Re: Unified BSD?
On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 9:34 AM, Hub- FreeBSD free...@hub.org wrote: Actually, according to what we are tracking at http://bsdstats.org, there are currently *8*: PC-BSD FreeBSD PYC-BSD (aka Rus-BSD) DesktopBSD OpenBSD NetBSD DragonflyBSD MidnightBSD Tracking something like DesktopBSD which doesn't exist for quite a long time make statistics not much useful. MidnightBSD seems to be same case as last activy on mailing list last year in May, forums doesn't working at all so we are still on 4 core BSDs (Open/Net/Free/Dfly). On 2012-11-16, at 12:30 AM, Alfred Perlstein bri...@mu.org wrote: On 11/13/12 2:45 AM, Ignatios Souvatzis wrote: On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 10:08:08AM +0100, Joost van de Griek wrote: On 12 Nov 2012, at 21:37 , Robin Björklin robin.bjork...@gmail.com wrote: Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? You'd end up creating a fifth. At least a sixth, IIRC. You left out MirBSD from your distribution list. Also, you could argue that Minix, with its NetBSD compatibility, is a seventh and MacOS-X, with its partially (Free-/Net-)BSD compatible userland, an eighth. And Free/Net derived kernel. (at least for unix services: vfs, inet, process) -is ___ freebsd-c...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-chat To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-chat-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-c...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-chat To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-chat-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Unified BSD?
On 2012-11-16 12:48, Tomas Bodzar wrote: On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 9:34 AM, Hub- FreeBSD free...@hub.org wrote: Actually, according to what we are tracking at http://bsdstats.org, there are currently *8*: PC-BSD FreeBSD PYC-BSD (aka Rus-BSD) DesktopBSD OpenBSD NetBSD DragonflyBSD MidnightBSD Tracking something like DesktopBSD which doesn't exist for quite a long time make statistics not much useful. MidnightBSD seems to be same case as last activy on mailing list last year in May, forums doesn't working at all so we are still on 4 core BSDs (Open/Net/Free/Dfly). I find it rather meaningless as a tracking tool for BSD in general. There is no way something like 2BSD would ever appear there, no matter how many systems were installed. And I also do happen to consider OS-X to be a BSD system. :-) Johnny On 2012-11-16, at 12:30 AM, Alfred Perlstein bri...@mu.org wrote: On 11/13/12 2:45 AM, Ignatios Souvatzis wrote: On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 10:08:08AM +0100, Joost van de Griek wrote: On 12 Nov 2012, at 21:37 , Robin Björklin robin.bjork...@gmail.com wrote: Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? You'd end up creating a fifth. At least a sixth, IIRC. You left out MirBSD from your distribution list
Re: Unified BSD?
Actually, according to what we are tracking at http://bsdstats.org, there are currently *8*: PC-BSD FreeBSD PYC-BSD (aka Rus-BSD) DesktopBSD OpenBSD NetBSD DragonflyBSD MidnightBSD On 2012-11-16, at 12:30 AM, Alfred Perlstein bri...@mu.org wrote: On 11/13/12 2:45 AM, Ignatios Souvatzis wrote: On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 10:08:08AM +0100, Joost van de Griek wrote: On 12 Nov 2012, at 21:37 , Robin Björklin robin.bjork...@gmail.com wrote: Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? You'd end up creating a fifth. At least a sixth, IIRC. You left out MirBSD from your distribution list. Also, you could argue that Minix, with its NetBSD compatibility, is a seventh and MacOS-X, with its partially (Free-/Net-)BSD compatible userland, an eighth. And Free/Net derived kernel. (at least for unix services: vfs, inet, process) -is ___ freebsd-c...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-chat To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-chat-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-c...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-chat To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-chat-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Unified BSD?
On 2012-11-16, at 6:42 AM, Erich Dollansky erichfreebsdl...@alogreentechnologies.com wrote: Hi, On Fri, 16 Nov 2012 14:52:48 +0100 Johnny Billquist b...@update.uu.se wrote: On 2012-11-16 12:48, Tomas Bodzar wrote: On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 9:34 AM, Hub- FreeBSD free...@hub.org wrote: Actually, according to what we are tracking at http://bsdstats.org, there are currently *8*: PC-BSD FreeBSD PYC-BSD (aka Rus-BSD) DesktopBSD OpenBSD NetBSD DragonflyBSD MidnightBSD Tracking something like DesktopBSD which doesn't exist for quite a long time make statistics not much useful. MidnightBSD seems to be same case as last activy on mailing list last year in May, forums doesn't working at all so we are still on 4 core BSDs (Open/Net/Free/Dfly). I find it rather meaningless as a tracking tool for BSD in general. There is no way something like 2BSD would ever appear there, no matter how many systems were installed. the number of FreeBSD installations for Indonesia seem also very, very low. We would have 20% of the installation base then. Its a purely opt-in system, excepf for PC-BSD, which has theirs as an opt-out when you install the OS … that is why its numbers are so much higher then everyone else …
Re: Unified BSD?
