As a longtime BSD user, I have my doubts about our future
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What this guy is observing is that BSD is a subculture getting swallowed by a dominant monoculture. There are a few strategies for dealing with this - one is to accept fate, give up, and join the monoculture. Another is to find a core differentiating purpose, rally around that, and hope that the monoculture sees you as complementary. This harder path does mean foregoing the benefits of economies of scale, such as having lots of other people writing drivers for you for free.
So what is the core differentiating purpose of BSD that will win the hearts of developers and convince them to turn their efforts towards it?
Red Hat way is not the only way with Linux, fortunately.
>I've used FreeBSD since 2013, NetBSD since 2015.....
May be it is me, but I expect long time to be at least a decade for OS. Especially for a "category" of OS.
> OpenZFS
I do sort of understand the issue especially with OpenZFS. The change-log always mentions fixes were specifically for FreeBSD. Usually I am pessimistic in these scenario as part of a possible EEE cycle. But I do think OpenZFS, or ZFS needs FreeBSD to survive. As long as the economics and political support are there, It should be fine.
And despite being a fan of BSD, there are increasingly less reason to go with BSD as all technical, and financial benefits gravitate towards linux. Minix is dead [1] because of similar reason.
Maybe Netcraft can be reached for comment on whether BSD is alive.
That was exactly the connection I made, then wondering if the author even realised the allusion. Claiming to be a “longtime BSD user”, but starting in 2013 means they’re not, not in the scheme of things, and by some decades.
" But if everyone got offended and quit a project over someone saying mean 30 years ago, all FOSS would have quickly died out. "
The snowflakes are invading FOSS and trying to take it out! We must protect ourselves!
Look at what’s going on at Basecamp. When it came out just how problematic they were and if they weren’t willing to fix things, they lost 30% of their employees. Reportedly it’s now up to 40-something percent.
For two, when the word is used in the context of inclusivity, usually the problem is that someone is behaving in a way that's exclusionary -- it's not being nice to encourage them to continue that behavior.
Take a step back and it's cliques all the way down.
And it was about a case where a funny names list had circulated, the founders said "yeah, don't do that" but then objected to holocaust references in the reaction to it. This was extremely 'problematic' -- not the references, the objection to them.
So, exclusionary to whom? Some people might value not dragging the dead into a dumb debate about a funny names list. It's not unreasonable.
Would you break out 'problematic' to describe that? How small is the circle of non problematic people?
Usually I see good community managers as people who go out of their way to be agreeable to the whole community, helping to reach common ground and consensus. That's their job, to solve those people problems. The size of the circle is whatever your community defines it to be, for some communities it's obviously easier to find consensus than for others. Example from the reddit post: Linux people seem to be fine with both GPL and BSD license, but BSD people seem to view GPL as problematic. So practically speaking it seems it can be easier to reach consensus in Linux, around some particular code licensing issues anyway (Please don't start a flamewar about this, I personally don't take any sides here when it comes to licensing).
I think 'problematic' when discussing legal terms of a license is a lot less loaded than 'problematic' about a person, or personal behavior if we want to narrow that down.
It raises questions of who gets first right to be alienated. And do we credit their alienation. If I said I feel alienated by the constant social justice signalling, do I get credit for my alienation? Or do I get the stinkeye and maybe fired?
It's really difficult to continue this conversation if you view the concept of justice to be alienating, what is open source if not a means to deliver code to large groups of people who would otherwise be alienated from working with that code? I don't understand. If you're not interested to help customers and be fair and just to them, I would think you would have a hard time working at any company. What is your real goal?
If you conducted a gallup poll, what % of Americans do you think self-identify as "I find justice alienating"?
Most reasonable people are for justice and caring, and the vast majority aren't out to find people they can label as 'problematic' and chase them off the island.
To me that it always the problem that has faced any minority groups anywhere -- it's never obvious to the majority what the alienating behavior is. So they have to painstakingly explain it, and of course some of them will always get accused of overreacting and attacking the majority. What else can be done?
There's no consistency, which really ruins the label 'justice' for me. Conservative star wars lady compares conservatives being criticized to the holocaust? Fired. How dare you disrespect the dead. Basecamp people bring the holocaust into an equally stupid argument? They're heroes, everyone else is problematic.
Oscar Wilde had a quote about how patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel.. maybe we should update it to "calling people toxic is the last refuge of the antisocial". Not that sincere patriots and activists don't exist, of course.
They're literally responding to:
> Good people don’t wanna work with problematic people.
- Me
1. Basecamp is not OSS, and the people involved were all employees.
2. As employees, if you worked with someone for years,"it came out just how problematic they were" is a stretch.
> I also, once upon a time, maintained some ports before getting banned for "conduct issues" shortly after John Marino left FreeBSD
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you are getting banned for "conduct issues" perhaps you don't actually know what is and isn't acceptable.
So I took a look into the mailing lists. On the BSD lists they were having some sort of fractious food-fight, if I remember about something like whether to ban people who ask dumb questions. On the linux list it was like "hey we got NCR 810 scsi working in 1.18".
Since I had an NCR 810, and some dumb questions, Linux (slackware) was what I tried first. 27 years later OP's post and the reddit thread confirm it was the right choice.
Same goes for the post itself, actually. You'll find disagreeable people in every domain if that's what you're focused on. Likewise if it was really all that toxic, it wouldn't last. Painting everyone with the same dismal brush does a disservice to the awesome folks that are there.
