Sony's PlayStation 4 Is Running Modified FreeBSD 9

[0xBADCODE]

what do you mean; "Now we can see..."?! ...

Exactly this. BSDs are basically good only for few proprietary f...ks who can afford enormous resources waste to turn freely available crap into something working. You want to present some extra proof? Nice idea!

The fact is BSD code is present in Windows and (obviously) MacOSX, as well. (aside from many other oses; Sun OS, NeXt, etc -> spanning over many years. ie: decades) this isn't anything new...

<sarcasm> I'm so happy that bunch restrictive proprietary f...ks got free ride, yay. Long live e-parasites! </sarcasm>

And it's NOT a dictatorship.

Actually it is. If we'll read EULAs/ToS/... from Windows, MacOS, sony, etc - there will be lot of mumbling about their rights and virtually nothing about user's rights. Most of these agreements are strongly asymmetric and biased if favor of some large corporation. This is qualifies as dictatorship attempt.

No one is forcing anyone to use a BSD license, nor any of the BSDs -> and those who do -> are well-aware of what a BSD license entails, and the advantages/strengths (or disadvantages) that it provides...

Oh, thanks, Cap'n Obvious. Now tell me: can you make yourself PS4 replacement on your kitchen? No? Oh, such a pity. This implies that either you do not have "feature" at all or forced to agree with fairly bad terms and conditions. That's what qualifies as dictatorship. Especially only if only couple of corporations are producing equipment in question and both stick to equally nasty and restrictive approach.

Sony isn't denying you nor the BSD developers sh*t by using BSD (if that is the case). The license allows this.

It does. However, only Sony benefits from it. Project as whole loses, or to be exact, does not gains anything. Hey, Linux example has shown us this crappy sequence could be improved by orders of magnitude if things are done in better ways. By joining those who makes changes into united powerhouse. It's utterly dumb to code same thing again and again just because of greed of some dumb corporate manager, etc. Unfortunately BSD license allows to excersize in greed well beyond reasonable limits. This often plays bad joke on BSD projects, keeping them third-rate crap which is doomed to be footpad for some "better" proprietary products.

You seem to not understand something really basic here BSD License != GPL ... the freedoms you think it (BSD license) owes you - it does not, end of story. ie: stop being a baby.

I do understand differences very well. And that's exactly why I think BSD license sucks. In particular it explains why "free" BSD OSes are in such a crappy condition. Nobody seriously considers "free" BSD versions as gaming OSes these days. In fact they're really crappy as desktop.

So BSD "freedom" usually comes to fairly simple chouce: you're free to use third-rate crap for free or have to pay money, agree dictator-style EULA/ToS, give up all freedoms BSD nuts were mumbling about, and of course you will never see a source and can't change anyting.. GPL (and Linux in particular) surely provides much better deal terms for most of people (unless they're Sony or somesuch huge corp capable of wasting tremendous amounts of resources on dumb duplicate work).

I love how you spew speculation as being fact. We don't actually know what Sony or AMD has or hasn't done or will do in the future, for that matter...

They already used BSD code in PS3. So if they wanted to do something good for BSDs, they had all chances to do it, ages ago. But it has not occured so far. So it's very easy to estimate history would repeat self with PS4.

I can bet freebsd will not become usable as gaming OS in reasonable time. Right now FBSD lacks proper graphic drivers for AMD GPUs at all. While Sony already owns something more or less working. Quite a difference, yep? Sure, Sony can ask AMD to write custom drivers. You can't. Sony wins. You lose. Simple! .

I've also never gotten the impression that FreeBSD developers goal is to overtake Win or Mac.

To be honest, they seems to have no clear goals at all. Overall project management is crap and it remains fairly uncompetitive to proprietary OSes and Linux.

~ More likely, some of their developers probably end up going to work for some of these companies using BSD; providing their expertise of *BSD systems ~ which probably isn't a bad thing for them, at all...

Well, I just can admit GPL approach worked better for Linux. So these days it's much better bet unless you're absolutely inclined on keeping changes private. Which is proven to be counterproductive, to say the least. Sure, Sony could afford being inefficient and do duplicate work. "Free" bsd versions can't. So they're doomed to be losers.

Why are you crying over spilled milk, that literally has NOTHING to do with you?

I'm just comparing different approaches and making conclusions what works better and why. Simple, huh?

Linux' popularity over BSD is not anything new; this really isn't a question of BSDs losing to penguins, nor a question of them giving up freedoms to Sony. (again, BSD license is permissive. it's the point of it, dude _> use your brain). You may not like BSD, nor like it's license ~ but i am also going to assume you haven't all that much experience with any of the BSDs, nor are you using any BSD -> So what exactly is your problem, then??

Problem? Well, problem is simple. It increases number of e-parasites like Sony who thinks it's okay to get free ride and then deny everyone else equal rights. Furthermore, their DRM restrictions are increasing numbers of dumb consumers who are denied any chance to "upgrade" to creators and authors. Humans should be strong and creative. They should evolve and develop. Downgrading human being to "just consumer" should be considered as crime to my taste.