On 2012-11-16, at 5:52 AM, Johnny Billquist b...@update.uu.se wrote: On 2012-11-16 12:48, Tomas Bodzar wrote: On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 9:34 AM, Hub- FreeBSD free...@hub.org wrote: Actually, according to what we are tracking at http://bsdstats.org, there are currently *8*: PC-BSD FreeBSD PYC-BSD (aka Rus-BSD) DesktopBSD OpenBSD NetBSD DragonflyBSD MidnightBSD Tracking something like DesktopBSD which doesn't exist for quite a long time make statistics not much useful. MidnightBSD seems to be same case as last activy on mailing list last year in May, forums doesn't working at all so we are still on 4 core BSDs (Open/Net/Free/Dfly). I find it rather meaningless as a tracking tool for BSD in general. There is no way something like 2BSD would ever appear there, no matter how many systems were installed. And I also do happen to consider OS-X to be a BSD system. :-) I agree on that point, which is why I run it for my desktops … but until you mention it, I'd never thought of even trying to get the script to run … have to play with that this weekend and see how out of the box it works, if it does …
Re: Unified BSD?
Did anyone bothered to check wikipedia? 80+? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BSD_operating_systems On Fri, 2012-11-16 at 00:34 -0800, Hub- FreeBSD wrote: Actually, according to what we are tracking at http://bsdstats.org, there are currently *8*: PC-BSD FreeBSD PYC-BSD (aka Rus-BSD) DesktopBSD OpenBSD NetBSD DragonflyBSD MidnightBSD On 2012-11-16, at 12:30 AM, Alfred Perlstein bri...@mu.org wrote: On 11/13/12 2:45 AM, Ignatios Souvatzis wrote: On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 10:08:08AM +0100, Joost van de Griek wrote: On 12 Nov 2012, at 21:37 , Robin Björklin robin.bjork...@gmail.com wrote: Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? You'd end up creating a fifth. At least a sixth, IIRC. You left out MirBSD from your distribution list. Also, you could argue that Minix, with its NetBSD compatibility, is a seventh and MacOS-X, with its partially (Free-/Net-)BSD compatible userland, an eighth. And Free/Net derived kernel. (at least for unix services: vfs, inet, process) -is ___ freebsd-c...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-chat To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-chat-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-c...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-chat To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-chat-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Unified BSD?
On 12 Nov 2012, at 21:37 , Robin Björklin robin.bjork...@gmail.com wrote: Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? You'd end up creating a fifth. .tsooJ -- The first testicular guard, the cup, was used in hockey in 1874; the first helmet was used in 1974. That means it only took 100 years for men to realize that their brain is also important. -- Joost van de Griek http://www.jvdg.net/
Re: Unified BSD?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 2012/11/13 7:14 AM, Mike. wrote: If your goal is to please as many people as possible, then compromise is the way to go. If your goal is to produce outstanding software then, well, you're gonna have to piss off a few people. Could not agree more! - -- Wayn0 Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJQohrUAAoJENzqTnPMiNZlOkkH+wdmcX12a68IiZEWgPxe/Suf apxY870GQVBQrqfLzlIFBSY/Le7aQWssmHhEx//GvmYcpQYgkwU12Yjzj5HHYmsg SrLP7qQA7L22R1h9MKtQAKo7+6EW6cRxa80oKIFK/+hxuPPMUyr8eApnyozU20sJ YN7ISZfuf7yTyUo3fI04sqltnKrhLcmbS3oYqiDdPchVvHkpSXFWYk2vbVDk7kRY QsMHaFHeltMmALhUCy1Jq97DVSCQ0n/Mb3oJR+7UcdF5dRbWZhTGO4FVpkf6FChj 7kaJeTM4mmps3bXSqu5yW9loD0mlhOKqRSSBhtqtdj9I4FUUgRFLWFJK1L68fPA= =9kra -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: Unified BSD?
