“How long have you been using FreeBSD. Months? Years? Decades? And you love using it because of whatever reason but at the same time you’re feeling a bit guilty to use it all for free without giving anything back? Well now you’ll have the chance to change that. We at FreeBSD are always in need of new people who are willing to spare some of their time and effort into FreeBSD development.”
maybe you can get an editor that cleans out the pasted Word crap?
Yeah, that is annoying.. making him the owner of the company seems a fit punishment.
waaa? You could just comment on the crap without sounding like an ass.
I wonder if the lack of development is a product of their license choices. While I don’t fault them for their choice, I wonder if it is a barrier to growth. Back in the day before Linux was mainstream, they seemed to have a lot of momentum. Now it seems like most development happens on Linux. Gentoo even uses the same type of package structure. Maybe its time to rethink the future?
Whats your rational for that conclusion? I do not see the correlation between license and development activity.
I would argue that the BSD license is, in general, more friendly to business. I also think its a much more liberal license, but thats neither here nor there.
I don’t think the license has anything to do with the momentum that it gained.
Apache has a liberal license and is also widely used.
Linux got some major corporate endorsements early on which made it safe for other corporations to use. CTOs are wimps when it comes to adopting new technologies.
I also think the boost in popularity also had to do with Linux having a nice story and figurehead. People like it when an organization has someone at the top that they can relate to. FreeBSD has always been a quiet and anonymous group project.
I really like FreeBSD but Linux is on easy street when it comes to funding, well on the server anyways.
Nothing to do with the license as long as it’s open-source. Personally I left FreeBSD because of poor Flash support, I know it’s not FreeBSD’s fault but I need excellent Flash support for my work, unfortunately.
Another good reason to use FreeBSD I don’t want admins watching videos on the server – not that you can run flash with out X and why would I want that?
This is part of the problem. As a server, FreeBSD works fine. Bits like Apache and ngix work just out of the box.
Things like Xorg, Gnome3, KDE, Xfce, etc. These are all desktop technologies. The only company investing in this area is iXsystems. Most of the work is still being done by solitary volunteers. The user’s interest is in these desktop bits that have little actual developer interest.
And to be honest, a lot of the problems porting this stuff stem from the upstream projects tailoring their “portable” code to Linux sysinternals exclusively, making the barrier of entry for aspiring FreeBSD developers that much higher. Especially when you get into the hacky, undocumented, and “do it this way today, completely change it tomorrow” methods of the Linux community.
The FreeBSD desktop would greatly benefit from more corporate sponsors and a few full time employees… like our Linux counterpart.
Yes this would be nice to some degree. Otherwise Linux becomes more and more a company influenced “Windows-mock-up” … quality-wise. Lots of new stuff, a plethora of regressions, drivers broken in several areas, no long-term goals, bad documentation, nonsense comments in the kernel-source, etc.pp.
How should it be possible for FreeBSD devs to cope with the up and downs of the so-called development of the Linux crowd? E.g. yesterday all hail to HAL, today forget about HAL. Another example is the crap design of the Intel driver and the GEM/KMS stuff in the kernel. Even on Linux it’s hardly usable, black screens, freezes of X and so on. I can show you lots of entries on bugzilla. Defective by design, but the massive hype plus the quantity guarantees some future, at least for the next 10 years.
I don’t think it’s the license. I think Liquidator hit something. I don’t use FreeBSD like I want because of the lack of real flash support.
Now the question is what should the FreeBSD guys do to provide what is important to you, i.e. Flash support? I think your answer would be useful if it could get to them.
Personally, I need the desktop part of FreeBSD. I know there’s PC-BSD, but let’s consider only FreeBSD, which is the topic we’re discussing. I just need Opera, which works properly, the Adobe Reader and Flash plugins, which both don’t work seemlessly on FreeBSD. There’s not much we can do about it. We have been working hard trying to find patches, hacks to make them work better, with little success. We have signed petitions, with no results from Adobe. The solution for me has been to move to Linux, sadly.
Other than that, in order to have a clean, working FreeBSD desktop, you need to spend heck of a time to install stuff using the terminal, edit files, etc… To configure your D.E. and other things that take seconds on Windows or Linux. The Gnome default theme is old too…There is no working equivalent to Synaptic or Yast for FreeBSD. Ports and packages very often return errors when installing or compiling, and you need to ask for help on the FreeBSD forum. Versions of apps are older than on Linux repos. Even less hardware is supported (terrible for hardware such as HDMI capture boards, newer printers, newer scanners, DVB boards…).Overall, it takes more time and effort to get what you expect from a modern desktop. I’m not saying it can’t be done.
So in order to get back to FreeBSD, many things need to be improved, but it’s sadly not always possible because it depends on third parties (software vendors and hardware manufacturers).
