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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: 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.