- Then came the Unix wars, where ATT sued BSDI (a commercial variant that no longer exists) over perceived copyright infringement. The free BSDs weren't really directly involved, but the suit would have been just as relevant, and people were worried. This was the time that Linux was in the ascendancy. Users had the choice of a free GPL system or one which might land them in trouble. Most chose the safe option. I know the view from Germany as to why Linux was taken up so readily, most people read about it later, repeat relayed wisdom, but I was here know: ( BTW though I'm British but in Germany, Germany is far more signifcant in this regard than eg UK of GB, eg Linux mag. has 3 times the circulation in Germany as UK, whenever I'm in UK I never see Linux mags in book shops etc ( of course no BSD) just MS, whereas here in Munich there's some choice of Linux mags, even in food supermarket (Tengelmann) I recall. Most newbies were clueless or didnt give a toss about FSF v BSD licensing then (or now), or some firm called ATT across the pond breathing hot air. (Only us BSD people cared, not many of us). Old Unix hands like me were earning good money fully employed doing consultancy, (plenty of work then). Although I thought I maybe should help spread BSD, considered knocking out batches of 30/40+ floppies per mail order, it was Very unattractive, labour intensive formatting, dd'ing, checking for media errors, at a very low pay rate compare with mich higher paid more interesting consultancy. Plus also if one did that under German tax law (I checked with my Steuer Berater = accountant I recall) it would be subject to Gewerbe Steuer, not just for the trivial amount earned on floppies shipped, but could imperil imposing the extra tax on the Whole of consultancy income, Very Expensive mistake to risk that. So I didn't others didnt; most other consultant friends here were also happy earning at commercial rates, didn't want to touch floppy reproduction. BUT ... meanwhile there was a whole new load of students on low or no income, no tax issues to worry about, young student mode enthusiasm time to evangalise their new free software ... Linux ... so one saw adverts for stack of floppies in eg CT Magazine (http://www.heise.de/ct/ others. then CDs came on the scene, even easier for the students to push out again I wondered whether I should push out some BSD CDs, again colleagues were too busy to reduce their consultancy income by doing grunt disk jockey work producing mailing CDROMs at cheap prices. Again I was scared of German Gewerbe Steuer ... So I decided to just do software bundling (safe consultancy work) let a commercial firm do manufacture, bulk distrib, German language correspondence, German gewerbe Steuer issues etc - Ughh) So I mastered a combination Live + Install FreeBSD CDROM years before freebsd.org did theirs, approached german Linux Mag Heise (I think) (English language, German based) BSD Mag (whatever, the one from Rosa Riebl) to see if anyone would bundle it stuck to front page of magazines (to really shift a lot have BSD make a big impact in the OS scene. I didnt get anywhere with that, but I got further with Dr Dobbs USA mag, negotiations were going OK, then they decided it would be too expensive to glue a CD on each cover, they just wanted to feature my CD in their library of CDs for sale ... at which point I lost interest cos: - It would fail to impact the market if not sent in bulk 1 per mag. (I'd have accepted very low payment for that, as it would have helped push BSD significantly) - If not on Mag. cover just in library for sale per individual order, I was scared of low sales, not worth the bother to polish the master maintain it maybe through new releases for low income. Actually, I still see a market opportunity for someone: For BSD (or Linux) shipped on memory sticks. But I wont touch that, especially not in Germany with this tax system, having to deal with thousands of customers at low profit per unit, plus a lot of german correspondence (German grammar not nice IMO) ... but its still a market BSD or Linux students could exploit (if not already ... I havent read CT mag ads. lately to know if it's being done). Cheers, Julian -- Julian Stacey, BSD Unix Linux C Sys Eng Consultant, Munich http://berklix.com Reply below not above, like a play script. Indent old text with . Send plain text. Not: HTML, multipart/alternative, base64, quoted-printable.
Re: Unified BSD?
I just can't resist the urge to point to this comic strip, which an other FreeBSD users posted regarding : hey let's create a FreeBSD desktop, like Ubuntu did with Unity http://xkcd.com/927/ -- -- Joar Jegleim Homepage: http://cosmicb.no Linkedin: http://no.linkedin.com/in/joarjegleim fb: http://www.facebook.com/joar.jegleim AKA: CosmicB @Freenode -- On 12 November 2012 21:37, Robin Björklin robin.bjork...@gmail.com wrote: Hi! First and foremost I'd like to present myself, I'm a young and naive junior sys admin that think people should be able to compromise and see the bigger picture and the good of the cause. Now over to the reason for my post. As all of you probably know there's a lot of buzz around Gnu/Linux these days and I'm pretty sure you couldn't care less. What I'm wondering is why the BSD community which from what I can gather isn't as big as the Linux community have decided to split their resources into several different projects/forks/distributions. To me it seems *BSD would be in a more competitive shape if all developers would get in under one roof? Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? Kind Regards, Robin Bjorklin ___ freebsd-c...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-chat To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-chat-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Unified BSD?
