SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
System administrator and former ski instructor, Albert Valbuena, has posted a table with accompanying analysis comparing several of the BSDs against Illumos and Linux. Among the topics in the analysis are licensing, how licensing is abused by companies, benchmarking, and of course a comparison of how various features are or aren't implemented across the spectrum.
The writing of this piece comes from the annoyance I get from reading about the prominence of Linux (the kernel) in almost all the computing spaces. And since electronic devices are gaining relevance in our daily lives and society in general this question of prominence of not just Linux but 'X' gains importance too.
More specifically this writing comes after reading someone who has participated in relevant software which is in a gazillion people's pocket. In a very unfortunate reply to the question: 'What are the advantages Linux has over BSD now?' the individual in question (which I'd like to preserve his identity) replied something close to (I do paraphrase): Linux receives much more investment from companies and therefore more paid developers are in it, plus BSD's feature parity with that of Linux doesn't hold.
This is mainstream opinion. Linux is better than anything else and money is poured in constantly, more than in other platforms. And aside this is not true, this is not based in facts but on feelings. Most GNU/Linux distributions are very average on many aspects. The fact they run on many servers on this planet and many developers work on them, doesn't make them better than 'X'. They are popular but that's it.
The individual in question did not, because he could not, point to relevant feature differences bettween the two operating systems.
Now go back to the top of this article and start checking features in a specific OS and start comparing, from that fastly written, from the top of my head, chart. Have fun doing that.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Tuesday November 05 2019, @02:09PM (24 children)
Interesting...
I'm curious as to whether this by choice, like "I will only contribute to an open source project if it is GPL licensed," or whether it has just happened to turn out that way, whether you choose to support the projects you do for other reasons, rather than the license under which they are distributed?
I feel like I'm the opposite, tending to spend my time and effort on the truly free projects.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Pav on Tuesday November 05 2019, @02:26PM (9 children)
Truly free? I don't want my collaborators "truly free" enough to wipe me and the rest of the community like a dirty arse if/when it becomes convenient. BSD lost to inferior Linux back in the day because so many felt the same way.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05 2019, @04:58PM (3 children)
Why do gnu types persist in believing the existence of a closed-source fork magically destroys its upstream?
I understand it when MS calls GPL a "virus" -- they view everything from a commercial perspective, and implicitly believe worthwhile code is only generated by corporations. So of course they're obsessed with the idea of GPLed projects as "parasites" that live by tricking corporations into releasing their valuable code.
But how can an actual Free/Libre/Open Source advocate be stuck in this parasite mentality, believing that a project can only thrive when a corp uses it and is compelled to release their patches? Yes, I know, more Linux code is contributed by paid codemonkeys than amateurs, but instead of parroting talking points, why not actually look around you. Linux, as with every other project of significance, is being built by employees from a multitude of corps (as well as amateurs), rather than being driven by a single company that could take their patches and go home. The dirty-arse-wiping threat you're so scared of is a creation of your addled brain, not a reality.
If someone wants to maintain their own private fork, let them -- they get to choose the disadvantage of being stuck in time, with no improvements from upstream, or the disadvantage of porting patches between ever-diverging forks. It's their own foot, let them shoot it if they want. Are there exceptions where one corp so dominates the project's development that little worthwhile comes from outside? Sure, but those projects are never going to serve anyone else's needs anyway, no matter what license it's released under.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pav on Wednesday November 06 2019, @12:17AM (1 child)
Perhaps you're not old enough to remember when BSD was just becoming competative on the desktop. Apple swooped in, hired away many of the key developers, and made a proprietary fork. This left the BSD desktop bled of developer energy, and pulled away many of those advanced users who would have otherwise potentially become the developers of the future.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday November 23 2019, @12:23PM
Linux did a lot more damage to FreeBSD on the desktop than Apple did. Several things hurt FreeBSD a lot around that time. One of the big ones was Eric Anholt, who maintained the DRI driver stack for FreeBSD being hired by Intel to work on the Linux DRI drivers and encouraged to stop working on FreeBSD support. One was the Linux ALSA + a load of sound daemon mess. Desktop developers spent a lot of effort rewriting things to use ALSA. FreeBSD implemented the OSS APIs and had in-kernel low-latency sound mixing back around 2001. The entire userspace sound daemon mess that culminated in PulseAudio was to work around shortcomings in the Linux kernel and resulted in portable applications moving to Linux-specific APIs. The other was the big HAL / udev debacle. Freedesktop.org tried to standardise OS abstractions that made it possible to run things on any underlying OS that provided the relevant functionality, Linux developers (encouraged by Red Hat and later Canonical) pushed the major DEs to drop those and depend on Linux-specific interfaces.
