FreeBSD's Executive Director Calls For Linux + BSD Devs To Work Together

[pal666]

I would find Linux with a BSD userland interesting

you mean commands which can't accept options after filenames? for amusement maybe

[pal666]

As far as I know, FreeBSD's pf isn't worse than iptables.

"isn't worse" is not enough to be "interesting". iptables are obsolete, use nftables

Unlike OpenBSD's pf, FreeBSD's pf is mulithreaded.

so even openbsd can't take freebsd's pf, how linux can collaborate with them?

[pal666]

Gentoo is extremely popular if you consider Chrome OS (a Gentoo derivative) and CoreOS (a ChromeOS derivative) to be part of Gentoo's userbase.

well, it has nothing to do with freebsd. if you count inspiration, all of it was inspired by at&t unix.
and coreos is switching to fedora infrastructure

By the way, saying that about Gentoo is inviting a similar comparison to be made between your distribution of choice and Windows.

being inspired by competitor isn't bad and isn't rare. everyone does it

[dreich]

They tend to get drivers from each other. pf is from OpenBSD. NetBSD ports have been ported through pkgsrc to work on nearly all POSIX systems (with varying degrees of compatibility).

Hopefully in the not too distant future it comes to more than just porting drivers which, considering the limited manpower, is no small feat in itself. For the most part however, my impression is that FreeBSD in particular has a propensity to easily lose mind-share to smaller projects. If for example someone wants to improve SMP but the project has other plans, he is left with no choice but fork the project. The same goes for security or whatever else comes up in the future. But then again maybe I'm wrong and the above examples are not related.

[pal666]

Anyway, copyleft does reduce usage

it's a lie. it increases usage, the most used operating system in the world is linux.

Toyota's sudden acceleration issues that killed people occurred in part due to horribly buggy proprietary software. They are not allowed to use copyleft software there due to federal regulations.

then federal regulations reduce usage. btw, they didn't use freebsd either, so freebsd reduces usage too

[pal666]

Nas4Free and FreeNas are FreeBSD, as well as many of the commercial NAS solutions.

isn't the later the reason to not work on freebsd?

[pal666]

Taking code and not returning immediate value is not theft nor abuse of a person's work in the BSD philosophy. It's meant to place work in the public domain in those jurisdictions that have no legal concept of the public domain for creative works. It's creative work in gratis.

antigpl zealots demand that everyone should work for them for free. real world doesn't work like that and you can see how many people are stupid enough to work on freebsd.
gpl people do not want to work for free, they are living in real world. so, go back to your sandbox, kid

[ryao]

Small note: While it's true that some floor mats where badly designed leading to potential unintended acceleration, there have been no destroyed brakes. The brakes in cars are by legislation always more powerful than the engine, and so far there have not been a single verifiable situation where applying the brakes does not stop the vehicle (only anecdotal claims exist).

The brakes are only more powerful than the engine at a standstill, not at highway speeds. I also recall that there was a rather prominent incident where a vehicle had the issue at high way speeds and could not stop.

That said, the claim that floor mats were the cause was pushed by the manufacturer, but it was found that floor mats were not involved in at least some of the cases. The audit of the design of the vehicle found more concerning issues, such as numerous software bugs, a lack of ECC and no hardware redundancy all in the system responsible for the accelerator pedal.

[ssokolow]

it's a lie. it increases usage, the most used operating system in the world is linux.

then federal regulations reduce usage. btw, they didn't use freebsd either, so freebsd reduces usage too

Toyota's a Japanese company, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's more the NIH effect. Japan is somewhat infamous for preferring to develop their own native competitors to software that's popular in the rest of the world... and that's just for the low-risk consumer software.

[bridgman]

that's a well-known example. but do freebsd devs work together with linux devs on those drivers or they are just leeching linux work?

I'm not sure, but I believe that BSD and Linux devs used to work together and that only changed when the BSD graphics community fell behind after a couple of key developers had to cut back the amount of time they were volunteering around the time that KMS was introduced and the degree of OS-dependence increased.

BSD developers seem to be catching up now, however, and I imagine they will work together again in the future.

If I remember correctly the X window system and associated graphics stack was already at v11 (aka X11) on BSD before Linux even existed (heck, I was using X on Unix myself through the late 80s and early 90s) so one could argue that Linux graphics started by leeching off BSD... although I don't think that statement is any more fair than saying that BSD developers are leeching off Linux. Both are true if you look at a brief window in time, but neither are true if you take a longer view.

I'll stop here before I accidentally start a BSD vs Linux religious war.