FreeBSD-Based m0n0wall Firewall/Network OS Announces The End

[ryao]

To be honest for me as a Linux user and who thinks copy-left licenses are Gold i never understand why these people
use anything else than: IPCop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCop

BSD license based products only works for companies like Sony with products like: PlayStation4

Any smaller groups and individuals are the loser in this big game if they choose anything else than Linux+Copy-left licenses.

And now the hard reality kicked M0n0wall out of business.... fine next time ask me first and then you choose not to give away all the code for big companies like Sony who just make it closed source and let you die in the Desert without water.

M0n0wall likely was discontinued because having multiple FreeBSD derivatives focused on routing did not make sense and others like pfSense do a good job.

As for the merits of BSD licensing, it eliminates barriers for code reuse. If you want your code used everywhere, you want it to be under a permissive license and whether it is incorporated into something closed source is not a concern for you.

Quite frankly, I am more concerned about bad software being used in places where failures can kill people, than I am concerned about trying to force open source paradigms on people. You cannot appeal to such guys without making things like what Sony did with the PS4 okay. The FreeBSD community realizes this, which is why they prefer licensing that permits it. I am sure they sleep better at night knowing they made a contribution to a safer world than they would have otherwise.

That said, those that refuse to open source their stuff usually refuse because their stuff is junk and in a way, they are doing the world a favor. Closed source software tends to die out once the market is saturated while open source software continues as long as it has a community. Some of the things that have been made open source are things that I would have preferred be closed source while few closed source things are things that I wish was open source. That is my two cents. Feel free to think you know better and reply saying that everything that does not agree with what you said is wrong.

[Luke_Wolf]

I'm not sure if that can be called conservatism, there's only a fraction of devs working on BSD derived projects compared to GNU/Linux, that definitely imposes the question of how to allocate resources and priority. Anyways, I'm looking forward on seeing launchd ported to FreeBSD.

I'm not saying that the BSDs are too conservative I'm saying that Linux people that diss on BSD think of BSD as too conservative. I think they're doing a lot of interesting work personally.

[SystemCrasher]

Quite frankly, I am more concerned about bad software being used in places where failures can kill people, than I am concerned about trying to force open source paradigms on people.

Quite interesting point. So you dare to tell opensource software haves worse quality than proprietary, don't you? And of course you can show us some objective quality metrics proving this fact? For example, if I remember it well, recent Coverity scans proven Linux code contains less bugs per KLoc than many other software, including proprietary one. So you'll have really hard time proving such statement.

I dare to counter: the fact you've hidden source does not makes things more secure. And security through obscurity does not works and is a poor practice.

And of course its okay when Sony runs AAA games and FBSD nuts just lack drivers for similar APUs. That's how corps like Sony see "fair" cooperation. Same goes for MacBooks. Which maybe got some parts of BSD code, but neither it helps upstream projects, nor it grants BSD freedoms to user who paid for this crap - these freedoms are for Apple only. So its worth of nothing unless you're Apple or Sony stakeholder.

And hmm... good luck to gentoo with such proprietary minded devs. Now I can clearly see it is going to nowhere and about to be something like "BSD with Linux kernel".

[WorBlux]

Quite interesting point. So you dare to tell opensource software haves worse quality than proprietary, don't you? And of course you can show us some objective quality metrics proving this fact? For example, if I remember it well, recent Coverity scans proven Linux code contains less bugs per KLoc than many other software, including proprietary one. So you'll have really hard time proving such statement.

Actually as a more stiking example, the open-source L4 microkernel, which is THE ONLY provably "safe, secure and real-time OS".