BSD BOF at LinuxWorld

Going to LinuxWorld this year? Robert Bruce, head honcho at Walnut Creek CDROM, writes "There is going to be a BSD BOF at the New York Linuxworld on Thursday, Feb. 3, from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. We are in room 1D05, Jacob Javits Convention Center, near the conference area in the lower (2nd level down) of Javits. You do not need to be a Linuxworld attendee to come to the BOF. Everyone is welcome. There will be representatives from BSDi, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD."

If you're after installation CD-ROMs, or a bite to eat, this is the place to be. You might even be able to get one of the free Daemon Horns that will be given away. The BOF is being sponsored by BSDI, Walnut Creek CDROM, and BUNY (BSD Users of New York).

Re:What is the point of BSD?

Mindshare does not a good operating system make.

What makes a good operating system is dedicated users,
developers and documentors, and *BSD has all of these.
It's not possbily to simply dismiss the hundreds of developers
with direct CVS write access to FreeBSD, for example, or
the thousands of code submitters, 3000+ ported applications,
and countless users of FreeBSD and *BSD, including
Verio, UUNet, HotMail, and countless others.

BSD provides many features that Linux doesn't, in the
same way that Linux provides many features that BSD
doesn't: they're neither mutually exclusive, nor
incompatible. BSD provides strong security, and a
clear orientation towards scalable service providing:
take the recent jail() code added to FreeBSD, allowing
providers to easily create virtual machines for each
virtual domain customer. Cool feature, and clearly
targetted at one the the prime FreeBSD audiences,
network service providers. The feature is not in Linux.
Sure, it could be easily enough, but it's not. Similar
to Linux support for dos emulation: sure, it could be,
but it's not.

Some of the great strengths of both Linux and BSD lie
in the applications that run on it, and you'll find that
almost all serious applications run on both: XWindows,
KDE, Apache, Samba, and many more.

And there seem to be no signs of either the Linux or
BSD worlds slowing down in gaining mindshare: while
Linux is a few steps ahead on the curve to popularism,
that doesn't mean that BSD isn't on the same curve,
or that it's not going in the same direction. As with
Linux, FreeBSD has seen exponential growth use,
increased media coverage, and adoption by major
consumers and vendors.

An exclusivist attititude is not an open source attitude:
if the goal is a better operating system, being able
to select best of breed features from multiple source bases
leads to strength through diversity, not stagnation. We
see stagnation in places where there's a single vendor,
not multiple vendors competing, and cross-pollinating.

rwatson

Re:What is the point of BSD?

Your argument is nullified by your apparent ignorance to both operating systems. Anyway, I will present my perspective.

First, Linux does not do "much more than BSD's do". This statement sounds like a corporate propaganda campaign that doesn't actually have any real arguments. Next time, please properly articulate features that you value in both operating systems.

Second, the world does not rotate around Linux. You may think that all the applications that you use in Linux were in fact specifically made for it, but this is in fact false. Many, many applications were not only developed to be specifically cross platform, but also were primarily developed on other UNIX-like operating systems.

"users want to feel 'superior' by using a 'real' UNIX"

These people are either ignorant or feel they can make weak statements such as that just because it's slashdot.

"having nostalgic fixation on an ancient code base"

Which of course brings about the fact that all the BSD's are in fact not full of ancient code but are being constantly modified just like Linux.

Under the direction of your argument, we could also say that we should stop using gtk or kde and use the other, stop using sendmail and use qmail etc. Different people use and develop for what they like. Your argument is just a weak minded attempt to bring uniformity where it has no place.

"Whatever technical advantages BSD may have over Linux, Linux will simply incorporate"

That's a stupid argument. Replace BSD with microsoft or SCO or solaris and you'll see how stupid it is. If you meant straight code lifting, who cares. It doesn't take away from the BSD projects. Those interested will contribute.

To elaborate upon my choices of OS:

- 2 co-located freebsd i386 shell and web servers. According to my benchmarks, Freebsd was faster serving static web pages. This, however, is irrelevant, given that I never come close to maximizing the 100mbps interfaces on each, and each is within that performance threshold. I like the ease in which I can secure freebsd, as well as the standardized setup where I can easily determine where everything is. The ports collection (along with packages collection) were also a very good plus (ports, because I often do makefile and minor source mods before make install). Another factor was also the fact that I had used FreeBSD in the past (at a time when Linux 2.0 was a joke compared to FreeBSD), so I found no compelling reason to switch to linux

- 1 2xp3 (debian)linux db2 server. Couldn't get db2 working properly on freebsd to even benchmark (linux base 6.1 wasn't available at that time). Linux SMP is also reportedly better, so I just thought I would use it. I wish I had a sparc with solaris with oracle, but budget was a consideration.

- 1 p200 FreeBSD firewall and nat gateway. I do not like ipchains. Netfilter seems to be getting there, but not yet. I don't particularly like ipfw for freeBSD, so I use ipfilter for filtering. I also use dummynet for traffic shaping (which is find superior to the solutions offered for Linux). It also doubles as a samba server.

- 1 FreeBSD 4.0 workstation. I enjoy playing with new features, so I'm running -CURRENT here. I use X, with the Window Maker window manager. I also have some kde applications installed. I do some java, c, and quick and dirty perl development here. I also run some multimedia applications. I also have cvs, samba and postgresql running here. The new jail chroot environment is also really interesting, especially for large shell login environments. Anyway, I do not see any compelling reason to go to Linux here. My ata 66 hard drive works fine, window maker works fine, kde applications work fine, performance is also comparable to linux in this configuration.

