EdgeBSD
edgebsd.org
edgebsd.org
EdgeBSD is a new member of the family of BSD-based Operating Systems, starting development with the current NetBSD codebase with Git for Source Code Management. Package management is based on pkgsrc.
Objectives
The primary goal of EdgeBSD is to provide an ambitious environment for working as a bigger community together on the NetBSD Project. This will be achieved thanks to a more modern development infrastructure, while taking a more aggressive stance on integrating and enabling features.
Ultimately, EdgeBSD should be just as fun and attractive as a Research & Development platform while delivering a modern, robust, and industrial-grade system for all ranges of computer devices. First steps
The preliminary plan looks as follows:
* existing features will simply be enabled and used by default (SSP, ASLR, modular kernels and Xorg, full disk encryption, securelevel...);
* a release with these features will be delivered, based on the latest stable NetBSD branch.
Every meaningful contribution will be proposed back to the NetBSD Project.
Longer term
EdgeBSD should be as attractive a platform as possible, and use the advantages of its existing codebase to experiment on being a modern, safe, and portable Operating System. This vision currently includes:
* advanced facilities for developers (patch management, build environments...);
* re-organization of the base system (Git submodules, packages...);
* a graphical installer;
* modern package management (signed packages...);
* alternatives to Xorg and default desktop environment;
* ready-to-flash images for embedded devices;
* virtualization of most components with the RUMP anykernel.
Community
EdgeBSD users and developers can be found on the #EdgeBSD channel on the freenode IRC network.
A web interface for the Git development trees can be found at git.edgebsd.org.
More services are being brought up and will be provided soon (mailing-lists, wiki...). Hosting
EdgeBSD is primarily hosted in Germany, Europe.
I expect to see that a lot more in the future. It's pretty much saying "EdgeBSD is not primarily hosted in the USA."
And it's so slow that I suspect it's running from someone's bedroom, anyway.
Not one single company in the financial sector in the UK wants their kit anywhere near the US or in any datacentres with US ownership any more simply because of the PATRIOT act and PRISM etc.
We just moved 2 tonnes of kit into a wholly UK owned DC away from two large primarily US based DC's. We've also cancelled our Amazon S3 storage option and migrated over 540Gb of data back to our kit.
People have paid for all this voluntarily because being responsble for being fucked over by the US government is a big concern. Would you want all your mortgage, insurance and credit scoring data in the hands of a foreign government who religiously ignore data protection laws?
It's odd because it seems that the British government and the USA have a sharing agreement (from what I understand of the PRISM story, which I don't follow a lot, I admit) which doesn't make it any safer to move hosting from the US to the UK.
Also, we happen to have many customers in the finance industry, including in the UK, and I never heard a single one of them telling me they're moving their servers from the US because of politics (or any other reason for that matter).
It would even be impossible for most of them as they have office in NYC and need to have IT there.
Would you want all your mortgage, insurance and credit scoring data in the hands of a foreign government who religiously ignore data protection laws?
Actually I'm more worried about credit companies and banks who also ignore the laws and share this data. I think it's a bigger problem.
Also we can drop the SAN fabric encryption keys remotely or on network events (such as peer disconnection) which will warrant the cluster useless until someone physically reloads the keys off the KMS.
This all puts the onus on the authorities to prove access is warranted and necessary.
This is what our clients want.
You are saying "including the UK". We deal with ONLY wholly UK based companies as we are very specialist.
Credit companies and banks in the UK do not share this data voluntarily. Sometimes there are leaks and cock ups but they are surprisingly rare.
The worst people for data leaks are utility companies.
I'd just about be willing to bet money that it will eventually come out that your GCHQ is doing all the same things as the NSA. So far it's already emerged that they are pretty solidly in bed with the NSA, so I don't even think that would be a surprising revelation. And consider that the UK has already been out in front of the USA in terms of openly advocating a "surveillance state". Isn't the statistic that the UK has more surveillance cameras, per capita, than any other country? Or something to that effect?
they won't let anyone in without a warrant and will inform us if anyone issues one immediately.
So far as you know right now.
Credit companies and banks in the UK do not share this data voluntarily.
So far as you know right now.
CCTV statistics are rubbish. Most of them are in private hands and/or are for traffic management.
As I said there is a financial penalty and we have motion tracking webcams in the cage so any unauthorised access, we know about straight away.
We do know because we're responsible for making sure stuff like that doesn't happen.
Or heck, maybe even start an initiative for a DVCS implementation under a BSD license that is able to work with the git protocol. This could even use the git disk format, so you can still use git in parallel until it's feature complete.
libgit2 exists and has been making steady progress, and its license is permissive enough.
libgit2 has been "making progress" for a long time -- it's barely used in github (it's one or two little features of libgit that are harnessed internally, according to the githubber I talked to at a meetup), and, without trying to insult the developers/development, I seems more accurate to say libgit is "plodding along slowly". With "critical mass" as one of gits features, this is sort of surprising. I suspect it speaks to the complexity of git, but I'm not positive.
Thanks for the pointer to libgit2.
Alas, no.
Maintaining your own or using a third party is possible, but that's more of a temporary fix.
The biggest changes over NetBSD for this NetBSD-derived OS are using git for source control (versus CVS of NetBSD), and by default turning on options like disk encryption. I had a brief discussion with the principle driver of this, and it sounds to me like this is all based in technical pursuits, and not (as mentioned above), hosted in Germany and enabling encryption as an NSA reaction, or anything like that.