job is that I use Enterprise class Linux every day, these are Red Hat Linux, CentOS Linux and Oracle Linux. This seems to be most stable and engineered (if You would believe their creators) most Enterprise class operating systems ... but they are not.

FreeBSD offers TONS of features over them, like:
- Deterministic start with rc(8) instead of random fsckup with systemd(8).
- Modern filesystem with data integrity (ZFS) compared to XFS from 1993 or not fully tested EXT4.
- ZFS Boot Environments for bulletproof upgrades/changes compared to nothing in the Linux side.
- Configuration of IP address with VLAN over aggregated interfaces takes 5 lines instead of 6 files with more then 10 lines each.
- Deterministic and reliable device daemon - devd(8).
- Reliable and actually useful documentation and man pages.
- Modern and well thought package manager pkg(8) along with ports(8) for compiling software/packages with customization versus RPM/yum tandem that does not allow You to compile anything, You can of course use EPEL and other repositories but that only leads to conflicts and problems. FreeBSD Ports/packages are at about 29000+ level, not many packages are available on CentOS/RHEL/Oracle Linux repositories.
- You can no upgrade RHEL 6.x to RHEL 7.x while You can upgrade FreeBSD to ANY version from ANY version.
- Tons more I do not have time to sit all day here and write them down ...

... but all that does not matter because Linux has companies support, Oracle Database works on Linux, not on FreeBSD, same for backup solutions like EMC Networker or IBM Spectrum Protect (TSM), same for Veritas InfoScale cluster, same for SAP HANA, Linux only.

Its even a hypocrisy from a lot of companies like EMC because EMC uses FreeBSD as their base for Isilon storage solutions, but EMC would not even provide a CLIENT for EMC Networker for FreeBSD ...

... and that is why, while being a lot more useful, stable and actually well-though FreeBSD is in a lot worse position then overhypped Linux, but that is how the world works, sh!t wins, million of flies cannot be wrong.
 
Oh. That guy. He wrote something equally outrageous a few months ago that I don't recall.

In any case, it was only a few years ago that Netflix switched all their video servers over to FreeBSD and that makes almost 40% of all internet traffic run through a FreeBSD server. Is he saying Netflix made a huge mistake and Netflix engineers are numbnuts?

Whatsapp is a 9-year old application and is hugely popular and runs on FreeBSD. Are those guys nuts, too?

Every few years someone comes here spouting about some article like this and it gets old real quick.
Really?
http://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/06/how-i-found-20-year-old-linux-kernel-bug.html
https://threatpost.com/serious-dirty-cow-linux-vulnerability-under-attack/121448/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/23/linux_kernel_gets_patch_against_12yearold_bug/
Besides these, I also dug up a number of other serious issues in the Linux kernel that were present for 2-5 years. Apparently this guy has a pretty selective memory.

Please stop spreading this FUD.
Please don't take me wrong. I had no intention to create hype on this subject. I was going through YouTube and there a person was say with that website link which seemed wired to me that's why I posted that
 
Please don't take me wrong. I had no intention to create hype on this subject. I was going through YouTube and there a person was say with that website link which seemed wired to me that's why I posted that
My remarks weren't directed at you, they were directed at the guy from the video.
 
Its even a hypocrisy from a lot of companies like EMC because EMC uses FreeBSD as their base for Isilon storage solutions, but EMC would not even provide a CLIENT for EMC Networker for FreeBSD ...

Careful: Isilon and EMC are really two different companies. Isilon did all the engineering and development when they were a free-standing company, before being bought by EMC. And even today, the corporate parent (Dell-)EMC does not take much direct technical influence over its Isilon division. The story with NetWorker is similar: it was a product of Legato, fully developed, before the company was bought by EMC. So Legato is not identical to EMC, even if it is owned by them.

One also has to remember that Legato NetWoker is at its core pretty old. I looked it up, and they still have full client support for Irix and Tru64, and for HP-UX on PA-RISC, which are operating systems that have not been sold new in many years. I know that Legato was a big company already 20 years ago; I used to see their building somewhere here in Silicon valley already long ago. Isilon is comparatively young, a product of the scalout-storage wave of the early 2000s. Neither company is located anywhere near EMC central (which has always been on the east coast).

So the fact that these two have very different views towards using FreeBSD should not surprise anyone. And it is probably good that EMC isn't coming down as the corporate parent and trying to integrate these disparate entities, because such heavy-handed tactics would probably ruin these smaller companies.
 
Now my question is if it is real or if becomes true in near future then what will happen to the diehard BSD users or common BSD fans like us?
Before you get caught up in a troll story again why not stop to think it through for a moment?

For example: how exactly does an open source project die?

Maybe when people stop using it? But even that doesn't always apply because I can come up with projects which have a very small userbase but which are - in comparison - going as strong as ever. I recently dug up some nostagia and discovered that even despite its drop in popularity the text adventures of the last century are still alive and kicking today. These days people like to refer to it as Interactive Fiction, aka IF, and there is even some seriously good software available to generate those, like this one: Inform7. The Windows variant (latest release is from 2016) even rivals modern development IDE's where user friendliness goes. It's even open source!

In comparison to a project such as FreeBSD one might be tempted to dub this a dead project, but if you look more closely you'll see that there's still quite an active community involved around it.

(the only reason I mention this is because I discovered Inform7 by accident last week, and it was thanks to the FreeBSD ports collection out of all things. so far this software has left me seriously impressed).

Which is another issue... People are so blindly focused on updates these days that they would even dub a project which hasn't had a release in a few years as obsolete or dead. But what if that project simply works as intended and there really isn't any valid reason to provide new updates? (also think about the famous Nethack game!).

