Slashdot Log In
Wind River lays off FreeBSD developers; Q&A
from the been-here-before dept.
In the interests of full disclosure. I'm also nik@freebsd.org, although not a WRS employee. I was employed by BSDi in Europe, before the European team were laid off as part of the WRS acquisition. These questions were answered by WindRiver's PR department.
Q: WRS has already been through two rounds of layoffs in the recent past. Why this third set of lay offs now? Are the FreeBSD developers the only ones affected?
Wind River has only had two rounds of layoffs. During the second round Wind River decided to divest itself of the FreeBSD project. We spent several weeks looking for a suitable corporate sponsor but did not find any company with sufficient interest and financial capability in this challenging economy. This week's layoff of the FreeBSD employees is therefore Wind River's "final option" in executing the plans set in motion by the second round of layoffs.
Q: WRS currently own the trademark "FreeBSD". Do WRS plan to retain the trademark? If so, why? If not, will WRS let the trademark lapse? Or are there plans to transfer it to a third party, such as the FreeBSD Foundation?
Wind River plans to ensure continuation of the altruistic, open stewardship of the FreeBSD trademark. We feel strongly that the FreeBSD project must be protected and encouraged and that a FreeBSD trademark in the wrong hands could be very detrimental. We continue to search for the best solution. No specific third-party has yet been determined, but transfer to a suitable third-party is the leading option being considered.
Q: WRS own the "bsd.com" domain. Will that be retained?
Possibly. Wind River will continue to invest in BSD/OS and participate as a highly interested member of the *BSD community. As such, the bsd.com domain may be important for Wind River. We are weighing this against the needs of the *BSD community and hope to resolve the issue later this month.
Q: What's happening to the "FreeBSD Mall", at freebsdmall.com?
freebsdmall.com continues to operate and take orders, and all new and existing orders from customers for FreeBSD 4.4 or other products will continue to be fulfilled. Wind River is still evaluating its long term options and strategy for the FreeBSD Mall, but plans to maintain its presence and service either internally or externally.
Q: As part of the BSDi acquisition, WRS will (presumably) have picked up customers who had subscribed to the BSDi CD sets of FreeBSD. Will WRS continue to service those customers, or are their subscriptions now cancelled?
Like all customer contracts, subscription orders will continue to be fulfilled.
Q: BSDi (and, it seemed, WRS) had made some headway in producing additional FreeBSD boxed products to go in to the retail channel. Will WRS continue to do this?
Wind River is currently continuing activities to promote FreeBSD 4.4 through the retail channel. Future FreeBSD releases will probably not be produced or distributed by Wind River.
Q: Will WRS continue to produce the usual 4 disc CD sets of FreeBSD, including one for the recently released FreeBSD 4.4?
Yes, for FreeBSD 4.4.
Q: WRS had been funding work on the FreeBSD Handbook, in order to print the second edition in the near future. [ Disclaimer, I'm co-editor of this work, along with your employee, Murray Stokely ] Will WRS continue with plans to print the second edition of the FreeBSD Handbook?
Wind River will encourage any stewards that emerge to take on FreeBSD publication to complete and publish this work.
Q: WRS houses the "FreeBSD Test Lab" at its Alameda campus. Will WRS continue to host this facility?
No. Some equipment from this lab will be transferred to Yahoo! which hosts much of the build structure equipment for FreeBSD, as well as the primary CVS source repository and main FreeBSD mail server. Wind River does not plan to maintain the FreeBSD test lab at its Alameda, CA headquarters.
preface.. (Score:4, Funny)
Thank you.
Re:preface.. (Score:5, Informative)
Who volunteers for FreeBSD anymore?
The numbers are amazing.
FreeBSD developers chase off anyone who doesn't already have extensive experience.
That's definately not true. I have gained most of my experience during my years as part of the developers.
Furthermore, criticism isn't necessarily meant as discouragement, but don't forget that if you mention ideas to the BSD developers (speaking in general, not just the committers) that most of these people have made a living in programming and Unix before most people even heard of Linux or BSD as alternative to Windows.
There is a difference in age and mindset between the BSD community and the Linux community. I often see the BSD community to be geared around 30'ish whilst the Linux community seems to have people around 20'ish in there. Of course, both have their exceptions on the old and young ages.
Furthermore, what I noticed (and I have touched a lot of different Unix systems in my past, including different Linux distributions) is that the mindset in the BSD community seems less focused on hacking up stuff, but more on adding well-tested code -call it more mature code if you like-.
