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BSDi Is Livin' On The Edge!
Posted by
Cliff
on Thu Nov 02, 2000 07:00 PM
from the bsdi-infusions dept.
from the bsdi-infusions dept.
Again, from Daily Daemon News, it looks like the Japanese ISP, Livin' On The Edge has infused BSDi with a 5 million dollar strategic investment to keep developing the iExtreme line of servers and provide backing to the FreeBSD project. The actual press release is here.
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BSDi and Livin' On the Edge, Two tastes that are great together.
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service option (Score:3)
Re:Yahoo should invest in FreeBSD too! (Score:3)
http://www.bsdi.com/news/press/20000310.php?emp
BSDi also announced that Yahoo! Inc. will take an equity interest in the new company.
Re:but bsd aint linux (Score:3)
Err, I mean five. Only five BSD. Still, BSD is not fragmented at all. Just five BSD: OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, BSD/OS, Darwin... and MacOS X.
OK. Only six BSD. Still, its not that fragmented. Only six BSD: OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, BSD/OS, Darwin, MacOSX... and 4.4 BSD Lite Mach Server.
Hmm... maybe I'll try again. Only seven BSD. If you squint, they're not fragmented at all. Just seven wafer thin BSD versions. Unless you count all the old BSD operating systems, like SunOS, Ultrix, NeXT step, etc. Only seven. Until tomorrow.
Yeah -- BSD isn't fragmented, and like you said, it never will be.
All Code enters, no code leaves! Rarr!! (Score:3)
The code that is in FreeBSD stays there. BSD/OS is free to use the code. Big surprise. Even better, with BSDi's ability to pay programmers, there are a few more people getting paid to do nothing but work on open source code.
Maybe you should take a careful look at an awful lot of the code that is in Linux, when you have a spare cycle or two. BSD people don't raise a fuss about our code being used for Linux, and re-licensed. Know why? We tend to believe in freedom to use the code in _any_ _way_ you want to. (though preferably in some kind of productive way :) )
Do you realize you're as free to use the code created by FreeBSD programmers under the BSD license as BSD/OS is? (and all you have to do is give credit to the original coder.) Where's the bitterness coming from?
It's hard to be mean to a company that is paying more people to do what they love, code... it's similar to the large linux companies paying the salaries of top Linux hackers. Suddenly, gifted people aren't weighted down by other jobs, but are able to devote their time to the open source community.
Only the most rabid of "programming for money BAD!" zealots would disagree with this, I think.
-Ceren E. (who works at a company that pays both Linux and BSD hackers to do their thing)
FreeBSD'S "Strange Attractor."
cerene@uclink4.pinkfakehambad.berkeley.edu
BSDi is Livin' In the Fridge? (Score:3)
Re:but bsd aint linux (Score:3)
My honest opionion is that Linux has gained an advantage over BSD by the very nature of its fragmentation (in distributions -- not in the kernel). Some of that advantage has been technical, but much of it has been social; the wide variety of linux has allowed just about everyone to find something in linux they like. Whether you're a l337 hacker trying to learn all the "arcane" options to "1337" commands like 'tar -xf && configure && make install', or an IBM executive trying to find a distribution to offer on workstations, or a software vendor hoping to escape the Microsoft hedgonomy, there is a Linux distribution made just for you.
It can also be argued that widespread linux buy-in has lead to a much wider variety of hardware and softare available to linux, making linux more flexible than BSD, and in some sense, technically superiour to BSD. This is dangerous arguement, however, as the same arguement leads us to believe that DOS is somehow superiour to both. In fact, the exact opposite may be true -- it is possible that an unfortunate side effect of a rush to popularity is a desire to provide a laundry list of desirable sounding items, instead of a short list of necessary items done correctly. Unfortunately, it also often true that broken things are talked about much more often than working things -- there is a strange correlation between popularity and brokeness that simply can't be ignored.
Unlike most people here, I do not believe "choice is good." At least, I do not believe it in the sense that it is often said -- I see no great advantage to being able to choose KDE or Gnome, or among a half dozen Java Virtual Machines, or among a dozen or so competing Linux distributions. But choice is very important in some cases. Different computers are used for different things. The demands placed on a farm of inexpensive webservers or a mail server are very, very different than the demands placed on a personal workstation, which are very different than the demands on a 365x24x7 SPF database server. Choice here is good. The option to choose the right tool for the task is very important. It does not matter much to me if I choose among two tools available for a job, which both do pretty much the same thing. It does matter to me if I can choose one good tool for one job, and another good tool for another job. This is where the choice between linux and BSD is good.
But there is another way to interpret choice; it can be interpreted as freedom. Its the kind of freedom that RMS keeps talking about -- the freedom to improve something that needs improving. BSD and linux are not so much about giving consumers a choice of operating systems (which is good, because they're not really interchangable), but instead about giving the developers a choice to develop what they feel needs developing. If I want BSD with SMP support, its entirely my choice to make a BSD with better SMP support. If I want a journaling filesystem, its entirely my choice to make a journaling file system. Its my choice.
This kind of choice really is what has led to both the fragmentation and vitality of Unix through the years. I would have to imagine that most of us on slashdot have had more accounts on more unix varients than we can count on our fingers and toes. We've all pulled our hair out over the differences. And we've all also realized that without every vendor being free to build their own thing, and copy each other, Unix would have stagnated and died long, long ago.
*sigh* (Score:4)
Anyway, before storming in and complaining about how terrible BSD is, perhaps you should use it and try and offer constructive criticism, as BSD users generally do when they are faced with a bombardment of Linux users.
In some ways, this feels a bit like the old Amiga 500 vs. Atari ST wars. Neither side would admit that it's just cool to be able to have some reasonable processing power in your home for less than £400, they just wanted to undermine the other side. I get the feeling that the FreeBSD crowd are fitting into the under-dog Atari ST niche where their solution isn't as popular, but is better in some areas than anything else around. For the ST it was sound (they're still in use today in a lot of studios), and for FreeBSD it's stable, clean server and workstation work.
*sigh*