FreeBSD has been around for years. I like to compare it to a turtle. It is slow, and in the eyes of some maybe useless. But if you look closer you'll notice that the turtle is actually extremely robust and solid. Sure, you can flip it over and "break" it but that's something you could do to pretty much everything. So if you then continue to observe said turtle you'll also notice that nothing really manages to divert it from its course. In fact: it's actually extremely reliable in what it's doing! Updates come out, new features get in (but slowly, in all due time) and from an outsiders perspective nothing really changes in there, while the people who work with said turtle can tell you that such observations are actually bogus.

But yeah... the main point here: how does an open source project die?
 
But yeah... the main point here: how does an open source project die?
When users stop using it and developers stop developing it I guess.
But FreeBSD has so many users and developers (though not nearly as much as Linux) that I don't see it die soon. A bit more users and developers would be nice of course, but I prefer quality over quantity.
 
Criticize BSDs' code base all you want, but it is 1 billion times better than most Linux distributions.

It is wishful thinking of Linux fanatics to make unfounded claims, and to baselessly repeat them. I think it's an agenda to make that false claim, to keep repeating something so untrue.
 
Again? Really?
Now, my braincells really start to ache.
Will it cure the pain if I become a little less critical?
 
Please don't take me wrong. I had no intention to create hype on this subject. I was going through YouTube and there a person was say with that website link which seemed wired to me that's why I posted that
And of course, everything you read or see on the net must be true - there is nothing like made up stories or fake news there.
Tell me; what do you do if find information that points in two opposite directions on the net? Do you have a mental breakdown because you can't figure out how the two different views / stories match up?
If everybody just could read and do a little research before writing about the next FUD story that they have found, everybody would realize that
a) we have all heard the story before - it isn't new
b) it is only FUD, and the only reason for posting it again is that someone is bored
c) the person who writes about it again is going to look like a schoolchild who hasn't done his or hers homework

Please, everybody - inform yourself better!
 
If all these news are not true/almost true then where and why they are coming form? Why any other will try to pull *BSD os down? Are they partial on some particular OS?
People are complaining that there is bad driver support for FreeBSD but forgetting that FreeBSD (like Linux) is a community effort and that no driver gets written by complaining but by actually writing one.
Nothing in this world comes for free but for FreeBSD it is FREE


One must understand that there is a political WAR between BSD license style and GNU Licensing style through GPL (Free Software Foundation). Many people of the Linux world WANT the death of BSD to kill the BSD licensing type.

I am surprised that many poeple in the BSD world are still not aware.

As far as you have understood that, you will have the explanation.

If I have personally choosen BSD, this is because I hate most of Linux people who are fanboys "cra...pping" everywehre, on Windows, on BSD ... on everything even the Queen..
The Linux world always criticizes Microsoft, but they have the same attitude... they want the supremacy of the Linux system all over the galaxy and they only have an obsession.... having a desktop imitating the Bill Gates' one

We can say that there are more Linux developer than BSD, but saying that Linux code is better is a pure lie.

I have a friend technician working for a big ISP... he hates Linux because every day he sees Linux server crashing.

So *BSD are not perfect, and no OS is perfect in this world, but Linux is far not perfect too.

I have choosen BSD for his philosophy...... an "engineer" OS, where the construction is very impressive separating base system form port system. In a Linux system this is generally a "dump".

So who can claim seriously that BSD code would be of less quality ?
The quality of code is the "essence" of BSD world... in the Linux world there are a lot of quick and dirty job along with a very good job, just because Linux moves (too) fast, sometimes coming back..

The BSD world is more conservative and each critical evolution is well evaluated before any decision.

You want the truth ?
Linux world creates a lot of junk code, far more than the BSD world
Just imagine the number of filesystems created by the Linux world, each one claiming to be the best of the universe..

The BSD world just say... useless, by developing continuously UFS to adapt it from server to modern desktop use.
Microsoft has just developed NTFS along years, just replacing FAT32 with exFAT for mobile storage.

And so... is Microsoft dead ?

That means what that means.... the Linux world generates a lot of junk and useless code.
Linux does quantity yes, but certainly not quality.
 
Another thing Linux people do far more than BSD ones is being permanently concerned of what OS other people are using.

Same for licensing war. If BSD people were really concerned about that, something like a "4-Clause BSD License" would already have appeared. Being the 4th Clause an anti-viral (GPL) one. :D
 
so, I don't think that *BSD would die, never.

And if it does, then there will be someone that can use the code and make a new OS.
Nothing in a PC is alive, nothing in a PC can die. Remember that. Even progress, even work, even effort. All of they aren't wasted. Every piece inside a OS can be used for make some new. The good thing about information is that, it only needs some storage where it can "exists", for say it in some way.
The information, it's mutant. It is in constant change and renovation.
 
Yep...there is a saying that says "do not judge a book by its cover", but this time, i think this article it's the classic clickbait.
Well, let's read what it says...at least, if someone spent time writing it, the less that i can do is read it, or not?
 
Another thing Linux people do far more than BSD ones is being permanently concerned of what OS other people are using.

Same for licensing war. If BSD people were really concerned about that, something like a "4-Clause BSD License" would already have appeared. Being the 4th Clause an anti-viral (GPL) one. :D
That reminds me of how LGPL had to be created to use one of the BSD licenses.
We can say that there are more Linux developer than BSD, but saying that Linux code is better is a pure lie.
I fail to see how non-fundamental redundancy 50 times for 1 piece of needed code or unused code is quality. This is what GPL encourages, when used for libraries, and not used for user end applications.
 
The *.BSD's will be around for a long time, watching linux spread apart in dysfunctional illusions.

But, I really want to see OpenSim 8.2 or 9.0 run on FreeBSD 11.1 with mono (let alone any version of BSD). Ubuntu 16.04.4 does it just fine. Why can't BSD?

// just sayin'
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top