A modern FreeBSD system incorporates code that took multiple tens of man-years to write from Apple. For it to be useful as a desktop, it has to include a similar amount of extra effort working around the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish model adopted by the major Linux vendors to avoid portable OS abstractions. If you want to blame someone for FreeBSD's failure on the desktop, Red Hat is a far better target than Apple.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06 2019, @01:17AM
Why do gnu types persist in believing the existence of a closed-source fork magically destroys its upstream?
That's a strawman argument. People adopting GPL/copyleft want all software to be free. There will never be a consumer product running a completely free FreeBSD stack because it's always more profitable and provides a market advantage to make a proprietary fork. And the company making the proprietary fork has to do some work keeping their fork up to date with newer contributions in the core project, but it's many orders of magnitude less work than implementing new improvements on their own. There will never be competitors to Mac OS or Playstation OS that are free top to bottom. The existence of a closed-source fork doesn't destroy upstream, but the fact the fork can exist at all means the upstream can't conquer the market.
Copyleft = "I want free software for everything because I believe in freedom and privacy."
Permissive license = "I want free software for this particular project, and the rest of the world can invade privacy and go DRM berserk as it wills."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05 2019, @05:18PM (4 children)
Yep, that's definitely why. Not because GNU/Linux was out there developing momentum while BSD was entangled in lawsuits and HURD was not quite done.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Tuesday November 05 2019, @05:36PM (3 children)
Both of those happened, but the question is *why* did they happen.
He's asserting that programmers contributed to the GPL software because they believed that improvements on their work would become available to them. I certainly see the point of that, and, in fact, if I ever make something good enough to share, the license will be either GPL3 or AGPL. BSD is great for interface specifications. Even there, though, an argument could be made that the specifications shouldn't be freely changeable, if you want them to be useful. That's why languages are often trademarked.
If UNIX had been issued under the GPL, there would have been no reason for the legal suits that kept it tied up in knots. The BSD allowed each vendor to make proprietary changes, that they then wanted to profit from, and thus the suits. Eventually UC made a version and licensed it freely, but the license still allowed each company to make proprietary extensions. Still, with less motivation for suits, they died away. And this only happened because UC wanted a version that respected academic freedom, and had the lawyers to defend their point of view.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by dry on Wednesday November 06 2019, @04:38AM (2 children)
If Unix had been released under GPL, would we be here talking about it? I first went online with a BSD 4.3 based TCP/IP stack and am posting this with a BSD 4.4 based stack. That freedom to tweek and keep closed the stack while needing to inter-operate was one of the things that allowed the internet to take off. Companies could quickly have a working stack without too much worry in a time when the GPL was new and frowned upon by big companies.
There's other examples of successful BSD or similar licensed standard software, zlib (including zip) for example is still perhaps the most used compression library/program.
Personally I think both BSD and GPL have their places with LGPL being a good compromise at times. I also at times find the GPL too strict, can't link with, for example, openssl even if distributing all the sources.
