WhatsApp Co-Founder Donates $1M to FreeBSD Foundation
freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com
freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com
>>"This marks the largest single donation to the Foundation since its inception almost 15 years ago"
First, I'm extremely excited to see this announcement. FreeBSD is fantastic and extremely underrated.
Secondly though, isn't it sad to hear that in FreeBSD existence - this is the largest donation ever ... given that Yahoo use to run it's entire company on it, OS X is based on it, Juniper is based on it, Netflix deploys on it, NetApp, EMC, etc.
Edit: typo
Here's a link to one of many articles that addresses your statement, for those uninformed [1].
Just imagine how many Apples products exist today that go back to FreeBSD roots (Mac, iPad, iPod, iPhone's, etc).
Core FreeBSD has 272,082 commits [1]
Of those, only 9,244 commits [2] have the word "Sponsored" in their commit message; however, 3,486 were sponsored by "The FreeBSD Foundation" [3]. So only a net total of 5,758 commits were company sponsored.
Said another way, that means just 2.1% of all commits ever made to FreeBSD, in it's 21 year existence, were companies sponsoring and submitting patches.
So no, I think it's safe to say that FreeBSD is primarily run and operated by lone individuals who do it because they personally love FreeBSD.
Edit: typo, fixed stats.
[1] https://secure.freshbsd.org/search?q=
[2] https://secure.freshbsd.org/search?q=Sponsored
[3] https://secure.freshbsd.org/search?q=%22The+FreeBSD+Foundati...
I understand your point, but all commits are not created equal. Some commits could be immensely 'more important' than others.
Looking at the commit log history [1] - there's plenty of commits with the word "sponsor" in it, as far back as 1996.
(Off topic, I have crazy respect for you btw)
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports?view=revision&revision=3149...
Netflix, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Apple for example have been outstanding contributors to "open source".
Yes, there are Netflix, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Apple and a few others.
And how many corporations are there in the world?
A plausible counterargument is that these types of companies wouldn't contribute back anyway: they just aren't interested. In that case the practical choice is between letting them free-ride off your code (BSD) or not letting them use it at all (GPL), because they aren't going to make a choice that involves contributing back, regardless of your license. In that case I can see people leaning towards BSD. But I'd personally lean towards GPL, because I think that, at least often, shutting these companies out of the ability to use open-source code would probably be a net win for society. But it's hard to prove that. And this probably depends significantly on your goals and the kind of software you write.
I release all my personal code under some flavor of GPL - LLGPL, LGPL, or AGPL3 - because I personally refuse to let my work be exploited like that.
One could argue that making a successful open source project makes the original developer "wanted" in terms of employment, paid support requests, paid consulting... And choosing leeching-friendly license helps in achieving that.
Why?
Two guesses, though. 1. To a significant extent it's just reducing the cost structure of BigCorp IT spending, which [note: unproven] in most cases I suspect mainly benefits profit margins and capital investors, though it may to some extent benefit others as well. 2. A significant proportion of these products are backed by corporations who are aggressive users of the copyright and patent systems. The flipside of the developer freedom of the BSD license is that it leaves the developer full freedom to restrict the freedom of users by suing users who dare modify, reverse-engineer, or produce software similar to the software the company produces. The GPL, particularly GPLv3 with its patent clause, complicates the ability of a company to incorporate my software into code they plan wield as a weapon in IP lawsuits, whereas they can roll BSD-licensed code into their legal weapons mostly unhindered.
Also, your post contains a very common myth: "the BSD license is that it leaves the developer full freedom to restrict the freedom of users". It does no such thing. The only thing the BSD license restricts is your ability to use the code without including the license like it says.
Also: you've simply restated my "myth" to say something that to me seems equivalent. The BSD license allows companies to take my code, and build it into software packages which they subsequently use as a basis for patent and copyright lawsuits. That is, one "freedom" the BSD license does not restrict is a developer's "freedom" to file copyright and patent lawsuits against users of the software. I do not believe that is a valuable freedom, and do not want to assist with that behavior. I am fine with people using my code to build other products, as long as they agree not to sue downstream users for violating their patents, violating the DMCA, and similar things. The GPL is an imperfect hack to try to meet that criteria, but imo it's often better than nothing.