Then number four: "We need to stay out of the politics of the larger FOSS scene"
Dude... (And yes, I know that the author means "politics" in a different sense. But still.)
What exactly is this? Linux features not standardized by POSIX?
I have less sympathy on the codes of conduct complaint. Codes of conduct are pretty straightforward to follow.
What’s more is that Docker has become the one true way to distribute software for enterprises. The dependency and package management problems are not optional anymore, and the lack of a consistent structure makes image based deployments inevitable. Yes, someone will immediately bring up that BSD had these features first, but it ignores the two advantages of universal distribution and simplicity that Docker built.
Good to foster open discussion early.
Linux, for all its warts, is superior to BSD in nearly every way that matters to application developers and to companies who need a server OS. The areas in which BSD is superior to Linux simply aren't important enough to justify using BSD, unless you are a corporate parasite like Sony and need an operating system with a parasitism-enabling license but don't want to pay for more than a handful of developers.
The market just doesn't seem big enough to support Linux and a handful of BSDs, and at the end of the day that's the real reason why BSD appears to be dying, because there's no reason to reach for BSD when Debian and Slackware exist.
FreeBSD was at one point (and may still be, I haven't checked in a few years) used in the bootstrap process for FB's ISP-hosted cache clusters (because potential GPL headaches IIRC).
It's also useful to test network protocol implementations across multiple platforms (e.g. Linux + FreeBSD) and can be handy if you are working with a standards body that wants to N>1 implementations of a protocol.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free...
You'll see regular "Sponsored by" lines in FreeBSD commit messages from Intel, Chelsio, Mellanox/NVidia for their products. Also:
The "notoriety" portion comes from the OtherOS side of things, as the other commenter mentioned. In the PS2 era, you could order a kit from Sony containing all of the software/hardware you needed to turn your PS2 into a reasonably capable Linux machine. To make a long story short, licensing is always a concern and it blew back in Sony's face. The whole "Linux on Playstation" thing is a blemish on Sony's reputation, and it's why a lot of people call Sony the "biggest offender" license abuse.
It's interesting to see the culture clash between different licensing philosophies.
There was previously a post on HN about this.
There's a large group of people in technology who don't really care how something works, as long as it works for their purposes. That's set against another group who will put up with incovenience in the name of what they think is "correctness". I genuinely don't want to suggest that either group is better than the other - but they are distinct.
Around 2010 I felt that the first group had started to dominate the decisions around the direction of the Linux userland. It was wonderful to be able to switch to BSD, which I sense is used and maintained mostly by the second group. Having an OS that is aligned with your culture is a sort of a "happiness by a thousand cuts": the defaults are already what you would have set them to, you don't have to declutter after the first install and what you do want is in the package repo, your niche use cases get attention when it comes to bug fixes because they're not considered niche in that crowd, etc. When the maintainers think the way you do it feels like they've anticipated your needs - it's presumably the same feeling that Apple-culture people feel when they use an Apple product; like it was made for them.
In a lot of ways, technology has mostly become a matrix for competing cultures. From that perspective it's not a matter of what performance edge the BSDs have over Linux, it's about whether there's a distinct enough culture to justify the costs of the duplication of effort. In my mind that distinction has only grown in the last 10 years.
FreeBSD has ZFS in-tree as part of the base system with zero kludges (DKMS, I'm looking at you) and perfect compatibility supported directly by the core devs, as opposed to having to deal with a semi-hostile upstream (KH: "my tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existent", Torvalds: "If somebody adds a kernel module like ZFS, they are on their own. I can't maintain it, and I can not be bound by other people's kernel changes."), and it's the default filesystem out of the box for several releases now with good tooling support around it. ZFS can be hacked into a Linux distro, but it'll always be inferior.
I’m satisfied with what I use, but there are some unbaked annoyances, like how jails basically don’t have an orchestrator. Another is how Salt seems to be falling behind, and Ansible just has ok support. No one seems to have bothered making a module for TrueNAS and Ansible.
XI seems to want to move over to Linux with their SCALE product, which would be really annoying if in the end FreeBSD is dropped.
I don’t have a whole lot of doubts, but I do have a wishlist and having more deployments at sites would keep the toolkits flowing.
My thought is having a competing distro is a good thing since there is an avenue for a new spin on the state of the art.
They should come up with a new file system of their own, for all BSDs, or try to use Hammer, and stop using someone's else file system.
FreeBSD defaults to the Unix File System (UFS). I'm not sure about NetBSD and the others, but I assume they are pretty much either FFS or UFS.
I really do like the idea of BSD and have several major OS choices, but honestly Linux seems to be the solution for most "third way" OS problems until programming a new OS becomes common like 100+ years down the road. BSD just failed where Linux succeeded in being able to easily pull in the lazy nerds like me. Short of a basic terminal command and simple troubleshooting of course. BSD is like arch level of difficulty and maintenance and I don't care for it. Also it's kind of ironic that he bashes macOS when historically it's the successor of BSD. What it gets right, this guy complains about. It's simple, I don't need to worry about any of the issues he mentioned, and it's reliable. The reason other BSDs aren't is because you have to waste time making you're system work first before you can do anything else unlike almost every other major OS.
What do you consider to be the idea of BSD?
Unfortunately linux community is not a well defined term anymore, because there are too many people and interests involved.