No offense Ignatios Souvatzis but your reference to Minix being a 7th BSD distro is like saying FreeBSD (or any of the other major BSDs) is another Linux because of its inter-compatibility for certain user-land components and various shared code. Minix has a minimal amount of NetBSD code and most of it being userland tools and package management. The actual core of Minix is totally different to NetBSD; MINIX is a microkernel and NetBSD is a monolithic kernel being a major difference. Mac OS X i can understand but again the core of OSX is based of Mach 3, FreeBSD and OPENSTEP, with a lot of modified code (more like BSD's 2nd or 3rd cousin). Although with that i suppose it depends on how you are defining what classifies as a BSD distribution. If your going of whether they have used any source from BSD then your going to be hard-pressed to classify one that isn't BSD. However, i was assuming you were going of the core of the system (i.e. how much source if any is used in kernel space). Which brings be back to what i was talking about in an earlier post. If you want to make a unified BSD, it would be easier to create a new BSD which at the core (i.e. memory management, IPC, I/O, etc...) is based of per-say NetBSD, i only chose NetBSD because it has what i believe is cleaner code than the others, and is structured in a way that would make it easier to modify and move components. Sure it wouldn't be true to the roots of an actual unified BSD that is based of 4.4BSD lite and has a mesh core of OpenBSD, FreeBSD NetBSD, but my point isn't about 4.4BSD lite or creating a true unified BSD down to the core (where all BSD developers work on one project). My point is about the possibility of creating a new BSD project (with separate developers) that aims for 100% compatibility with at least FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and maybe DragonflyBSD. Your suggestion i would think is possible, but only by being realistic about it. Using an already stable kernel and then modifying it where necessary to make it compatible. lol, that's just my 2-cents about it. Hell the idea is more possible with the BSDs than it is with Linux. I wouldn't even consider trying to create a unified Linux. Linux is such a jumbled mess, that i wouldn't want to go anywhere near a project trying to un-jumble it with a 10ft pole, as it would take about as long to un-jumble it as it would to finish the same idea on BSD. I like Linux but if your talking about a project/s being unified, BSD is leaps and bounds ahead of Linux. So while Linux is doing better in terms of popularity, BSD has a far greater potential for more than Linux, just because each project has made such a strong base foundation and is so well organized. :D On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 9:45 PM, Ignatios Souvatzis ignat...@cs.uni-bonn.de wrote: On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 10:08:08AM +0100, Joost van de Griek wrote: On 12 Nov 2012, at 21:37 , Robin Björklin robin.bjork...@gmail.com wrote: Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? You'd end up creating a fifth. At least a sixth, IIRC. You left out MirBSD from your distribution list. Also, you could argue that Minix, with its NetBSD compatibility, is a seventh and MacOS-X, with its partially (Free-/Net-)BSD compatible userland, an eighth. -is
Re: Unified BSD?
On 2012-11-13 11:45, Ignatios Souvatzis wrote: On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 10:08:08AM +0100, Joost van de Griek wrote: On 12 Nov 2012, at 21:37 , Robin Björklin robin.bjork...@gmail.com wrote: Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? You'd end up creating a fifth. At least a sixth, IIRC. You left out MirBSD from your distribution list. Also, you could argue that Minix, with its NetBSD compatibility, is a seventh and MacOS-X, with its partially (Free-/Net-)BSD compatible userland, an eighth. And what about 2BSD, BSD 3 and BSD 4 with all their releases? (And I assume that there was probably something that in retrospect would have been called 1BSD as well...) Johnny
Re: Unified BSD?
On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 10:08:08AM +0100, Joost van de Griek wrote: On 12 Nov 2012, at 21:37 , Robin Björklin robin.bjork...@gmail.com wrote: Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? You'd end up creating a fifth. At least a sixth, IIRC. You left out MirBSD from your distribution list. Also, you could argue that Minix, with its NetBSD compatibility, is a seventh and MacOS-X, with its partially (Free-/Net-)BSD compatible userland, an eighth. -is
Re: Unified BSD?
On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 01:04:27PM +0100, Lars Engels wrote: MirBSD / MirOS is dead: http://www.freshbsd.org/search?project=mirbsd Last commit: 2011-08-29 23:00:00 I'm no Mir* co-worker, so take this with a grain of salt. But on general principles: a) I question the date itself - that's the last commit to whatever freshbsd.org watches, not necessarily the last thing the developers did. (In fact, I've heard from Thorsten at FrosCon that he does definitely not consider his project abandoned.) b) Besides - I question the notion of unchanging == dead. In fact, as somebody who *uses* software, and who administeres computers for others who want to *use* the software, I consider changing software - e.g. the fortnightly changes of Firefox-Current's user interface - a nuisance. (That's why Mozilla has their extended support release, currently 10.0.9.) People want to use software for some work, not spend half of their time rewriting configuration files or relearn key bidings or menu entry positions. (Now, nobody being there who looks at bug reports etc... thats something different. But you only see changes through this activity if there really *are* bugs.) -is
Re: Unified BSD?