It is possible they could do all that without my assistance anyway, of course. They could build things entirely from scratch and then sue users of the software. But I don't want to help make it easier.
But your very first words clearly state otherwise: "As I noted it's hard to prove".
>Imo it's harmful for society at large because: 1. all else equal, helping to shift the proportion of returns that go to capital vs. labor is negative for society; and 2. assisting companies in building products that they will use as a basis for IP lawsuits is negative for society.
This does not answer the question, it simply makes more. Why do you think those things are negative for society. And why do you think they are related to the question at hand, much less a direct result of the use of free software?
>you've simply restated my "myth" to say something that to me seems equivalent
No. You restated it. I did nothing of the sort.
>The BSD license allows companies to take my code, and build it into software packages which they subsequently use as a basis for patent and copyright lawsuits
So does the GPL. You are very mistaken if you believe that free software can remove people's right to sue others. Both in the sense that you can not remove people's right to sue and in the sense that if you could, that would not be free in any sense of the word.
>That is, one "freedom" the BSD license does not restrict is a developer's "freedom" to file copyright and patent lawsuits against users of the software.
There is no "developer" vs "user". They are the same thing. That is one of the fundamental facts the GPL was conceived on. You are creating a non-existent category of people who you feel should not have freedoms. Neither the BSD license or its cousins (MIT, ISC, etc) nor the GPL in any version makes any such arbitrary distinction between "developers" and "users".
>The GPL is an imperfect hack to try to meet that criteria
No it is not. You are both grossly misrepresenting the GPL, and attacking free software. This behavior is expected from people who oppose free software, it is appalling from people who purport to support it.
>They could build things entirely from scratch and then sue users of the software. But I don't want to help make it easier.
This only explains why you choose to not write free software. That is not what I asked about. I would like to know why you think free software is a negative for society. How did society lose out by apple using free software in its operating system? How did society lose out by the billions of devices out there running openssh?
I suggest reading the FSF's explanation of why the GPL exists. One of the reasons is: because free software means that downstream users have the right to use and modify software. That is a freedom. The right to keep other people from using and modifying software is, by contrast, not a legitimate freedom. Invoking copyright and patent law are two common ways people attempt to use the legal system to restrict other people's use of their own computers.
The GPL attempts to disarm such attack routes by requiring you to pass on, to all subsequent downstream users, the same right to use and modify the software that you yourself received. The BSD license by contrast, allows you to sue downstream users who modify the software for copyright infringement, because you didn't grant them a license. For example, OSX is built on FreeBSD, which is free software. But because it's BSD-licensed, Apple can prohibit me from distributing modified versions of OSX, and can invoke the DMCA to prevent me from reverse-engineering it in certain ways. That's a "freedom" the BSD license allows Apple to retain, to use the power of the state to restrict my freedom.
My post is very direct and clear, and contains absolutely no hyperbole. Rather than make up nonsense to try to dismiss what I said, if you feel you can not respond without further embarrassing yourself then simply opt not to. The fact that you have yet to answer my very simple direct question, and instead want to try to weasel more FUD against free software in is quite telling. But now I have a new question. Since BSD licensed code is so bad for society, I assume you don't use openssh, or X Windows, or apache, or nginx, or any of the other massively important BSD licensed software millions of people benefit from?
>I suggest reading the FSF's explanation of why the GPL exists.
I suggest you try to be less condescending when trying to convince people to buy into your lies.
>The right to keep other people from using and modifying software is, by contrast, not a legitimate freedom.
Words have meaning. They still have the meaning even if you do not like it. Freedom means freedom. Not "only freedoms I approve of". Your statement is every bit as absurd as people claiming the freedom to prevent others from entering your home is not a "legitimate freedom".