Personally, I like the idea of keeping source open and no matter what the license, I treat open source as GPLish but sometimes I don't release failed experimental source if the license allows it, as in why bother with a crashy program until its working, though if someone asked and I had it, I'd share but sometimes you try something and it don't work so you try something else.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday November 06 2019, @06:34PM (1 child)
A definite point. There are lots of edge cases, and the LGPL has a wide range of reasonable uses. But it UNIX had been GPL, there never would have been a Linux developed. The LGPL would still be needed for libraries of various sorts. And the BSD + trademark would be needed for interfaces and language definitions. And proprietary would still exist for those who felt that the best choice. I'm really not sure of the justification for the pure BSD, except that public domain is pretty much impossible any more until the copyrights expire. And "trade secrets" would still exist...though I'm not sure why they should have any legal basis, with works being automatically copyright.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dry on Thursday November 07 2019, @02:41AM
There might have been a Linux that no one heard about and faded away like so many experimental kernels that people write to scratch an itch.
Public domain also has a big problem with people stealing it and copyrighting it. Try making a Snow White movie and be prepared to spend a lot of time in court with Disney for example.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Arik on Tuesday November 05 2019, @02:49PM (1 child)
FFS. You're one of those idiots that think you aren't really free until slavery is legal again aren't you?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05 2019, @09:00PM
Oh neoo someone did something with the source that I didn’t like! The people supporting it must be nazi orange man loving quadroons!!!
(Score: 2) by Pav on Thursday November 07 2019, @12:40AM (11 children)
I think you're conflating "law of the jungle" with "freedom". BSD never had the chance to challenge Linux for the Unix desktop because, just when desktop BSD became a contender the eight-hundred-pound gorilla called Apple swooped in and created a proprietary fork. They hired away some key developers and left desktop BSD anaemic for many years. The community never recovered that lost ground. This was a similar lesson to what the generation before me learned during the "Unix wars", and why Linux (then inferior) became popular in the first place.
I'm happier with my GNU fortified pallisade... with those gorillas having to deal with the community on more equal terms.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday November 09 2019, @10:44AM (10 children)
The problem with that argument in defence of the GPL is that exactly the same could have happened to Linux. Apple did not make a proprietary fork of FreeBSD. They incorporated a load of FreeBSD components into a NeXTSTEP-derived system and released the changes, and they also built a load of proprietary stuff on top. They could have done exactly the same with Linux: made XNU a Mach+Linux hybrid, used forked glibc for the C library, and built all of their proprietary GUI frameworks on top.
Android has more or less done the same with Linux recently: the code for the GUI layer is open source, but it's Apache licensed (so the GPL didn't gain anything) and it's 'open source' in the special Google sense of the word: they develop internally, periodically do code dumps, and have a build system that makes doing anything with a modified version incredibly hard.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Pav on Saturday November 09 2019, @09:19PM (9 children)
That's like saying seat belts and crumple zones don't stop people dying in car accidents. True... but it's harder. That's good enough for me.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday November 22 2019, @07:42AM (8 children)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Pav on Saturday November 23 2019, @08:28AM (7 children)
An OSX/macOS-style closed fork is off the table - that is a HUGE win. The tivoisation and patent provisions help for GPL3 based projects.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday November 23 2019, @08:42AM (6 children)
Once again, you're completely missing the point. OS X is not a closed fork of BSD, it is an open source kernel that has a large proprietary stack built on top. This is not 'off the table' with the GPL. It would be entirely possible to build a proprietary operating system on top of a Linux kernel. These days, Android is getting close to that: a great many Android apps have a dependency on Google Play Services and similar things that are not part of AOSP. Android's display server, widget set, and so on, were all written from scratch, just as OS X's were, and Google chose to release them under an Apache license. The GPL didn't enforce this and would not have prevented Google from releasing this as proprietary software on top of a Linux kernel.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Pav on Saturday November 23 2019, @10:11AM (5 children)
That's disingenuous. It's a bunch of technologies above the kernel level that was closed, and the developers hired away. Apple got everything they wanted. Google had to redo those layers inhouse. They didn't rip off the layers they replaced... they had to completely reimplent them. If it's so important for them to keep the ability to take away our freedom then at least we didn't contribute.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday November 23 2019, @12:33PM (4 children)
And how would that have been different with the GPL? You can put as many proprietary layers as you want on top of the Linux kernel. Similarly, how would the GPL prevent you from hiring away developers?