Yes, your bat crap crazy :-) All of these variants inherit from the same unified BSD 4.4 base code as far as I know. So years ago there were reasons that groups wanted to spilt off and focus on specific goals. Some of these goals are mutually exclusive. These BSD variants are not really competing with each other or Linux for that matter. Justin Mayes -Original Message- From: owner-m...@openbsd.org [mailto:owner-m...@openbsd.org] On Behalf Of Robin Björklin Sent: Monday, November 12, 2012 2:38 PM To: us...@dragonflybsd.org; netbsd-us...@netbsd.org; freebsd-c...@freebsd.org; misc@openbsd.org Subject: Unified BSD? Hi! First and foremost I'd like to present myself, I'm a young and naive junior sys admin that think people should be able to compromise and see the bigger picture and the good of the cause. Now over to the reason for my post. As all of you probably know there's a lot of buzz around Gnu/Linux these days and I'm pretty sure you couldn't care less. What I'm wondering is why the BSD community which from what I can gather isn't as big as the Linux community have decided to split their resources into several different projects/forks/distributions. To me it seems *BSD would be in a more competitive shape if all developers would get in under one roof? Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? Kind Regards, Robin Bjorklin [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pkcs7-signature which had a name of smime.p7s]
Re: Unified BSD?
On 13 November 2012 07:04, Lars Engels lars.eng...@0x20.net wrote: On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 11:45:11AM +0100, Ignatios Souvatzis wrote: On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 10:08:08AM +0100, Joost van de Griek wrote: On 12 Nov 2012, at 21:37 , Robin Björklin robin.bjork...@gmail.com wrote: Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? You'd end up creating a fifth. At least a sixth, IIRC. You left out MirBSD from your distribution list. Also, you could argue that Minix, with its NetBSD compatibility, is a seventh and MacOS-X, with its partially (Free-/Net-)BSD compatible userland, an eighth. MirBSD / MirOS is dead: http://www.freshbsd.org/search?project=mirbsd Last commit: 2011-08-29 23:00:00 Latest looks like 20120911 via http://www.mirbsd.org/MirOS/current/ Also, mksh (I use this on gentoo) jupp (a fork of joe: I still use the ol jstar for word processing) are both regularly worked upon. In any case (getting back to the Original Troll), the various BSD projects regularly borrow code from each other, so I hardly see the point. -- --
Re: Unified BSD?
On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 2:45 AM, Ignatios Souvatzis ignat...@cs.uni-bonn.de wrote: At least a sixth, IIRC. You left out MirBSD from your distribution list. Also, you could argue that Minix, with its NetBSD compatibility, is a seventh and MacOS-X, with its partially (Free-/Net-)BSD compatible userland, an eighth. OS X has benefitted greatly from FreeBSD, Apple hiring former FreeBSD core team members. And indirectly from OpenBSD as well, with modern versions of OS X, 10.7+, have pf. Cross pollination is a huge benefit to the BSD community.
Re: Unified BSD?
The Unified BSD idea is as crazy as the decision to split this discussion on multiple lists. I've quit reading this, but I got the Nick's insights, nice and touching as always.
Re: Unified BSD?
I know the basic history of all the BSDs and the reasons for divergence, but I've always tended to think of them as different focus areas of a single project. The best ideas tend to get shared around, where applicable, but each retains its unique focus and niche within the greater whole. We don't need a unified BSD; BSD is already unified in the ways that matter. Open source and meritocracy see to that. Tim -- Tim Larson Software Engineer [Proxibid]http://www.proxibid.com/ e: tim.lar...@proxibid.com p: 877-505-7770 d: 402-505-7770 This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify by return email. If you are not the intended recipient you are notified that disclosing, copying, distributing or taking any action in reliance on the contents of this information is strictly prohibited. Warning: Although the company has taken reasonable precautions to ensure no viruses are present in this email, no assurance or warranty is given that this email and any attachments are free of viruses.
Re: Unified BSD?
On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 11:45:11AM +0100, Ignatios Souvatzis wrote: On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 10:08:08AM +0100, Joost van de Griek wrote: On 12 Nov 2012, at 21:37 , Robin Björklin robin.bjork...@gmail.com wrote: Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? You'd end up creating a fifth. At least a sixth, IIRC. You left out MirBSD from your distribution list. Nice. And it's not April the first yet.
Re: Unified BSD?
On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 3:37 PM, Robin Björklin robin.bjork...@gmail.com wrote: Hi! First and foremost I'd like to present myself, I'm a young and naive junior sys admin that think people should be able to compromise and see the bigger picture and the good of the cause. Now over to the reason for my post. As all of you probably know there's a lot of buzz around Gnu/Linux these days and I'm pretty sure you couldn't care less. What I'm wondering is why the BSD community which from what I can gather isn't as big as the Linux community have decided to split their resources into several different projects/forks/distributions. To me it seems *BSD would be in a more competitive shape if all developers would get in under one roof? Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? Kind Regards, Robin Bjorklin Model yourself after Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino who was involved in Net, Open, and Free BSD. If you are interested in generating linux-like buzz advocate hardware manufacturers and industry types to fund (with money) development of drivers. Matt
Re: Unified BSD?