[Vim_User]

Let us speak about dictatorship: You want that any project is GPL licensed because you deem it to be the better license. Who is the tyrant now, those that accept the freedom of the developers to choose any license they want, regardless of the consequences, or those who want to dictate which license has to be used. You are not using any BSD, I guess, so why do you care at all? Do you really think that Sony would have chosen a GPL licensed OS? You must be kidding.

[mike4]

Yes +1. If AMD doesn't give the driver to the FreeBSD community, we can call it a failure. Than Sony does the same self service as Apple, without giving back anything!

Anyway I don't need a radioactive device, that I'd use twice a year... If they don't make ps4 titles available for Linux, go f*.

[CaptainBlame]

I can bet freebsd will not become usable as gaming OS in reasonable time.

Funny that I was getting about 20% performance improvements in games under wine on FreeBSD over Ubuntu and Arch Linux.

Once Steam gets ported we will take that performance benchmarks too. In the mean time have you guys got your sound working under Linux yet or are you stuck trying to boot past systemfaild?

[GreatEmerald]

You know, normally troll-on-troll battles are fun to watch, but this is just pathetic.

[mrugiero]

Let us speak about dictatorship: You want that any project is GPL licensed because you deem it to be the better license. Who is the tyrant now, those that accept the freedom of the developers to choose any license they want, regardless of the consequences, or those who want to dictate which license has to be used. You are not using any BSD, I guess, so why do you care at all? Do you really think that Sony would have chosen a GPL licensed OS? You must be kidding.

Well, it depends. If the kernel is able to accomplish their goals unmodified, then it's likely they'd use Linux, since they have no obligations to release their userland, and they didn't make any modifications they'd want to keep at the kernel level. I think the choice for BSDs is mostly because no free OS gets to achieve their goals, so whichever they use as a base needs to be modified.

Yes +1. If AMD doesn't give the driver to the FreeBSD community, we can call it a failure. Than Sony does the same self service as Apple, without giving back anything!

Anyway I don't need a radioactive device, that I'd use twice a year... If they don't make ps4 titles available for Linux, go f*.

Why would they? What's the point of making a console if you'll be making your titles available for an OS which you don't control and that can run on almost any PC, which would compete with your console? That would be utterly stupid for a company.

Steam is too complex to be ported by BSD fucks to BSD. It'll instead be running on your shitty little Linux emulator where it will keep crashing after 2 seconds. An that it gets benchmarked against Linux, you'll Linux fucking BSD's pussy hard brutal.

That's funny, because according to the slides about porting games to Linux, the only Linux specific bits are on the joystick management. As long as you disable that, making it compatible with BSD is a matter of recompiling only. X.ort, checked, SDL, checked, OpenGL, checked.

You know, normally troll-on-troll battles are fun to watch, but this is just pathetic.

^This.

[V10lator]

Also remember Value is a special case: Their Source engine was origonally written in OGL, with DirectX being added in later.

Bullshit. You're talking about the GoldSrc engine (this is where Valve even dropped DirectX support on Windows!). The Source engine is a pure DirectX engine with no OpenGL bits at all! The engine even talks DirectX on Linux, the reason this works is the togl library which translates these DirectX calls to OpenGL on the fly (presenting itself as DirectX device to the game).

[gamerk2]

You do know about these things called emulators and emulation layers right? and the fact that they even have it for the current generation of consoles right? Here's for the Wii http://www.dolphin-emulator.com/ here's for the PS3 http://playstation3emulator.net/ and here's for the XBox360 http://xbox360emulator.net/ (latter two I haven't used personally but was just using google to find). And you know that while you're going to have similar OS issues that the current gen consoles the hardware emulation is going to become a lot simpler right?

The 360/PS3 emulators are jokes; Dolphin has SIGNIFICANT problems and is one of the least stable emulators I've ever used. PS2 emulation is about as far as we've gotten to as "stable".

And no, hardware emulation is going to be harder with this generation, due to needing to emulate, to bus level timings, AMD's HSA architecture. Or simulating how the ESRAM on the XB1 works, entirely in software. And so on.

[stevenc]

Let us speak about dictatorship: You want that any project is GPL licensed because you deem it to be the better license. Who is the tyrant now...

Heh: http://cvs.openbsd.org/images/43song.gif

[gamerk2]

So for the sake of argument let's say you're correct... what do you suppose should be done? Microsoft is not going to port their D3D API over to Linux, no way in hell, not gonna happen. You think another API that fixes the flaws of OGL should be developed? Well, that already kind of sort of exists - in the form of OpenGL ES. Not good enough for you? Well, why don't you start developing your own 3D API and then market it to all the major GPU manufacturers so they'll support it with drivers. Let me know how that works out...

Thing is, OpenGL may not be perfect, but it is all we have. And it's cross-platform, not tied to the proprietary interests of only one corporation, which is a good thing.

Personally? I'd make a new API that actually reflects how the hardware works, and is easy to program with. OGL is NOT easy to program with, especially compared to D3D, and that makes porting titles very unattractive. I'm not even talking performance here, I'm talking ease to program.