>The GPL attempts to disarm such attack routes by requiring you to pass on, to all subsequent downstream users, the same right to use and modify the software that you yourself received
No, it passes down an obligation, not a right. Not a freedom.
>The BSD license by contrast, allows you to sue downstream users who modify the software for copyright infringement
No, the BSD license does not prevent you from suing people who modify your code. You have no ability to sue people for modifying the BSD licensed code. You are resorting to the oldest and most obviously incorrect FUD technique, one which even RMS has requested GPL fanatics refrain from repeating. My code that uses BSD licensed code is not the BSD licensed code I used. Nothing done to my code has any effect on the BSD licensed code. It can not be "made closed" or any such nonsense.
>But because it's BSD-licensed, Apple can prohibit me from distributing modified versions of OSX, and can invoke the DMCA to prevent me from reverse-engineering it in certain ways.
That would still be true if they did not use BSD licensed code. That's the point. Nothing is lost here. The only thing that changed is instead of apple writing code, they used existing code which due to age and examination is almost certainly of higher quality than anything apple could have produced in such a short time span. So users of apple software got better software, and nobody lost out on anything. Hardly seems a negative to society.
>That's a "freedom" the BSD license allows Apple to retain, to use the power of the state to restrict my freedom.
Apple is not restricting your freedom. The government is, via copyright law. You feel so entitled to other people's work that you conflate "someone did not grant me additional rights above and beyond those I already have" with "someone is restricting my freedom".
When a person or company makes use of a legal process to restrict someone's freedom, I think it's fair to blame both the law and the person using it. You don't get a free pass on unethical actions just because they are currently legal in a particular jurisdiction.
> You feel so entitled to other people's work
I feel entitled only to freedom to use my own personal property without restriction. If I purchase a computer, I own it and can do whatever I want with it. If I buy a MacBook Pro, I can legitimately open it up, modify it, replace components, modify the installed operating system or software, etc., etc. I can also share photographs, schematics, disassemblies, and anything else I want to document this process. It's my computer. If you, Apple, or anyone else tries to get the government to stop me from doing so, you are in the wrong, even if you try to dress up your intrusion on my personal property with made-up terms like "intellectual property", EULAs, and whatever other bullshit they come up with.
I do think it would be preferable to simply repeal "intellectual property" laws rather than have to try to use things like the GPL to work around them. In that world, the BSD license would be fully free, too. But licensing software as GPL is something I can do easily as an individual, while getting stupid laws repealed is considerably more difficult, so it's the pragmatic workaround for now.
They are not. You are still pretending things are backwards. They are not doing anything to you, they are simply not giving you privileges.
>You don't get a free pass on unethical actions
You have not made an argument to support the notion that "selling software" is an unethical action.
>If I purchase a computer, I own it and can do whatever I want with it. If I buy a MacBook Pro, I can legitimately open it up, modify it, replace components, modify the installed operating system or software, etc., etc. I can also share photographs, schematics, disassemblies, and anything else I want to document this process. It's my computer.
None of that is even remotely relevant. You are free to do those things. They have nothing to do with BSD licensed software. It is hard to see your red herrings get further and further from any sense of relevancy and still believe you are not being deliberately dishonest.
>I do think it would be preferable to simply repeal "intellectual property" laws rather than have to try to use things like the GPL to work around them
The GPL does not work around them. The GPL requires copyright law to achieve its impositions. Without copyright law, people would simply not give you the source and there would be nothing you could do about it.
And don't fool yourself that GPL means companies cannot use it or include it in their products. Many do, even following the letter and spirit license agreement. As a quick example, OpenEye released openbabel under GPL; now their biggest competitor, Schrodinger, uses openbabel in products with the modifications released as a fork on github where the product is developed[1].
(Current employer has been better, and I've submitted a few improvements to libraries I use)
"Android" can have conflicting definitions, but AOSP is certainly OSS.
for reference: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors
Paying back into open source is part of Cost Of Good Sold, and companies that seem to have longevity are realizing this.