Having had that exact experience just weeks ago, I totally understand this. And that’s why I’ve chosen PC-BSD, not installed yet but I’m seeding the iso file.
On the Adobe Reader subject, aren’t there X alternatives to it? On Vista, I replaced that memory hog with SumatraPDF; so far, it has had everything I needed and its automatic reloading of modified files is a useful feature. I guess there are open source pdf viewers that would work on FreeBSD?
And Opera on FreeBSD even faster than anything I could have imagined (despite being a long-time user on Windows and Linux on the same machine and the same network…) That’s the point I loved the most 🙂
If Flash support wasn’t as important as important as it is, I would suggest OpenBSD for your complaints about ports not compiling. This was also a source of frustration with FreeBSD for me.
The longer I think about it.
I think most poeple don’t want to compile, just install binaries with source available when they need it.
What FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Gentoo do only appeals to a smaller portion of the open source world. Maybe most just want to install it and get to work.
Maybe that is the problem ?
Yes, I prefer binaries, as they should be more simple and take less time to install, but package installation usually aborts at some point, that is the problem for me.
I can’t say anything about the other BSDs, but OBSD does in fact encourage NOT compiling everything.
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq5.html#WhySrc
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq15.html#Ports
That is one difference between BSD and Linux. Most BSDs encourage building from ports. There are two choices for going to packages though:
PC-BSD (PBIs)
MidnightBSD (mport packages)
I forked FreeBSD because it lacked on the desktop and I also need developers. My goal is to make a desktop OS and not to make a server/embedded platform. The first task was coming up with a unique ports and package system. I just committed the first working version (with remote fetch, search, etc) of the new mport package management tools this week. I’m planning on writing a GUI version as well.
PC-BSD is much ahead of us on installation and package management at the moment, but that’s going to change.
I suggest desktop users get involved with MidnightBSD or PC-BSD development if they want to improve the BSD on the desktop situation. We’re the two projects trying to do that. Feature requests welcome.
OpenBSD actually discourage building packages from source.
… and almost nobody cares about it and uses ports.
Bollox … Why would I spend ages compiling from Ports when the package is sitting there ready to download?
You hit the nail. The market of FreeBSD is big corporations/enterprises, not the end consumers and desktop users. And besides, only developers and system admins will tinker with FreeBSD, even with this market, can only be found among Linux admins/devs, and almost zero from Windows admins. I myself a Linux user will never use FreeBSD for the company where I work(except perhaps for some FreeBSD-based firewall distros) because it won’t support the software I want it to run, like Zimbra. If you want to run a *customized* thing on a FreeBSD box, then you must have the resources(high-paid admins) to do so, and you only have few options available, while in Linux there are tons available and commercial support. I am not saying there are no commercial support for *BSD.
But I know that there are good things about *BSD but as of this moment, those good things are not worth enough to have a switch.
What if you would be offered a repackaged version of FreeBSD oriented towards business users like you — with commercial support and binary packages offered through an easily accessible and popular framework like dpkg/apt ? Would you be tempted to try EnterpriseBSD (see URL below) ?
PS: we’re always happy to get feedback & suggestions.
http://www.enterprisebsd.com/
http://www.enterprisebsd.com/have-your-say
But PCBSD is FreeBSD respun for ease on the desktop. The PCBSD installer even offers to install a standard FreeBSD minus GUI if you wish.
The standard FreeBSD isn’t made to be a Desktop – their slogan is “The Power to Serve”. FreeBSD is basically a server OS. I’ve just finished setting up a box and the installer isn’t like a ubuntu installer you have to work if you want for example a journalled file system.
I’d say it’s less popular because it is a conservative, rather than cutting edge OS that isn’t made to attract the masses and there is nothing wrong with that.
You want FreeBSD for the desktop try PCBSD which has as it’s first feature a “Fully functional desktop operating system, running FreeBSD 8.x® under the hood.”
http://www.pcbsd.org/content/view/12/26/
Edited 2011-03-08 12:31 UTC
I agree 100%.
Personally I think lack of focus is FreeBSD’s main problem. What was their target again?
A free OS? But they have ZFS and other suspiciously licensed stuff.
A server OS? But they only fully support desktop architectures.
A half proprietary desktop os with binary blobs, Linux emulation and Flash? But it doesn’t work as well as Linux.
A conservative Unix? But they add many crazy bleeding edge extensions and Linux emulation layers that get dropped after a while.
A secure OS? A fast OS? A build-your-own OS?
They try to be everything for everyone and introduce many cool features and great code but IMHO they ultimately fall short.
What non-desktop arch would you have them support? POWER7? Itanium? (Among amd64 and the arm ports, they seem well covered to me.)