I don't understand what you think OS X is. All of the layers above the kernel (and some major kernel subsystems, such as the sound and video stacks) are in-house Apple developments. The libc (which is open source) is largely based on FreeBSD's, so is the network stack. The mandatory access control framework is common to XNU and FreeBSD, but was funded by Apple for both platforms. The filesystem stack is new, the threading implementation is, well, not new and actually pretty horrendous, but inherited from Mach not from FreeBSD. The scheduler is not from FreeBSD.
So, just like Apple then? Quartz (the window server), CoreAudio (the sound framework), Cocoa (the widget set and core libraries), their OpenGL stack, in fact their entire device driver framework are in-house developments. You make it sound as if OS X is FreeBSD + X11 + GNOME with a different skin. Most of the kernel and all of the layers above it were either inherited from in-house NeXT developments or were written from scratch at Apple.
Actually, the best counter example is the printing stack. This is based on the Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS), which was a mixture of GPL and LGPL [cups.org]. Apple bought the company and relicensed it under the Apache license [cups.org]. So software developed under the GPL was incorporated into proprietary macOS. If you consider that this involved taking away your freedom, then anyone who contributed to CUPS did contribute to it.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Pav on Sunday November 24 2019, @12:55AM (3 children)
Stop gaslighting. If GPL was functionally the same then a BSD would rule the roost, and don't give me that crap about the BSD legal issues being a factor in the earliest days. Hackers grabbed Linux and started developing it precisely because of the GPL before the BSD lawsuit was a thing. Linux supported next to no hardware (eg. it only supported one network card), and was a buggy underdeveloped student project and was hugely inadequate compared to the relatively mature BSD, but the community (on Usenet, which was THE centre of internet discussion) moved enthusiastically behind Linux as a way to avoid a repeat of the 1980's BSD-based "Unix wars" where private outfits were creating slightly incompatible forks all over the place, and driving the community as a whole insane.
Apple wasn't big enough to reimplement everything above the BSD kernel immediately clean and from scratch, and they didn't need to. Google on the other hand had no other choice - GOOD!
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday November 24 2019, @06:36AM (2 children)
You also might want to look at some of your timelines. If you think hardware support on early Linux was bad, there wasn't even an x86 port of *BSD at the time Linux was released. Sure, Linux may not have supported all of the exotic expansion cards in your PC, but BSD didn't even support the CPU.
If you want to believe in the superiority of the GPL, that's fine, but please stop writing revisionist history to justify your beliefs.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Pav on Monday November 25 2019, @09:51PM
Stop being disingenuous. I... me... myself alone, am big enough to reimplement everything above the kernel IF time isn't a problem. Time is always an option though. Google, even given it didn't have to develop its own kernel and certain OS plumbing, and even given it's best-in-the-industry coding chops and cash took a year in beta alone (and perhaps another in alpha), and Android 1.0 certainly wasn't all that. Apple could close and go with a mature product instantly if it wanted to.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Monday November 25 2019, @10:35PM
Regarding architecture, I don't remember that being an issue. I never got the impression my country (Australia) was behind the western world while hanging out on Usenet, but even if it was it could have been no more than a year. All the Unix hackers hung out either in the server rooms, or on lab terminals (either dumb terminals or perhaps a terminal emulator on a PC). None of the labs had an ethernet connection, let alone our rooms on campus - ethernet was a server room only technology. A year after that the labs got ethernet, and couple of years later ethernet was rolled out to the residental college, and we were required to buy actual Novell NE2000s to be allowed onto the coaxial network (to prevent problems with slightly incompatible hardware). During that first year of Linux verything was done over text/serial to server rooms, where the Unix machines lived. NONE of those servers were PCs. I don't remember anyone hacking on Linux specifically, though I saw Linux installed from a few floppies and prodded at before being uninstalled because it was useless on an unconnected PC. I certainly remember them hacking on GNU code in mainframe accounts over serial, getting in trouble for overloading the system from the sysadmins etc...