Others (e.g. HP) choose to donate hardware to the Project and most of its infrastructure is hosted (gratis, IIRC) by Yahoo!, ISC, NYI, and Sentex.
Side note: Tarsnap is listed at the same level as Juniper (2013) and VMware (2014); I have mixed feelings about that.
If you look at the donors listed in each category for 2008-2014 (why those years? Because that's what I scraped the website for) then Tarsnap comes after Anonymous (one or more people giving $250k+, $250k+, and $50k+), NetApp ($450k+), Cryptography Research ($250k+), Hudson River Trading ($250k+), Google ($180k+), LineRate ($150k+), NetFlix ($75k+), iXsystems ($70k+), Swisscom ($40k+), McAfee ($35k+), and John Baldwin ($30k+). And of course WhatsApp, who aren't on the donors list yet for some reason. Part of the reason that Tarsnap always looks like one of the largest donors is that Tarsnap's donation always arrives a few weeks into the new year, while other companies are faster and get their money in at the end of the previous year.
Not to say that Tarsnap doesn't contribute, of course; just that other companies contribute far more over the long run.
We can sometimes give more than money. (Colin is insanely bright too, so he is a true asset)
Colin Percival could crash the entire bitcoin economy with the amount of bitcoins he's accidentally mined in his head, while sleeping.
Sorry, I was afraid that remark would be misinterpreted.
As a long-time FreeBSD (and previous Tarsnap) user, I'm certainly appreciative of the fact that you donate to the Project (in addition to your other contributions). That's the "happy feeling".
The "disappointment feeling" comes from wishing that Juniper and VMware's donations were of an amount that would put them in a much higher category.
In other words, my thinking was along the lines of "These two [huge, public] companies are donating roughly as much as Colin himself is". (I realize that, technically, Tarsnap is the entity donating but the fact is that that would be extra money in your pocket otherwise.)
Well, it would always be nice to see more and larger donations, but I wouldn't be too harsh on them. As far as I know, VMware doesn't use FreeBSD at all; and while Juniper certainly uses FreeBSD a great deal, they also contribute a lot of developer hours -- vastly more than I ever have.
Given the cost of developers, perhaps that suggests that cash donations are not all that effective a method, and measuring contributions to FreeBSD is maybe better done in developer time? If you convert the donations to developer-years, companies like NetApp and Google have each donated an average of less than one developer per year over that period in the cash format. Surely there is some company that beats that threshold, if measured in developer-years?
Keep in mind that those are lower bounds based on which "donation bracket" they fell into. I know there was at least one case where a company donated $200k (which fell into the $100-250k bracket).
measuring contributions to FreeBSD is maybe better done in developer time
Yes. But that's harder to measure, of course.
Also keep in mind that the FreeBSD Foundation != the FreeBSD Project; it is only in the past couple of years that the Foundation has had enough money to hire ongoing engineering staff. For a long time their budget went to project infrastructure and self-contained projects proposed by individual developers.
It's more like a sibling of FreeBSD.
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin...
"Apple's Mac OS X is based in part on FreeBSD and includes a rich UNIX® foundation in addition to the proprietary Apple user interface"
And I am in no way dismissing the relationship. I am just pointing out that Darwin was based on NeXtStep but incorporates a LOT of *BSD technologies. I used OSX Beta 1 and it was pretty far from a FreeBSD based OS.
Lineage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)#media...
I found a couple of other articles, I didn't know Linus turned down the job offer from Steve Jobs before they hired that famous FreeBSD developer. It's funny to think how things might have turned out in an alternate reality :) http://www.wired.com/2013/08/jordan-hubbard/
It's also fascinating to try old versions of nextstep and rhapsody in virtual machines, you can really tell how osx traces straight back. Even the installer is so similar still, comparing nextstep 3 and yosemite (if you bring up the console window during its progress)
FreeBSD is the main current source of stuff, but NextStep is much older.
Darwin incorporates a lot of FreeBSD kernel and userspace code, and Apple continues to incorporate new code.