Again, this has its exceptions on both side.
And do note, I am not saying that either is technologically more advanced than the other, I am merely saying that for my wishes and desires BSD was better in that it was a full operating system with a mature way of development behind it. YMMV.
By the time someone has extensive experience, they're usually working on Linux already.
Quite possible. But everyone is allowed to send patches to the BSD projects, just make sure you take all comments merely as sharing of experience on how to approach things. I know my C skillset improved by getting `lectured' time and time again about things. And not just C, but also the ability to develop things as a team, do maintenance work, technical writing, and the list goes on.
It is quite possible that the bar to entering and hacking on Linux might be lower, but does it, in the end, make it more stable or faster or..? Do not forget, most subsystems, VFS, VM, drivers, are pretty specialist kinds of source code which do verge a lot of knowledge. Not to mention designing APIs. That's the beauty of peer review. Either people confirm my idea is sound and solid or they tell me I should recheck my understanding of things. But it is in the human nature to take most criticism as a scolding.
Layoffs. (Score:1)
Seems a waste of some talent, someone here has to have an idea where this level of development team would be headed.
Re:Layoffs. (Score:4, Insightful)
They will not land with gnome, ibm, redhat, or some other branch of BSD. They remain FreeBSD developers, do you really think they will change their aims and goals because they got laid off? They merely had a chance to work on it fulltime compared to the part-time contributions of the majority of us (yes I am a FreeBSD developer too).
They will surely wind up in companies who can use their extensive skills and probably will still be heavily involved in BSD related issues at their next employer.
And then again they may not.
What happens after FreeBSD 4.4 then? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What happens after FreeBSD 4.4 then? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What happens after FreeBSD 4.4 then? (Score:4, Informative)
It is and will remain a volunteer project.
The matter that corporations decide(d) to employ certain developers full-time to work on FreeBSD was only for the corporation's own benefit.
For god's sake people, it is not like the people they laid off now cease to exist.
Re:What happens after FreeBSD 4.4 then? (Score:5, Informative)
Hmm, no.
FreeBSD is still very much alive, and development of both 4-STABLE and -CURRENT continue as ever. AFAIK, none of the people being laid off are core team members or even really active source developers. Most of them work(ed) on documentation and improving the FreeBSD product line (CD box sets, etc.).
At the moment the release date for 5.x has been pushed out until late next year, partly because we've lost a few developers to real work, but also because we bit off more than we could chew... Rewriting the kernel for preemptive fine grain threading is a big task.
Other aspects of the project continue to be very actively developed. The Ports collection [freebsd.org] is almost at 6000 ports.
It is really sad to see people laid off, but this is just a side effect of the dotcom crash.
Regards,
-Jeremy
The bigger question... (Score:2, Flamebait)
The future (Score:1)
But how does this affect to the future of FreeBSD? The FreeBSD is, after all, an open source project and will continue to evolve with or without commercial support. Right?
Re:The future (Score:4, Informative)
We have 5.0 standing for November 2002 [this was changed from November 2001 due to the fact that we weren't quite satisfied with the current state and thought things were missing].
Until we release 5.0 in 2002 we continue to work on 4.x, so we will most likely see 4.5, 4.6, 4.7 and possible 4.8.
Releases will very probably be going through DaemonNews, since it looked like WRS shows no interest of doing so after 4.4.
So possibly all of you subscribers might want to look for a new distributor.
fsck (Score:5, Interesting)
What I'd like WRS to do is this:
In short, if they are *not* interested in FreeBSD, which seems to be the case, they should just let it be. As others have pointed out, Wind River was mainly interested in BSD/OS, the closed-source BSD. They have got what they wanted, so firing people makes sense... Unfortunately.
PR Blabber (Score:5, Funny)
Wind River: a fitting moniker for a company whose committment has dried up and blown away.
merge back to NetBSD or OpenBSD? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ok, a silly question from somebody who doesn't really follow *BSD:
Is there any chance of some consolidation in the *BSDs? I always thought it strange that there were three of them, but then I don't really know the history behind it.
I'm all in favour of competition, but four free Unix-like OSs (Linux + 3 * BSD) does some a little much to me.
Re:merge back to NetBSD or OpenBSD? (Score:5, Informative)
FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are operating systems and split off for various reasons and now serve their own niches.
Linux is only a kernel. It becomes an operating system only due to the fact that people created their own distributions.