Oh, and the linux compat has never been dropped? They updated it to 2.6.something a while ago, and they’re thinking about moving to a newer linux distro as default in the ports system – it’s been quietly working fine since it first got declared stable.
How is ZFS suspiciously licensed? Because it is GPL incompatible? There is nothing suspicious about it, the terms of the CDDL are clear.
As for your comment about architecture CENTOS is only for x86, I guess it must not be a server OS either. Red Hat dropped itanium in 6, the server world is going x86 in case you hadn’t noticed.
>A free OS? But they have ZFS and other suspiciously licensed stuff.
Nonsense, the code is fine, the license too, it’s just “incompatible” with the GPL. And guess what, nobody cares about fundamentalism.
Can you spell F.U.D.? Take a fish, your welcome.
No, we don’t need another *buntu. Think about FreeBSD in terms of quality instead of quantity and compare it with distros like Slackware, Gentoo, Debian and to some degree ArchLinux.
Yes therefore I have to use Windows to some degree, because Flash in Linux isn’t that much better as in FreeBSD.
Flash is a little better on Linux. At least it doesn’t crash (personal experience).
However, the “Square” alpha sees life in pink in its latest version, aside from still producing garbled sound
http://img855.imageshack.us/i/pink.png/
Oh well, I knew what I’d get by installing it… But the thing is, the stable 32-bit release just won’t install well on my Fedora x64
Edited 2011-03-08 15:55 UTC
A little better compared to? Windows or FreeBSD. If you know what you’re doing it’s as much crap Adobe stuff in FreeBSD as in Linux. If you’re referring to hardware support and 100% Flash then you have to use Windows. Linux, FreeBSD etc. don’t have a reasonable market share. The latter is about Windows, Windows and let me think … ahm Windows and don’t forget the growing area of Apple.
Well I’m pretty much on that track myself. While corporations most likely love using bsd, mit, licenced code due to the few conditions that comes along with them, there’s another thing when a company are about to contribute code. Giving code to prospective competitors whom may enhance that code and use it to compete against you must have a bad ring to it in the boardroom. However, contributing code under a licence that means that your competitors will have to do the same is obviously an easier sell.
In my opinion, that GPL is by far the most popular open source licence is not because so many programmers out there thinks proprietary code is evil, but rather that GPL’s tit for tat mechanism makes perfect sense for collaborative projects. If you have no real interest in collaborative development then obviously BSD/MIT are a perfect fit and are often used for such projects like Google with VP8, V8 Javascript engine, Go etc, they are not really interested in people helping them develop this since they prefer to do it themselves (they DO have the resources after all).
Looking past corporations, GPL is attractive for spare time developers aswell, since it means that if anyone enhances their code they will get access those enhancements as the rights given to them as an end user. It also seems to be the licence of choice for software companies which chooses to open source their apps/games after they have left the commercial market (ID Software comes directly to mind and they certainly do not think proprietary code is evil).
Again, I’d say that the VAST majority of people choose GPL for practical purposes (not counting corporations, which OBVIOUSLY does) and not for ideological reasons.
In a perfect world all source code would be open, heck even unlicenced because noone would try to screw someone else over and everyone would be appropriately attributed and/or compensated, but in the world we live in I’d say GPL is generally a more attractive licence to contribute through, than the likes of MIT,BSD.
Yeah, GPL makes it safe for companies to contribute without worrying about competitors taking advantage without giving back. The tit-for-tat puts some restriction on what companies can do but it applies to all and thus enables collaboration. In a sense, it works by giving advantage to the group of companies which are collaborating against the ones which don’t.
There would be a lot of other factors but one of the reasons why the effect is so prominent in OS development is that it takes inordinate amount of resource to develop and maintain modern OSes. If a group of company is collaborating on single project, it becomes extremely costly for isolated companies to maintain the same level of competitiveness, and as a result we’ve been seeing extensive consolidation of OS development effort centered around linux.
More liberal licenses sure work well for some projects but they’re usually much more focused smaller projects which don’t necessarily require similar level of consolidated effort.
It’s really about the economy of things and that’s the natural and beautiful part.
The GPL sure isn’t protecting Red Hat from Oracle. There is no tit-for-tat that the GPL ensures, Oracle can undercut Red Hat’s subscription revenue without contributing anything.
But it should be noted that Oracle does contribute to the kernel (btrfs), unlike a certain other distro that sounds like a type of African coffee.
It was noted, however, Oracle did it because they need it for their Linux farms, not that Red Hat or other people needs it.
You people are just short-sighted, joining the circus of criticizing Canonical for not contributing back.