The rebranding to OS X was largely cosmetic from the command-line userland and underlying OS architecture's points of view, despite what the tech media often claimed about it at the time. OS X ported "Carbon" Mac OS 9 APIs to the new operating system; the Rhapsody strategy was either "Yellow Box" (former OpenStep, now Cocoa) runtime, or run in an emulation environment.
A discussion of a computerworld article about it: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2005-Fe...
I'm not sure about that. Have you any source?
https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths#FreeBSD_is_Just_OS_X_Without_...
> The two operating systems do share a lot of code, for example most userland utilities and the C library on OS X are derived from FreeBSD versions.
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin...
> The BSD portion of the OS X kernel is derived primarily from FreeBSD, a version of 4.4BSD that offers advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features.
Personally, I do not believe that money magically makes software better. Some of the best code I have ever seen was written by "academics" who received little to nothing for writing it.
I currently do quarterly donations to FreeBSD Foundation and Apache Foundation, and some hand-picked developers in the technologies I use regularly, whom I would consider indispensable in the open source community. While it's not $1M, if everyone were doing it, none of those groups would depend on corporate donations.
I have even thought of a project that I may bring to life one day, if enough interest exists. Find the most indispensable members of the open source community and put crowdfunding efforts together to buy them out. In other words, put enough money on the table that they won't need to work for 1,2,3 years at a time. Working tirelessly on open source projects is something these people have already proven they love to do, and will almost certainly continue if suddenly they came across a windfall like this.
My guess is these kinds of things have been attempted, but for one reason or another have never really gained the support they would need.
Also I wouldn't necessarily advocate letting corporations off the hook. If every corporation / small business / organization who uses FreeBSD in their infrastructure also contributed $1/month I think this would easily put them over the top. I think developers should be just as active with advocating to the companies they work for to also do micro-payments to open source projects / foundations they depend on for their infrastructure.
Has anyone thought what an 'opensource' endowment might look like? I'm thinking an endowment manager and a policy for distributing 2% of the endowment annually to folks who contribute and against costs (like hosting repos and mailing lists etc.) The thought being you end up with some "project" with a $100M - $250M endowment and it operates 'in perpetuity' on a budget of $2 - $5M annually.
Nobody ever invests an entire endowment in bonds; even aside from the lower rate of return, the inflation risk is much too dangerous.
For dedicated server systems that developers don't access, it's pretty much perfect. I kind of wish that the developer world had standardized on that rather than GNU/Linux, though perhaps if there was a wider pool of developers, the BSDs wouldn't be so clean and straightforward.
That's exactly how I feel about it. You never want too many cooks in the kitchen. They have all they need for a very successful server system already.
Right now I'm just hoping for some sort of BSD-based desktop environment∗. Doesn't have to be a Windows/OSX/GNOME/KDE killer, just something functional. I suspect the usage of Linux GUI environments is going to become increasingly volatile in the future with so much Linux-only tech being pushed in as dependencies to absolutely everything these days.
(∗ I don't mean something like Lumina, I mean from the display server up. Xorg is moving to Wayland/Weston, GTK3 is pretty much becoming GNOME-only, which is becoming systemd only. I'd like to see a new BSD-style lightweight, modular, minimal display server, widget toolkit, and desktop. Run the whole thing on either VESA or barebones EGL.)
For example I can run GNU bash on an HPUX system.
My personal NetBSD experience has been that (on a laptop) my ATI Radeon was supported (back in the day) and currently, we've been experiencing "near misses" with accelerated gfx w/ Intel integrated (ie: i915) GPUs. NetBSD -current (7.99.1) is currently (on my Lenovo Thinkpad t420) unstably supporting accelerated graphics. I'm hoping this effort stabilizes and sticks around.
There is no nvidia binary driver, and no nouveau port. You only have the ancient nv driver, which is just a frame buffer. And an absolutely horrible one at that. It is at least 20x slower than pure VESA. I don't know how that's possible, but it's too ridiculous to make up. If I drag a window across the screen, it takes about five seconds for the system to catch up on the redraws.