And if we look at the distributions, there are over 100 distributions (at least).
So ask yourself, which part is more ripe for consolidation then?
Re:merge back to NetBSD or OpenBSD? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, the most basic reason is that there are three different objectives, which aren't easily met in a single operating system:
BSD/OS is a proprietary implementation of BSD by Berkeley Software Design, who's name coincidentally enough has the same initials as Berkeley Standard Distribution. They're a commercial organization, so you get support etc. from them, whereas the others are ad-hoc. This doesn't mean there's no support and no product upgrading of course, just that they tend to proceed according to the developer's wishes rather than contractual obligations.
FreeBSD will survive (Score:1)
As i look through the commits, it seems development is even going faster than ever
Cheer up guys, FreeBSD will overcome
Hmm, this again. (Score:4, Interesting)
- Company of bright people gets bought by larger company.
- Larger company fires everyone from smaller company.
- Smaller company no longer exists, nor does their product nor whatever research they were doing.
This just seems awfully wierd to me. It seems to me like you still have the same bunch of people open, aand they collectively have whatever money was used to buy them out; Why don't they just immediately reform back into the company they were? Sometimes there are intellectual property concerns, true, but not if the company subsisted primarily on research or if (like dynamix) they just got completely finished with a product and it was time to start on something else, or if their product is *cough* available under the BSD license. (Except it looks like what happened here was that there was a company that existed to create funding for FreeBSD, and a larger company bought it, took the bits that created funding, and stranded FreeBSD without either funding from them or funding from the funding mechanisms FreeBSD had created.. is this accurate?)I'm not sure what my question was. I'm just looking for comments on what seems like an odd issue to me, and wondering if anyone could try to show me why that if you're a small company with something actually sellable, it wouldn't at this point be a really foolish idea to trust another company enough to let them buy you. Given that you seem to have little proof that you're doing anything other than quietly signing your company out of existence after a three month grace period. I mean, if you just want to get rid of your products and logo, you could sell those things independently of the company itself.
Unless the reason these companies actually get bought is that some larger company wants to destroy a smaller company before they innovate themselves into being a competitor.
Unless the reason these companies get sold is that the CEO wants to quit, and he can get more money by steering the company into being sold than he can in a severance package.
Someone closer to the industry want to explain to me what is happening here?
Does FreeBSD Foundation get a cut? (Score:3, Interesting)
So, WRS has divested the majority of its expenses related to FreeBSD, but will still sell merchandise and profit from it. Anyone know if they plan to contribute financially to the project based upon revenues/profits from the CD sales? Let's Hope...
HP/UX, FreeBSD (Score:1)
100 or so unix gurus laid of at HP labs in NJ. X developers laid off from Wind River Systems. FreeBSD is dead and/or dying, HP/UX is dying, what is going to happen of the rest? Are these new employees skilled in unix-like OS programming going to move to other unix-likes? Windows? Mac (I guess technically a unix now)? Or will the the tumble merely continue, taking Solaris and linux, leaving Windows and the toy (Macintosh) standing?
As an unemployed unix C programmer, I'm worried.
Re:HP/UX, FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
Merely questions.
I know, and my comment was semi-joking, hence the smiley.
My comment was that FreeBSD was dead and dying. It started when the lead programmer and cofounder left to go work for Apple. It continued when 5.0 was pushed back by a year. Now with this news, I think it's impossible to say that FreeBSD is not dying, and personally I consider it dead.
If you think that one person is the thing which lets FreeBSD live or die then I must sadly conclude you have been comparing FreeBSD too much with Linux.
FreeBSD, ever since I joined it about 2-3 years ago, and probably before that, the project didn't fall or rise with the come or leaving of one person.
5.0 was pushed back because of a lot of the developers, including myself, requested this since we didn't believe in releasing a `product' which we found was not what we wanted it to be yet. And we now added KSE to the kernel, which is a major step forward.
Your telco could probably use FreeBSD 1.0. I'm talking about the future.
Funny remark. I foresee a wonderful career for you as psychic instead, since you are able to conjure up the systems we use here. :)
NT is getting there.
Out of there yes. At least in Europe I see less and less usage of Windows systems and the replacing of Windows systems --which ironically first replaced Unix systems-- by Unix systems again.
Stability remains an issue and with the current licensing scheme introduced...
I know nothing about the NT kernel, but I would assume it has a more tightly coupled GUI, for instance, which would pretty much guarantee that unix will always perform better and be more stable.
