slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/05/0855222&mode=thread
Change The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. FreeBSD developers chase off anyone who doesn't already have extensive experience. 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-. 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. By the time someone has extensive experience, they're usually working on Linux already. 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. Do not forget, most subsystems, VFS, VM, drivers, are pretty specialist kinds of source code which do verge a lot of knowledge. 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. Seems a waste of some talent, someone here has to have an idea where this level of development team would be headed. 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. The matter that corporations decide 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. 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. Rewriting the kernel for preemptive fine grain threading is a big task. Other aspects of the project continue to be very actively developed. It is really sad to see people laid off, but this is just a side effect of the dotcom crash. Regards, -Jeremy 162 Parent * 163 3 replies beneath your current threshold. Piccolo (Score:1) Friday October 05, @12:39PM 167 How can an open source development project die? Corporations traditionally gut anything not making money - what's to become of the carcass? The FreeBSD is, after all, an open source project and will continue to evolve with or without commercial support. So possibly all of you subscribers might want to look for a new distributor. What I'd like WRS to do is this: * Transfer the trademark to the FreeBSD Foundation. 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. 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. Wind River: a fitting moniker for a company whose committment has dried up and blown away. 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. FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are operating systems and split off for various reasons and now serve their own niches. 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? This is more important than feature set or performance on a single platform. I believe they are an offshoot of FreeBSD, but I could be mistaken. They might like cross-platform compatibility and performance, but these aren't the priority. 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. 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. Allen (Score:1) Friday October 05, @08:01AM + 247 Re:In which case the chosen names are inappropriat by sql*kitten (Score:2) Friday October 05, @08:36AM + 248 Re:In which case the chosen names are inappropriat by styrotech (Score:1) Friday October 05, @04:21PM 249 Re:In which case the chosen names are inappropriat by fsdb (Score:1) Saturday October 06, @02:15PM 250 1 reply beneath your current threshold. 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. 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? 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? 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? Or will the the tumble merely continue, taking Solaris and linux, leaving Windows and the toy (Macintosh) standing? Slip...
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