OpenBSD also lacks the memcontrol utility, so you can't tweak MTRR (write-combine caching) for VESA (which increased my video bandwidth rate from 200MiB/s to 1,200MiB/s), unless you write your own C program to use the kernel API for doing that.
Even then, the real problem is that finding a video card that has your native widescreen VESA resolution is like winning the lottery. I managed to find a 2560x1600 card for my primary system, but I've yet to ever find a card that has a 1920x1080 VESA mode for my secondary PC.
The OpenBSD project refuses to include binary "blobs," and Nvidia just simply don't provide open-source drivers for their cards. There's been some indication recently they may be changing their stance on that, so we can hope.
All that said, the BSDs, and OpenBSD in particular do not have ultimate video performance as a goal. While OpenBSD is certainly usable as a desktop or laptop OS (I use it) you are best to stick with Intel or AMD graphics adapters. FreeBSD might arguably be a "better" desktop OS but I prefer OpenBSD's focus on consistency, security, stability, and documentation.
Sure, in the case of the nvidia binary-blob driver, that's very fair. It's the same net effect to the end user, though. nvidia+OpenBSD is an instant failure.
You can also blame nouveau relying on Linux KMS functionality, but I would like to see OpenBSD try a bit harder to run nouveau, given how ridiculously poor nv is. Really, nv is actually worse than nothing. I'd sooner run in VGA 640x480x16-color mode. It's that bad.
> All that said, the BSDs, and OpenBSD in particular do not have ultimate video performance as a goal.
I don't want ultimate performance to run Crysis (whatever # they are up to now) or Star Citizen or whatever is popular amongst gamers today.
I want a frame buffer that will let me drag a window across the screen without deadlocking my system for 5-10 seconds. I appreciate their pain with these damned video card manufacturers, but I don't think my request is unreasonable, either.
> you are best to stick with Intel or AMD graphics adapters
AMD drivers are absolute shit on every other OS, so I don't expect them to be reliable under OpenBSD. And unfortunately, Intel won't sell PCIe cards. I really, really, really wish they would.
But to me, the focus should not be on trying to run the latest games. Linux isn't replacing Windows for gaming, so there's no chance FreeBSD is going to.
I'm running a 2560x1600 display on VESA, and after a few MTRR tweaks, it's more than fast enough (I can push over 100 full frames per second), even for watching video and playing 2D games. The only thing missing is Vsync support in the protocol. And what I get in return is never seeing another graphics driver crashing my entire system (because we're still stuck with monolithic kernels running video card drivers in ring 0 in 2014.)
I would say, get a nice desktop up using only a frame buffer with maximum bandwidth possible. Then if people want to run an EGL context, they can render 3D stuff to a buffer, and blit that into a window, or do a fullscreen EGL app that controls the display. But that should be entirely optional and only used where needed. The BSDs are server OSes, so I think this is acceptable to favor stability over performance.
The best part would be that this could run on (top of, if necessary) any system. Windows, OS X, DOS, Haiku, Minix, you name it. If you could write pixels to a screen, you could run the display server.
How does that work? For long I've lamented the fact that VESA/VBE caps at some not-particularly-high 4:3 resolution. Also, the lack of DMA & vsync...
Having a simple way to drive modern displays at a reasonable speed would be nice. The complexity of the accelerated graphics stack is depressing... and I don't really want or need it. Hell, I didn't need it ten or twenty years ago, so why now.
The official VESA modes are all 4:3 (and 5:4 for 1280x1024). But most video cards have non-standard modes. These modes are usually just more 4:3 variants or really low-res 16:9 (1366x768, gee thanks!)
By some miracle, my PNY GTX 760 OC 2GB card had a 2560x1600x16bpp custom mode. No 32bpp mode, but in this case I'll take half the bandwidth requirements (twice the speed) for the extra color anyway.