Yes, NT has its graphical subsystem/driver in the kernel. Performance gain, likely, stability gain, not so likely.
[...]and performance at the kernel level is becoming less and less of an issue with these faster and faster machines.
If I can buy less state of the art hardware, speedwise, by having a kernel which is better designed and optimised and thus making good use of that hardware, I will. I am not going to counter a sloppy non-optimised kernel by buying mega-expensive hardware.
I'm not worried about unix so much as my own personal career. I'm confident that unix will be around for many many many years to come, but how big of a market it will have and how many people will be hired in it.
I think it will remain big. I have had no problems finding new Unix related jobs in the last year (switched jobs twice). Granted, that's Europe.
Where are all these laid off people going to go? Let me know at least that so I can put in my application!
Assuming you are referring to the, now, ex-WRS employees. I know some are busy on their own businesses, already heard some other FreeBSD developers offering them jobs since they know their skillset and the company they work for can use people like that. And others are just looking through the wanted ads. So it basically looks like whatever any person does when they get fired/laid off.
Stability (Score:2, Insightful)
This makes little sense to me. The whole beauty of FreeBSD vs. Linux (to me) was the simplicity. I didn't want distros and rpms and a gui install and all the other crap that came with Linux when I was installing a server. How hard would it be to just maintain the current tree and work only on the really important server features, bug fixes, and essential drivers?
I suggest the FreeBSD community forks FreeBSD, GPLs it (possibly with a modified GPL to support the advertising clause, where necessary), and then continues to maintain FreeBSD by porting new Linux drivers, fixing bugs, and if there's enough manpower, adding server-only features/performance enhancements. Yahoo used to run a lot of FreeBSD machines. I assume they still do. Yahoo combining efforts with the FreeBSD community (utilizing the GPL to try to coax a little more sharing) could do it.
I'm going to look into how realistic this (forking and GPLing) would be right after I finish hitting submit.
What about APPLE!? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Ummm Isnt Apple's OSX built on FreeBSD?
Ahhh the trappings of the BSD license, you do the work - someone else makes money by stealing it.
Re:What about APPLE!? (Score:4, Insightful)
And releases it as Darwin. But otherwise, yeah you're right. Look at what happened to Apache and X without the protection of the GPL, they're just in the dustbin of history now, aren't they?
Idiots (Score:3, Funny)
I wish I could say I was surprised.... (Score:2)
When they bought BSD I really wondered what they were thinking, as I was at a loss to see how BSD fit into their corporate strategy. The BSD kernel is much more competent than the VxWorks kernel, but being Free Software there is little value added from WRS - I can just embed BSD and avoid dealing with WRS. If they had a good history of decent board support packages I might see where they would be of value to me, but given how poorly they've supported VxWorks with BSPs, I have little confidence they would really have a benefit for their support.
Now, had WRS been able to buy Cygnus before RedHat, that would have made sense - Tornado (Wind River's VxWorks development package) uses the GCC toolchain, so owning the primary developers for GCC would have made sense. But I cannot see where the advantage to owning BSD is to WRS.
However, this just goes to show the power of Free Software - while WRS may screw up BSD.COM, they can never kill BSD.
#include <std-disclaimer.h>
The views expressed here are mine, not my employer.
FreeBSD and BSDI (Score:1)
Some of the advantages of BSDI were you could call them for support, they released security patches and fixes (although some required you to have an upgrade contract, and as soon as ours expired they quit even sending us notifications of such updates.) What I didn't like about BSDI is it's closed-source nature, which to me would make it more difficult for developers. Plus, they didn't seem to have very much RAID controller support (at lesat, along the lines of Dell.)
FreeBSD, on the other hand, may not have the "call this number for tech support" (although I am sure someone sells commercial support), but it IS open-sourced and it supports our RAID controller properly.
We have two servers running our major services (mail, web, ftp, dns, etc.) and both were running BSDI. We recently commissioned a Dell, onto which I installed FreeBSD, and are phasing out one of our BSDI machines. After that, said BSDI machine will be blown away, loaded w/FreeBSD, and will replace the P166 box that is our secondary RADIUS, secondary DNS, and backup MX. (Don't ask - the dual 166 kicked the bucket in June, and the single 166 is what was in the spare parts bucket. We knew it would handle the load, and didn't want to invest in a new box when we'd be getting one in a couple months anyway.) The 166 is running BSDI, and will put back into retirement soon.