Hi, Reference: From: Johnny Billquist b...@update.uu.se Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2012 13:34:56 +0100 Message-id: 50a23e70.8010...@update.uu.se Johnny Billquist wrote: On 2012-11-13 11:45, Ignatios Souvatzis wrote: On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 10:08:08AM +0100, Joost van de Griek wrote: On 12 Nov 2012, at 21:37 , Robin Björklin robin.bjork...@gmail.com wrote: Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? You'd end up creating a fifth. At least a sixth, IIRC. You left out MirBSD from your distribution list. Also, you could argue that Minix, with its NetBSD compatibility, is a seventh and MacOS-X, with its partially (Free-/Net-)BSD compatible userland, an eighth. And what about 2BSD, BSD 3 and BSD 4 with all their releases? (And I assume that there was probably something that in retrospect would have been called 1BSD as well...) Johnny No they were sequential from same team, not later parallel forks. Cheers, Julian -- Julian Stacey, BSD Unix Linux C Sys Eng Consultant, Munich http://berklix.com Reply below not above, like a play script. Indent old text with . Send plain text. Not: HTML, multipart/alternative, base64, quoted-printable.
Re: Unified BSD?
On 2012-11-13 18:51, Julian H. Stacey wrote: Hi, Reference: From: Johnny Billquist b...@update.uu.se Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2012 13:34:56 +0100 Message-id: 50a23e70.8010...@update.uu.se Johnny Billquist wrote: On 2012-11-13 11:45, Ignatios Souvatzis wrote: On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 10:08:08AM +0100, Joost van de Griek wrote: On 12 Nov 2012, at 21:37 , Robin Björklin robin.bjork...@gmail.com wrote: Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? You'd end up creating a fifth. At least a sixth, IIRC. You left out MirBSD from your distribution list. Also, you could argue that Minix, with its NetBSD compatibility, is a seventh and MacOS-X, with its partially (Free-/Net-)BSD compatible userland, an eighth. And what about 2BSD, BSD 3 and BSD 4 with all their releases? (And I assume that there was probably something that in retrospect would have been called 1BSD as well...) Johnny No they were sequential from same team, not later parallel forks. Not so fast... 2BSD and BSD 4 are definitely parallel, almost to this day, I'd say... Well, BSD 4 has been sortof dead for a number of years now, but 2BSD is not entirely so dead yet. And things were back- and forwardported between the two for a while. Johnny
Re: Unified BSD?
yes, you are young, naïve, and 'bat crazy'/idealistic (never could find the difference between these two ;) ... but you are also quite lazy -- had you taken the time to research the history behind the forks and the current stated goals and objectives of each of these OS's, you would see why only a tiny minority of developers participate in more than one of the projects, and that despite the common ancestry and BSD philosophy, there are irreconcilable differences between all of the projects. On 12 Nov 2012 at 21:37, Robin Björklin wrote: Hi! First and foremost I'd like to present myself, I'm a young and naive junior sys admin that think people should be able to compromise and see the bigger picture and the good of the cause. Now over to the reason for my post. As all of you probably know there's a lot of buzz around Gnu/Linux these days and I'm pretty sure you couldn't care less. What I'm wondering is why the BSD community which from what I can gather isn't as big as the Linux community have decided to split their resources into several different projects/forks/distributions. To me it seems *BSD would be in a more competitive shape if all developers would get in under one roof? Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? Kind Regards, Robin Bjorklin
Re: Unified BSD?
On 12 November 2012 22:37, Robin Björklin robin.bjork...@gmail.com wrote: As all of you probably know there's a lot of buzz around Gnu/Linux these days and I'm pretty sure you couldn't care less. What I'm wondering is why the BSD community which from what I can gather isn't as big as the Linux community have decided to split their resources into several different projects/forks/distributions. To me it seems *BSD would be in a more competitive shape if all developers would get in under one roof? Different BSDs have different interests. Also, competitive shape is ambiguous (competitive in speed?, portability?, security?, market share?). Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? Doesn't that apply for Linux too?
Re: Unified BSD?