The way this works behind the scenes is that the VESA VBE is part of the VBIOS image. This BIOS contains 16-bit instructions that poke the video card into video modes based on a table. Nowadays, 64-bit OSes just emulate the VBIOS instructions to set the video mode. Yet unfortunately none of them are proactive enough to let you specify your own modified VBIOS file to use in substitute (like you can with EDID)
Some people have had luck hacking the VBIOS and adding in their monitor modes, and flashing it back to the card. However, gaining that write access can be difficult, and often times these files are now compressed and/or encrypted.
> Having a simple way to drive modern displays at a reasonable speed would be nice.
God yes. I am so sick of the ridiculous complexity of everything these days. I miss the ease of working with serial, PS2, gamepad ports, SB16 cards, and VESA. Nowadays you need a team of 40 engineers to support the 10 USB variants (UHCI, EHCI, OHCI, XHCI, etc) just to poll a damned keyboard.
This stuff really cripples the chances for any hobbyists to ever come up with a new, breakaway, successful OS. I doubt Linux would ever take off if it had to start in today's SecureBoot / long-mode / SATA / RAID / USB3 / Wifi / binary-blob-graphics world.
A simple frame buffer with page flipping or Vsync really is enough to do pretty much anything 2D-based you'd want to. And at the rate CPUs are gaining cores, I suspect we could even pull of some really rudimentary software 3D rendering, too (not MESA, that tries too hard to emulate and is ungodly slow.)
Indeed we can; we could long ago. I think of that when I play games like Doom and Quake (which is often). They look awesome, they were software rendered. And to think that the effort on software renderers was more or less abandoned around when Unreal came out in 1998 -- that was pretty much the last FPS engine to have an advanced software mode (which looked amazing), and it worked for me back then since I didn't have a 3D accelerator. Where would we be at if that effort had continued for the next 16 years?
You can run Xorg on top of Wayland simply by changing the driver Xorg use.
Now if GTK or Qt drops their X support completely, that becomes a different story. But that don't seem to be a issue any time soon.
I am not an expert here, and I would be happy to be wrong. But I'd rather be proactive in planning for an eventuality where Linux software becomes just too difficult to port to the BSDs anymore.
While this is mildly off-topic, I'm mildly frustrated that there doesn't seem to be any BSD equivalent to hosts like Digital Ocean and Linode. The closest I've been able to find in recent searches is RootBSD, and its specs are... well, pretty sad for a VPS in 2014. Are there technical reasons that make this difficult to do with FreeBSD? I know you can't use a Linux-specific VM solution like KVM, but is there no BSD equivalent, or no VPS provider with a more OS-agnostic solution?
FreeBSD is available as an EC2 AMI.
For what it's worth, Nearly Free Speech[2] offers jailed hosting on FreeBSD and has recently improved their ability to handle persistent processes.
[1]: https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve [2]: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net
You can also vote on this suggestion on the DigitalOcean website: https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocea...
I've had a lot of luck getting bleeding edge Arch linux kernels running on DigitalOcean using kexec to essentially turn the kernel DO gives you into a bootloader. It should theoretically be possible to get FreeBSD running in a similar manner, but it would obviously not be officially supported.
If you're looking for other hosting providers, EC2 does have FreeBSD images available.
It's actually possible to boot grub4dos via kexec, however it doesn't work out of the box in digital ocean. I'm not sure how to format code on HN so here's a proof-of-concept on pastebin: http://pastebin.com/5jcvG2N9
A kexec bootloader also exists, called petitboot, but I've never used it to boot anything other than linux, though scanning google, it looks like people may have used it to successfully boot FreeBSD on the PS3 or OpenWRT compatible routers. Petitboot can be found here: https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/geoff/petitbo...
[1] Fall of 2001.
[2] Yes, Verio had those weird virtuals running on e10ks, but JC was the first to offer the VPS as we all came to know it.
Their features and prices are very competitive with Digital Ocean, which is a nice change for an Australian ISP.
[1] http://www.binarylane.com.au [2] https://www.binarylane.com.au/support/solutions/articles/100...
A few providers have started doing this, but more need to do this as it would cut down on the wasted ipv4 addresses that they have in "stock".