But, back to the point. With FreeBSD being open-source, it's open nature is going to allow development to continue. As far as the trademark is concerned, IANAL but they probably only own the trademark to the *name* "FreeBSD" - thus, in a worst case scenario they could probably write a shell script to run sed on all of the files with s/FreeBSD/WhateverBSD/g
I will say that I'm much happier now, as on FreeBSD I don't have to have a goofy cron job that checks to see if MySQL is running, and if not, restart it.
Just my $0.04 (still adjusted for inflation)
Stickers? (Score:1)
Does 4.4 come with stickers? Anywhere to buy them individually? My new car is badly in need of them.
Uhm FREE BSD not FREE ? (Score:1)
Differences (Score:1)
Re:Differences (Score:4, Informative)
NetBSD grew out of FreeBSD during an uncomfortable time when the FreeBSD regents, the individuals who guide FreeBSD's growth in a kind of guiding council, were focussed on ix86, and only ix86 for their OS. The NetBSD team's goal has been portability above all else, and can be likened to rabbits. You name the platform, the NetBSD guys are already installed there, or working on a distro for it.
OpenBSD grew out of NetBSD, as certain individuals wanted a stronger emphasis on security. OpenBSD inherited a fairly wide platform base from its NetBSD foundation, but their primary goal is security by default.
If you needed a system to sit exposed to the internet, I cannot recommend OpenBSD strongly enough. If you need a system to serve data quickly using inexpensive hardware, FreeBSD has many performance advantages, even over the linux 2.4 tree. And, if you want Unix on your Atari Falcon, go grab NetBSD, you nutcase. =)
Oh, and if you want a Unix your grandmother can be comfortable with, go get OS X.
Re:Differences (Score:4, Informative)
NetBSD and FreeBSD simultaneously grew out of the 386BSD project which was headed by Bill Jolitz. It was a project that ported 4.4BSD to the i386.
There's no such thing as "FreeBSD regents". You're thinking of the Regents of the University of California, who owned the (open source) license to BSD. They're a bunch of university administrators and have nothing to do with operating system development.
In fact, NetBSD is technically older than "FreeBSD", as FreeBSD was then just a handful of people (4 or 5) who started releasing patches to 386BSD called the "386BSD Patchkit".
You're right about the rest.
For your (and anyone reading this) review, see
Tough Sledding (Score:1, Interesting)
Who can save us now??? (Score:1)
I find this rather shocking and at the same time a wee bit disconcerting.
I am really suprised that Apple hasn't stepped forward to fund this, as IMHO it could be in their best interests.
Of course, given today's business world they could take the Rambus route and sue everyone that makes an OS. Hell, sue Microsoft, that seems to be the trendy thing to do nowadays anyway.
Trademark (Score:1)
BS! They ripped me off (Score:1)
WRS has fucked up FBSD beyond belief. Its a sad thing.
Slackware (Score:1)
Oh well... (Score:1)
Regardless, I like FBSD and plan to keep using it. I'm currently downloading all that I can (via a schedule so I don't overload or hog the network)from the FBSD ftp servers so I can at least save some of it for future use. I've got plenty of space on my server, and I'm adding another 60gig shortly, so I'll be able to hold a good chunk of the info for awhile. I don't believe FBSD will go away and disappear because to many of the people involed/working on it just simply like it and want it to live. So, I choose to believe that it will continue in a diminished state for some years to come, and may resurface one day as a good OS to install/use. I'll keep using it as I have no reason not to, and I also like it. I would advise others that feel as I do to consider downloading and saving a portion of the materials so that they do not every become lost or unavailable.
My mind, my thoughts.
The 3 BSD's explained (Score:1)
Community (Score:1)
Re:Their fault for kicking Slackware to the curb! (Score:1)
Re:Their fault for kicking Slackware to the curb! (Score:1)
You're telling me, mate - Slackware ROCKS! Have you tried 8.0 yet? You'll get addicted very soon. It's not too fast to download in the UK yet, but once I get all of 8.0 I'll probably set up a mirror.
Re:Their fault for kicking Slackware to the curb! (Score:1)
Re:*BSD is dying (Score:1)
> *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a
> miracle could save it at this point in time. For
> all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
So the solar flare that happened the day of the announcement at Seybold of the release of OS X.1 wasn't enough of a miracle for you?
Sheesh, you just can't please some people. It's okay, Mothra, at least I appreciated it.
OS X: the Apple of Mothra's Aqua eye.
Re:um hello moron! (Score:1)