On 11/12/12 15:37, Robin Björklin wrote: Hi! First and foremost I'd like to present myself, I'm a young and naive junior sys admin that think people should be able to compromise and see the bigger picture and the good of the cause. compromise. That is almost always an evil word. In school in the United States, they taught us the glories of the art of compromise, and told us about the wonderful compromises of our founding fathers (mothers need not apply). If you look at them, with one major exception, which I would call a nifty win-win solution rather than a compromise, most of them devalued people or kicked decisions down the road, clearly bad solutions that the wrong were glad to get and the right were willing to live with. By the logic of my teachers, if you wished to shoot me four times and I didn't wish to be shot at all, a good compromise would be to shoot me twice. How could either of us object? I have two fewer holes, you got to do some of what you wanted to do. yay. And of course, a compromised computer is a bad thing. You can accuse me of linguistic games, but I don't think the uses of compromise are as different as people like to pretend. Realistically, OpenBSD refuses to compromise on things it thinks are important. The small number of OpenBSD users like that; in fact, that's the reason we use OpenBSD. The lack of compromise results in high resistance to compromise. WE like it that way. Now over to the reason for my post. As all of you probably know there's a lot of buzz around Gnu/Linux these days and I'm pretty sure you couldn't care less. bingo. What I'm wondering is why the BSD community which from what I can gather isn't as big as the Linux community have decided to split their resources into several different projects/forks/distributions. To me it seems *BSD would be in a more competitive shape if all developers would get in under one roof? That is an opinion. It may be right. As someone who has watched the Unix world since the 1980s, I disagree. It's been diverse for decades; in fact, it's been diverse since it escaped from the first computers it was developed on. That's been both a strength and a weakness of Unix. Lots of attempts to unify it have been made in the past, all failed. All involved committees and compromise. And back to what you said earlier...yes, we couldn't care less. I suspect a number of OpenBSD developers would probably freak out if next year we were the #1 (or #3) OS in popularity...it would be a sign we are probably doing something terribly wrong. Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? I wholeheartedly support your right to give it a shot and see what happens. Maybe you can break the Winux mindset. The BSD license begs you to take your dream and run with it. I hope you succeed, but only on my terms, of course. :) Your theory has been thought of many times before: http://xkcd.com/927/ (and many people reading this list know exactly what cartoon that is BEFORE clicking on it!) And realistically, that's to be expected. Why are there solutions A and B? Because some people prefer A, some prefer B. Try to make a compromise solution C, you will have people who STILL prefer A, others that STILL prefer B, and a few that think the compromise version is good. OpenBSD's goal has never been to be The Biggest or Most Successful. Just The Best, by the definition we chose. We don't see the good of the cause to compromise being the best (by our terms) for being the biggest, or bigger. Personally, I think there are bigger issues that the computer world needs to address, very high on my list is the level of craptastic design and implementation people tolerate and even encourage in the computer world. Why are your credit cards splattered all over the 'net? Well, I can say with confidence, compromise was involved -- between good design and an arbitrary deadline, between good design and pretty pictures, between good design by a skilled (and expensive) programmer and the $5/day that a programmer in Elbonia charged. Nick.
Re: Unified BSD?
On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 12:37 PM, Robin Björklin robin.bjork...@gmail.com wrote: Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? you are not crazy for thinking this, and fortunately there is nothing prohibiting you from doing so (or a collective group of people, or company etc...). One thing you will see in the BSD Unix systems is there is quite a bit of cross pollination between projects. The largest example current example of this from my perspective is support for OpenBSD's pf packet filter in FreeBSD. This is a packet filter built to suit the OpenBSD developers goals, but it did not restrict FreeBSD from supporting this packet filter and hopefully both projects benefit from this collaboration (wider code exposure of the pf code, and wider choice of packet filters for FreeBSD users). My opinion is that with the current state of the BSD's this is one of its stronger suits - we have multiple projects right now building entire operating systems to suit each of the projects stated goals and developer wishes. this would be opposed to gnu/linux where you are cobbling together many disparate sources to build your distribution (some of which will have goals that may not line up with your goals). with this diversity we still cross pollinate ideas and methods, but are still allowed to spend our limited resources focusing on our projects core goals. -pete -- pete wright www.nycbug.org @nomadlogicLA
Re: Unified BSD?
On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 9:37 PM, Robin Björklin robin.bjork...@gmail.comwrote: Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? Ain't that what OpenBSD is though - the best from all worlds? Tony http://soundcloud.com/abletony84
Re: Unified BSD?
If there's to be any hope of a rational discussion, we need to remember to CC each list as the OP did. On Mon, Nov 12, 2012, Tony ableton...@gmail.com wrote: Ain't that what OpenBSD is though - the best from all worlds? Especially with comments like these..
Re: Unified BSD?
On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 5:14 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey g...@freebsd.org wrote: - Then DragonflyBSD split from FreeBSD. Mainly personality driven AFAICT. Again, this doesn't imply any criticism of the founder of the new project. There were some very valid technical reasons at the time as well, IMHO.
Re: Unified BSD?
You seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that the Linux world is unified. It isn't. The big difference between Linux and the BSDs is that it alienates itself from the BSDs and many other projects by using a viral, business-hostile license. The BSDs can draw on one another's work because there are no licensing barriers between them. --Brett Glass
Re: Unified BSD?