Canonical is totally different from Oracle. Their focus is on the desktop and in the server and what the desktop user needs. While Oracle have a massive software portfolio, where the Linux kernel is of prime importance because of this, so they have to develop(not contribute) to let their applications run at top speed using the Linux kernel. And knowing that the Linux kernel was licensed through the GPL2, they need to show/contribute their changes back. Oracle need not to worry about desktop users at the OS level, as this is not their prime target of their massive software portfolio, whereas Canonical is so focus on the OS desktop and so with their resources. So, contributing back to the kernel at Canonical is not that strong as it is from Oracle.
Do you have an excuse for that banshee money grab as well?
Surely explains why so many big OSS projects does NOT use the (L)GPL…
Apache and pretty much anything related to it, rubyonrails, python, perl, php, X.org, erlang etc etc.
It would certainly seem like not using the GPL is not a big factor for getting big companies to contribute to your project.
Contrary to other opinions I agree with you. What I also see as a big talent drain is the Linuxulator. They should have dropped the Linux emulator layer. There is a lot of OSS that is not closed and has value. Finally I believe they should focus on bringing new tech inside. Apple has published a lot of code and unfortunately the FreeBSD project did nothing to incorporate it. IOKit is a very big tool along with older XFree/IOKit bindings. I also believe that they should focus more on uKernel designs, revamp DDE-Freebsd and embrace Clang. At least they could spin off a BSD-NG design with all the above fresh tech and co-operate closely with Haiku and IllumOS.
LLVM/clang support is in the works, since they can only ship an ancient version of GPLv2 gcc in their base. Because of this mplayer-svn does not compile.
The other things you asked of would need significant manpower, and would be better served by forking and rewriting everything. Rewriting everything tends to create a new set of bugs though. The first few iterations would suck.
Wrong, it just means newer gcc versions aren’t in the base, but in ports. So many ports are using already newer gcc versions to use different optimizations, like ffmpeg, x264 etc.
Alright, I might have been convinced the license could have something to do with it. I also think the lack of focus is a big part. Well, I really think it’s more of a lack of manpower than focus, though. Which is kind of the point of the article in the first place. FreeBSD could definitely benefit from somebody who was willing to throw money at their lack of resource problem. As long as that money didn’t shift their focus to world domination through software and mobile devices. I guess that would be ok, as long as it was well written, stable software.
I know FreeBSD is geared more toward server use, but it is so fun as a desktop. Gentoo is/was just a fad. What’s wrong with ArchLinux?
Ever feel guilty for not giving back to a BSD project that you use so much?
Well, no. I read the license, and it said nothing about a requirement to feel guilty for not giving back. In fact, the license said I could do as I pleased with the code, including selling closed binaries for a large profit without owing anyone anything, least of all a feeling of guilt.
Whenever I hear that the BSD license is “more free” than the GPL, I think of this guilt crap that some of its advocates try to pull. My thought is: rename the BSD License to the Finger-waiving License or give it a rest.
The BSDL has often be criticized as a “rape me license” as it explicitely allows exactly what you did describe. It’s a developer’s choice which license he applies. For example, if it’s okay for me to provide my work for free to others who then can make the big money with it – fine. If this is not my intention, there are other licenses to choose from.
So basically, BSDL is more free than GPL as it allows you to do things with the licensed material than the GPL would allow. If this is always a good permission… this is debatable, I agree. But I would let guilt out of scope. Guilt has no place in business, in marketing, or in crime. It’s about profit, after all.
The GPL allows this as well, just not in the form of derivative proprietary software.
Far more money has been made with GPL software than BSD. Corps have saved billions by not having to buy commerical Unix licenses.
Edited 2011-03-10 00:12 UTC
>Well, no. I read the license, and it said nothing about a requirement to feel guilty for not giving back.
Yes this is true, the GPL doesn’t say anything about “feeling guilty” too. It’s about open source, community and such things. Even a license like the GPL doesn’t guarantee anything, look for example at Ubuntu or many companies using the sources of Red Hat.
Btw. many companies like Juniper, Cisco, Nokia, Yahoo, Apple etc. contribute something back to BSD, but it’s not about those big companies, it’s about the single user … you know _community_.
Finally, you’re comparing apples and oranges.
I will probably never get into FreeBSD development. But back when I was a complete newb and naive enough to believe that reading and groking all the FreeBSD source code was a necessity and even possible, I attempted just that. Starting with cat or something or whatever comes first alphabetically in /bin. I may have ended up on /bin/false or some junk. I never made it through /bin I assure you. At any rate, let me tell you, the code is an absolute pleasure to read.
While I am one of those GPL fanatics, I will say this, if you’re not one to care about the licensing issues and want to get involved in a free software OS, then BSD is where it’s at. Hands down.