Does apple have any plans to help the freebsd project in any way? Funding, code, etc? They did use freebsd 3.2 as a starting point for Darwin, after all, it seems only fair to give something back to the community that made MacOS X possible.
The answer is "I don't know". I know Apple would certainly like to find ways of helping where it can, but people don't fling money around much in this economy.
What effects, if any, have your ties to Mac and OSX have had on the Freebsd project? How do you feel towards the other BSD projects? Why when NetBSD was just starting did you feel it necessary to start the FreeBSD project?
There haven't been a _lot_ of effects on FreeBSD from my Mac OS X work, but there have certainly been more lines of communication set up, and there's a definite advantage to being able to communicate important bits of information back and forth -- like security advisories and such. Some code has flowed in both directions, like the cool filesystem exersizer that Apple had which the FreeBSD folks were able to use to turn up 4-5 really bad long-term bugs in NFS, and even one in the soft-updates code that Kirk had been chasing for months. That was a very simple thing to do, but it had major effects. I hope to do more things like that as the opportunities come up.
As to NetBSD, we both started around the same time and didn't even know about one another until we got big and well-organized enough to show up on each others radar. By that time we'd already formed a group and decided on a mission. It was becoming increasingly clear that each group had a very different mission in mind -- You can't force volunteers with dissimilar interests to work together when they'd rather just communicate and work with some other set of engineers who share the same interests. The net is big enough that you can reach critical mass without having to force fundamentally incompatible particles together.
What are your thoughts on pf and ipf?
I think there should have been more effort put into resolving the license issues, as we did, before going off and writing a whole new IP filter. Now we have 3, ipfw, ipf and pf. Whether pf had its genesis before or after OpenBSD adopted it [is besides the point], we now have 3 mainstream filters, and that seems a little silly.
I read recently that you were considering improving the startup scripts by following a paper from the NetBSD project. What other things have NetBSD and OpenBSD done that influenced you to implement them as well?
We take all kinds of stuff from NetBSD and OpenBSD, that's what open source is about. I think the NetBSD startup stuff, for example, is pretty cool. We're just trying to find enough bodies to finish that (the merge). I'm sure the NetBSD folks would like over 6000 ports in their ports collection too, but they have the same problem -- we all share as much code as we have time to integrate.
- "FreeBSD 5.0"
- "General FreeBSD Questions"
- "FreeBSD, Apple and the Other *BSDs"
- "Jordan, the FreeBSD Community, and the world"