- 1 windows 98 workstation. I use editplus for most coding (as well as developer studio). I use ie5 heavily. I play counterstrike, a half-life mod when I have free time. I sometimes use word to format specifications documents and letters. I also create PDF's. Another reason to keep it around is proprietary media formats such as windows media, real and the sorenson codec in quicktime.

As you can see, I have plenty of reasons to use multiple operating systems.

Re:BSD is dying

How can FreeBSD, a non-commercial entity, go bankrupt? This is like saying the Linux kernel is on the verge of going broke.

I didn't hear of any Linux booths at the FreeBSD Con last october - even RedHat didn't show. I thus conclude that Linux is on the verge of death.

You are a twit.

Re:BSD License

With the BSD license, the creator of a derivative work can only "hide" his or her changes. The original is still available. If someone makes improvements, they belong to that person; he or she should have a choice of sharing them or not. To try to force him or her to give up that work with no compensation is confiscation, pure and simple. This is what the GPL tries to do: confiscate programmers' work using the government's guns and courts.

This is neither fair nor just.

--Brett Glass

The 2 second guide to acronyms...

IANAL = I am not a lawyer
AFAIK = As far as I know
BOF = Bastard Operator From (...)

Dammit BSD people, what the hell DOES "BOF" stand for???

What bugs me is that the acronyms have been getting longer. Earlier in my formative BBS years, the longest you had to contend with was "ROFL" = Roll on the Floor Laughing or even the absurdly long (for an acronym) ROFLMAO (MAO=My Ass off) Now AFAIK and IANAL are actually common...I tell you, it's obscene.

In my day, we respected our elders, ate our vegetables, didn't say dirty words like "Microsoft" and "EULA" in polite company, and we CERTAINLY didn't use long acronyms. (Of course, BOF is not a long acronym, but I've spun far enough off-topic that I can't stop now)

Jeez, when do I see somebody prefix their slashdot post with:

OYMBAINIUMEAPMSOS = Obviously you must be an idiot not immediately understanding my el33t acronymz. Ph33r m3 spl01t2, Or something

Re:Bring 'em on.

To add to what was said up there:

I'm an RHCE, and run Mandrake at home. I haven't bothered to mess with *BSD; when I got into throwing M$ off the desktop, Linux was what was ready to hand.

That said, I have one thing for all the daemon-bashers out there: Where would any of us be, any of us including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun, et alia ad infinitum nauseumque, without BSD 4.3 networking?

If you jerked all that Berzerkeley code out of "The Internet", The Net As We Know It would cease to exist (at least until we could re-engineer all that, each vendor his own way, and we all know what THAT would entail....)

Bash M$ all you want, I don't care. Leave the daemons alone. Maybe they don't understand that free as in beer doesn't measure up to free as in speech... But without that original codebase and the original idea of giving away sofware, no enthusiasm for Unix in the university setting, no Internet as we know it, and therefore nothing for RMS to get excited or pissed off about, nor anything for Linus to base an OS on. Without the Daemons, there ARE no Penguins. And without Penguins, there would be no Slashdot. And without Slashdot... ~~*&%$#
NO CARRIER


:)

OT: Bug in Slash?

This is offtopic. Sorry.
I was skimming the replies to this article below my threshold (usually 2), and I saw a bunch of the usually trollish first post (well, first 30 posts this time) garbage. I noticed something really weird about the posts, though.

The article is dated:
"Tuesday February 01, @02:31PM"
BUT, if you read post #1, you see that it is dated:
"Thursday January 27, @07:54PM EST"

I haven't looked at the slash code yet, and my perl isn't really that good anyway, but:
What the heck?

good to see...

Despite the general consensus around here, BSD is a very worthwhile operating system, that in many ways is much easier to use than Linux. I am curious what BOF stands for, though? Anyone figured that out yet? Despite what might be said, however, BSD is not "jumping" on the linux bandwagon at all. It's just that when people start looking around for alternatives to Windoze they see Linux... and if they look a bit further they bump into BSD. I run both Mandrake and FreeBSD (with my primary gateway being FreeBSD for stability) and I would highly recommend some Slashdotters to try out both (if you have the machines and the chance to hook both up as gateways/firewalls... even not connected to the net, it's an interesting experience) because the differences between the two are both interesting and informative. Yes, BSD is at a Linuxworld conference, but that's only because there's no BSDworld. All I'm saying is it's good to see both great operating systems represented.

Re:TMA's

FOLDOC Illuminates: http://www.instantweb.com/~foldoc/foldoc.cgi?query =bof [instantweb.com]

1. Birds Of a Feather.
2. Boring Old Fart.

Birds Of a Feather
(BOF) (From the saying "Birds of a feather flock together") An informal discussion group, scheduled on a conference program or formed ad hoc, to consider a specific issue or subject. It is not clear where or when this term originated, but it is now associated with the USENIX conferences for Unix techies and was already established there by 1984. It was used earlier than that at DECUS conferences and is reported to have been common at SHARE meetings as far back as the early 1960s.

Bring 'em on.

I'm going to be at linuxexpo, it's in fact going to be my first linux trade show despite the fact that I've been using linux for close to 4 years now.

The BSD's are not the enemy of linux. They're just a "cousin" so to speak. I don't approve of their licenses, but hey, that's not really the issue. The issue in my mind is that they're bringing good free software to the table for everybody to use. Now, some people may think of BSD as the ugly third cousin that we try to keep locked in the closet :) but I don't see it that way.

It is quite interesting to see linux/BSD bigots lock horns over the advantages and disadvantages of the two - as in the maturity of BSD over the momentum of linux, the centralized development of BSD versus the bazaar development of linux, et al.