OpenBSD Drops Support For Loadable Kernel Modules

[nslay]

true, companies have not put FreeBSD out of business. They just haven't contributed back anything of worth.

That is why as a company I would never allow my employees to work on BSD licenced projects. Some other company might snatch it up and I am screwed.

With GPL code on the other hand everybody has to work together and nobody is able to screw the other over.

That is why BSD is anti commerce and and anti cooperation at the same time, while linux is corporation friendly AND pro-cooperation.

So, I went ahead and scanned the entire commit log from FreeBSD, of it I found 200+ different companies that contributed to FreeBSD.

Those that made 10 or more commits are given below:

• The Weather Channel : 20
• iXsystems, Inc. : 60
• Citrix Systems R&D : 18
• Nokia : 46
• Yandex LLC : 17
• Isilon Systems : 10
• Bright Path Solutions : 10
• Bally Wulff Games & Entertainment GmbH : 14
• ISPsystem : 13
• Myricom Inc. : 18
• Spectra Logic : 31
• Juniper Networks : 31
• Spectralogic : 10
• Sandvine Incorporated : 105
• iXsystems, inc. : 10
• Netflix : 17
• Juniper Networks, Inc. : 19
• nCircle Network Security, Inc. : 10
• Apple, Inc. : 30
• ADARA Networks : 15
• home.pl : 19
• iXsystems : 77
• Google Inc : 34
• EMC / Isilon storage division : 47
• Isilon Systems, Inc. : 186
• Intel : 156
• EMC / Isilon Storage Division : 76
• Spectra Logic Corporation : 44
• Multiplay : 20
• Nginx, Inc. : 51
• Google : 10
• Hobnob, Inc. : 44
• Google, Inc. : 38
• Rambler : 17

Sony's not there, but Juniper, Apple, Netflix, Yahoo (Yahoo has 14 commits under various names) and Panasas contributed (Panasas has 8 commits). I guess it's not necessarily true that companies don't contribute back to BSDL projects.

Here's how to reproduce this list:
First checkout the FreeBSD repository with svn:

svn checkout http://svn.freebsd.org/base/stable/10

Then run:

svn log > /tmp/Log.txt

Use the following awk script to extract the contents.

#!/usr/bin/awk -f

BEGIN {
  threshold=10
}

/Sponsored by:/ {
  sub("^[ \t]*Sponsored by:[ \t]*","")
  sub("[ \t\r]+$", "")

  company=$0
  Histogram[company]++
}

END {
  for (company in Histogram) {
    count = Histogram[company]
    if (count >= threshold)
      print company " : " count
  }
}

[energyman]

true, companies have not put FreeBSD out of business. They just haven't contributed back anything of worth.

That is why as a company I would never allow my employees to work on BSD licenced projects. Some other company might snatch it up and I am screwed.

With GPL code on the other hand everybody has to work together and nobody is able to screw the other over.

That is why BSD is anti commerce and and anti cooperation at the same time, while linux is corporation friendly AND pro-cooperation.

[nslay]

To put it another way: if, as a developer, I choose to release something as open-source, I may select a BSD licence, let others appropriate it and then put me out of business, or I may select the GPL and let others use it on the condition that they cooperate with me. Put like that it looks like a no-brainer.

Licensing it as BSDL does it make more viable for companies to use (although, trust me, a lot of companies don't want to touch any OSS with a 10 foot pole) and if companies do you use your code, browny points on your CV/Resume ("Founder of Blah Blah Project, used in Product X, Y, Z").

Anyway, it's not like Juniper or Sony put the FreeBSD project out of business despite using modified closed source versions of FreeBSD. Your simplistic point-of-view just doesn't seem to be true in practice. I think people will always prefer an open source version that solves 90% of the problem versus a non-free version of the same code that solves 99% of the problem.

I can think of nasty uses of GPL. I could write some very useful software, license it under GPL to bolster its popularity. Then I can offer a commercial licensing option for a fee. This is already done, for example, with BDB and gSOAP. GPL can be a good way to get your name and product out there. You exploit the OSS community as an advertising platform to sell your commercial licensed version. In light of that, permissive licenses truly are generous and free.

[jacob]

the GPL is not communist.

That still is burped out by people who do not understand that the BSD licence is THE reason why BSD failed against linux. BSD style licences promote and reward egotistical behaviour. GPL promotes and reward cooperation.

Since cooperation the only way to go forward, BSDs are doomed to failure.

To put it another way: if, as a developer, I choose to release something as open-source, I may select a BSD licence, let others appropriate it and then put me out of business, or I may select the GPL and let others use it on the condition that they cooperate with me. Put like that it looks like a no-brainer.