On Monday, 12 November 2012 at 21:37:41 +0100, Robin Björklin wrote: First and foremost I'd like to present myself, I'm a young and naive junior sys admin that think people should be able to compromise and see the bigger picture and the good of the cause. It shows :-) As all of you probably know there's a lot of buzz around Gnu/Linux these days and I'm pretty sure you couldn't care less. What I'm wondering is why the BSD community which from what I can gather isn't as big as the Linux community have decided to split their resources into several different projects/forks/distributions. To me it seems *BSD would be in a more competitive shape if all developers would get in under one roof? There's 20 years of history to explain that. Where should I begin? Should I begin? - The initial split was between Bill Jolitz and the rest of the world. This was partially personality driven, partially goal driven. Bill soon faded out, leaving just the NetBSD project. - Next came the split between NetBSD and FreeBSD. That was mainly goal driven, but there was also a fair amount of personality involved. - Then came the Unix wars, where ATT sued BSDI (a commercial variant that no longer exists) over perceived copyright infringement. The free BSDs weren't really directly involved, but the suit would have been just as relevant, and people were worried. This was the time that Linux was in the ascendancy. Users had the choice of a free GPL system or one which might land them in trouble. Most chose the safe option. - Then OpenBSD split from NetBSD. Mainly personality driven AFAICT. This doesn't imply any criticism of the founder of the new project. Round about this time I wrote a paper on the subject, which I presented in various conferences. You can find numerous versions at http://www.lemis.com/grog/Papers/, including Why BSD is better than Linux, presented at the Linux.conf.au in Brisbane. - Then DragonflyBSD split from FreeBSD. Mainly personality driven AFAICT. Again, this doesn't imply any criticism of the founder of the new project. And that's where we are. We have 4 different BSD kernels which regularly borrow from each other. Some projects, such as PCBSD, take these kernels and package them differently. Looking across the fence, I see that there is no distribution of Linux with a completely standard kernel (I think), and lots of different distributions with significantly different interfaces. On the whole, I'd say that BSD is more uniform than Linux. Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? Maybe not, but there are many reasons it won't happen. One is the structure of the individual projects, and another is that the current system works well. If you only have one kernel, you don't have people implementing different solutions for a problem, so you don't find out which is better. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger g...@freebsd.org for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft MUA reports problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
Re: Unified BSD?
The reason was actually intellectual property based between ATT and the proprietary BSD/386 if your talking BSD4.4. That was the core reason for why FreeBSD and NetBSD started. So really it isn't that crazy, more highly unlikely that your going to get the core developers of each project to abandon years of work to start again on a unified BSD. It is a cool thought, one i have thought about. Which is why i reckon your far more likely to get support for a new BSD system that takes the foundation of one of the existing BSD's and create a project that aims for compatibility between the major BSD players. At least then its not like restarting. On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 8:36 AM, Justin Mayes jma...@careered.com wrote: Yes, your bat crap crazy :-) All of these variants inherit from the same unified BSD 4.4 base code as far as I know. So years ago there were reasons that groups wanted to spilt off and focus on specific goals. Some of these goals are mutually exclusive. These BSD variants are not really competing with each other or Linux for that matter. Justin Mayes -Original Message- From: owner-m...@openbsd.org [mailto:owner-m...@openbsd.org] On Behalf Of Robin Björklin Sent: Monday, November 12, 2012 2:38 PM To: us...@dragonflybsd.org; netbsd-us...@netbsd.org; freebsd-c...@freebsd.org; misc@openbsd.org Subject: Unified BSD? Hi! First and foremost I'd like to present myself, I'm a young and naive junior sys admin that think people should be able to compromise and see the bigger picture and the good of the cause. Now over to the reason for my post. As all of you probably know there's a lot of buzz around Gnu/Linux these days and I'm pretty sure you couldn't care less. What I'm wondering is why the BSD community which from what I can gather isn't as big as the Linux community have decided to split their resources into several different projects/forks/distributions. To me it seems *BSD would be in a more competitive shape if all developers would get in under one roof? Am I bat crap crazy for thinking it could be good to merge the four largest BSD variants out there, take the best bits and pieces out of each and create a Unified BSD? Kind Regards, Robin Bjorklin
Re: Unified BSD?
On 11/12/2012 at 5:20 PM Nick Holland wrote: |On 11/12/12 15:37, Robin Björklin wrote: | | [snip] } |compromise. That is almost always an evil word. | | [snip] | = Agreement abounds. Compromise takes two good ideas and results in a mediocre idea that is in the average of those two good ideas. Many like a compromised idea, because the idea is exactly that - compromised. If your goal is to please as many people as possible, then compromise is the way to go. If your goal is to produce outstanding software then, well, you're gonna have to piss off a few people.