They're affordable and answer support tickets within minutes.
Vultr.com[0] offers FreeBSD VPS from $5/month. I've used these guys, and have been very happy with the offering.
Atlantic.net[1] offers FreeBSD VPS from $0.99/month.
TransIP[2] offers FreeBSD VPS from €5/month.
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--OpenSSL, not SSH.
Edit: "critical to". My mistake.
Why? Do you think popularity reflects quality?
It is immediately evident to me that the popular BSDs (or at least FreeBSD and OpenBSD) are of vastly superior quality (both in terms of design and code) to Linux. I understand why people use Linux instead (it's generally for the same reasons corporate environments use Windows: legacy, large userbase, and familiarity), but it is definitely the case that by all my metrics, the BSD programmers have every right to be critical.
Like I said, sorry if I misunderstood your post.
That page is inaccessible to me, does somebody have a mirror?
Here I was using it more as a game item that you get so much money from a successful product that you don't really have to worry about anything again. I usually hear it with technology acquisitions and founders leaving later after the money than with termination as there are only golden parachutes for failure in the financial industry.
I should have said funding or freedom, as the funding from WhatsApp sale now gives Jan Koum the freedom to work on many ideas and support important projects like BSD.
Golden parachute: you're forced out (by a lay-off or takeover) but they're obligated to give you a pile of money.
Golden handcuffs: you volunteer for corporate servitude (by being acquired) in exchange for a big pile of money.
(However, what can they really do with that money? Operating systems aren't the sexiest of free software projects to work on, so I would be tempted to think that manpower is FreeBSDs biggest limiter.)
The point about the need for and value of marketing is well taken; Anne Dickison joined the Foundation as Marketing Director earlier this year.
Keep in mind that this donation won't be spent in one year; we'll be able to find qualified uses for this money.
Somewhat of an aside, how do you guys manage the relationship between volunteers and paid work? Mixing the two has a historically poor track record in the open source community (eg. Dunc Tank, etc. etc.)
:-)
Al though it is awesome that they have received this donation but it is such a shame it took 15 years to get a $1M donation for such a great work they are doing.. and on the other side silly small apps get millions of funding which go in total waste and those apps might be using FreeBSD for their production servers or development
Its nice to see FreeBSD getting appreciated
There was a point I had my laptop running FreeBSD as my main OS.
Part of the blame lies with the foundation itself - they don't know how to ask! Fundraising is a full time, yet unsexy job...and very few people do it well. The key thing is to be top of mind by asking frequently and nicely.
Personally, when the time comes, I default towards Wikipedia because Jimmy Wales does a great job of asking. This is a problem not just with FreeBSD, but many others like OpenSSL,etc. If nothing else, I wish these guys just run a yearly kickstarter just for outreach.
People bashing other companies, keep in mind some of them employ people that work near full-time on FreeBSD.
But, some deserve the bashing.
Personally: I hope they make an UI to FreeBSD on par with OS X, because it already seems to be so stable that no change except security fixes is neccessary in my naïve eyes ☺
Sorry, if this was asked before.
Either way, brilliant business plan from this whatsapp co-founder :P
Is this very, very dry humor?
edit:
So nobody thinks that there's anything funny about reaching a million dollar fundraising goal, but noting that they might want to expand the size and diversity of the donor pool in future after getting a million dollar donation from a single person.
Of course they reached the goal, and of course they might want to raise the size of the donor pool it took to reach the goal [one person] and the diversity [the donors that put them over the top all have the same Social Security number.]
Feel free to interpret the comment as "why donate to them, they just got a million dollars" or whatever bizarre impression people are getting, but if I meant that, I would have just said that.
FreeBSD get a huge donation. They let people know about this - it's a great piece of publicity. But that carries a risk. Some people will think that FreeBSD doesn't need any more donations because of this single huge donation, so FreeBSD needs to talk about the importance of regular donations from a broad group of supporters, not just huge donations from a tiny group or purely corporate donations.
I fail to see how any of that could possibly be part of some humorous comment.