If you learn that an exploit exists in some network feature/driver you never use nor will ever use - and luckily you compiled that feature/driver into a module, off it goes! Into the abyss with it. Hole closed.

If that same feature is in the kernel. You got a problem.

Oh - and all those people wanking about OpenBSD's stellar security. It is not so stellar if you look behind the grandeur and PR-speak.

On an exposed machine, LKM support *is* potentially dangerous, but there are various ways to address that. One is to require modules to be digitally signed, as in Linux, which essentially solves the problem. Another one is not to have LKM at all, as in OpenBSD, which is simply moronic.

[energyman]

the GPL is not communist.

That still is burped out by people who do not understand that the BSD licence is THE reason why BSD failed against linux. BSD style licences promote and reward egotistical behaviour. GPL promotes and reward cooperation.

Since cooperation the only way to go forward, BSDs are doomed to failure.

Back on topic.

From a security point of view, OpenBSD's decicion is completely and utterly brain dead.

More drivers and optional, seldom used features in the kernel means more possible attack vectors in the kernel.

If you learn that an exploit exists in some network feature/driver you never use nor will ever use - and luckily you compiled that feature/driver into a module, off it goes! Into the abyss with it. Hole closed.

If that same feature is in the kernel. You got a problem.

Oh - and all those people wanking about OpenBSD's stellar security. It is not so stellar if you look behind the grandeur and PR-speak.

[jacob]

Jacob you can go fuck yourself, because that is simply not the case. Linux is, in all seriousness a completely different beast architecture wise from BSD and System V UNIX, just as OS X is ( OS X is Mach with a forked BSD userland with some GNU tools ) In this case, the LKM feature is completely useless as the kernel is pretty damn small, I don't know a single module for the OpenBSD kernel. Your statement just proves your ignorance of the design concept of BSD and your poor fallacy filled attempt at humour falls flat. Why do you think North Korea and China chose the Linux kernel over BSD for their operating systems they're trying to push? Because Communism is roughly equatable with the philosophy of the GPL.

There, take it easy mate. You will have to excuse me but I just don't see how having monolithic kernel where all drivers and filesystems must be in RAM even when not used is supposed to bring any advantage whatsoever. Yeah yeah, the OpenBSD kernel is small etc. but that is just a variant of "640k ought be enough for anybody". Unless OpenBSD devs expressly plan to never expand hardware support, implement new filesystems or add more features, then without LKMs you can say hello to massive bloat.

Funny, but I would have thought that China and NK are using Linux for pretty much the same reasons that the NSA, NASA, Google, Facebook, IBM etc.... are using it: because it is a great, versatile OS. You obviously talked to them and know that no, it's just because the GPL is "communist". How precisely is the GPL communist? Last time I checked, its purpose was to make centralised top-down control impossible so as to level the playing field and prevent monopolistic behaviour. Sounds really like something straight from Marx & Engels.... not. But never let the facts stand in the way of a good meme. "GPL is communist" and "anti-business" because Microsoft and BSD fanboys say so, never mind that it has been spectacularly successful in the business world. That is, unless you also assume that Fortune 500 companies, virtually the entire Sillicon Valley except Apple and the NYSE itself are all part of a North-Korean communist plot to destroy BSD.

[TeamBlackFox]

Jacob you can go fuck yourself, because that is simply not the case. Linux is, in all seriousness a completely different beast architecture wise from BSD and System V UNIX, just as OS X is ( OS X is Mach with a forked BSD userland with some GNU tools ) In this case, the LKM feature is completely useless as the kernel is pretty damn small, I don't know a single module for the OpenBSD kernel. Your statement just proves your ignorance of the design concept of BSD and your poor fallacy filled attempt at humour falls flat. Why do you think North Korea and China chose the Linux kernel over BSD for their operating systems they're trying to push? Because Communism is roughly equatable with the philosophy of the GPL.

[jacob]

In 1969 Unix did not have Loadable Kernel Modules, therefore they are contrary to the Unix Philosophy, therefore they are a Bad Thing(TM).

The next release of OpenBSD should drop support for any hardware other than the PDP11.

[kpedersen]

$ uname -srm
OpenBSD 5.5 amd64
$ ls -lh /bsd
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  bin  11.1M Oct 20 03:43 /bsd*
$

Now that OpenBSD is removing the dynamic loading from the kernel, it should be even smaller haha. Might be pushing only 10M

[Zplay]

And reboot the 200MB Kernel every time you test your module? ^^

The system boots easily with 32 Mb of ram. The kernel don't takes more than 10-20 Mb I think ! You can try in a virtual machine