The BSDs have issues
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| garymax May 03, 2008 7:00 PM EDT |
Being a Slackware user I am acquainted with the BSDs--particularly FreeBSD. The problem is no BSD is mature enough as of yet for desktop use as is Linux. Criticize Linux all you want but is has the market, the mindshare and the drivers. BSDs have relatively few of these. Case in point. I recently installed FreeBSD 7 on an old box and it did not have the Trident driver in the system at all. How's that for being thorough? Linux, on the other hand, has never failed to install on this box. I have never installed any BSD without having some problems. With Linux, all of the drivers were present in the kernel and system installation was a snap. I've tried to like the BSDs but they have too little mindshare and "driver" share at the moment to be thought of as capable desktop systems. I know PC-BSD exists but it is a far cry from desktop Linux and quite limited in scope. I may revisit FreeBSD some day but it has routinely demonstrated that it is not yet formidable enough to challenge Linux on the desktop. |
| herzeleid May 03, 2008 7:34 PM EDT |
> Being a Slackware user I am acquainted with the BSDs--particularly FreeBSD. The problem is no BSD is mature enough as of yet for desktop use as is Linux. Unless you count OSX - which basically amounts to a port of FreeBSD with the proprietary apple GUI on top. |
| Steven_Rosenber May 03, 2008 7:38 PM EDT |
No version of Linux will automatically detect the sound chip in my Compaq Armada 7770dmt. OpenBSD is the first and only OS to do so. |
| garymax May 03, 2008 8:14 PM EDT |
@ herzeleid No, MacOS X doesn't count because it only uses a portion of the BSD kernel. It is not a full BSD kernel from what I understand. @Steven_Rosenber Not saying that the BSDs will "never" find anything; but when compared to Linux, BSD just doesn't have the driver support as Linux does. I'm glad, however, that your sound chip was found by OpenBSD. I'd like to get into FreeBSD more but to me, I have enough with Linux at the moment... |
| tuxchick May 03, 2008 8:45 PM EDT |
The Mach kernel is an independent project. FreeBSD uses a modified version, and so does OS X. The BSDs are good to have- FreeBSD for usability, NetBSD for portability, and OpenBSD for entertainment. Flamefests! Tempests in teapots! Molehills to mountains! OpenBSD has it all. |
| mark_oz May 04, 2008 4:00 AM EDT |
There is just one problem with the BSDs ... their liberal license. As a programmer, you could put in quite a bit of effort ... only to see a large corporate take your effort and given nothing back. ... Windows network stack (before Vista). ... the Darwin kernel. Where is the return from these big coporates for the effort individual programmers have put in to BSD? What benefit from all that effort ... has the adoption of this code by the big corporates helped BSD in any way at all? If the BSDs would modify their license just a tiny bit ... and require anyone who takes the code to give any improvements in that codebase back to the BSD project ... then their license would effectively be the GPL anyway, and BSD would be Linux. So why not just go with the system that does require improvements to be contributed back, the system that has the vast majority of the mindshare anyway? What is it with BSD developers anyway ... "please, oh big corporate brothers, steal from us?" Sheesh, what maroons. |
| tracyanne May 04, 2008 3:27 PM EDT |
Quoting:What is it with BSD developers anyway ... "please, oh big corporate brothers, steal from us?" I never could understand the idea of a license that simply gives away my blood sweat and tears, my precious IP (to use a Microsoftian term), to the very same corporates that want to charge me for the privilage of using theirs. |
| jdixon May 04, 2008 4:02 PM EDT |
> Windows network stack (before Vista). Yeah, but there's one major difference. The BSD network stack works. Windows' network stack doesn't. Even in XP, a slow network link can bring a Windows machine to its knees (I can't speak for Vista, but i seriously doubt it's improved). I have no idea how Microsoft managed to break the BSD networking code, but they did. They can't even steal code properly. |
| techiem2 May 04, 2008 5:07 PM EDT |
Vista just randomly decides that it's no longer connected to the internet and is just connected to the local lan.... |
| gus3 May 04, 2008 6:45 PM EDT |
IANAL, any lawyers in the house please fact-check me:Quoting:I never could understand the idea of a license that simply gives away my blood sweat and tears, my precious IP (to use a Microsoftian term), to the very same corporates that want to charge me for the privilage of using theirs.It's my understanding that the BSD license is the result of settlement negotiations between the Regents of the University of California and AT&T. Because there had been so much cross-pollination between the projects, each side basically agreed not to prosecute the other, AT&T got to keep the BSD-derived stuff, and UC got to keep BSD, but had to promise not to use their BSD copyright to interfere in any business interests. |
| Steven_Rosenber May 04, 2008 7:02 PM EDT |
Despite the attitude maintained by those who develop and use OpenBSD, there's quite a push within the project to add hardware support. While I can't verify it, the OpenBSD people don't like and don't want binary blobs in their kernel or drivers. Either they port a driver from Linux, write one from scratch or try to reverse-engineer it. |
| dinotrac May 05, 2008 12:03 PM EDT |
mark oz and others -- Guess what? You could invest a lot of blood, sweat and tears developing GPL'd software and see it taken by large corporate interests who give nothing back. From a practical standpoint, there is only one significant difference between the BSD license and the GPL: If you create a derivative work incorporating GPL'd code AND you distribute the binary, you must make the source available for the derivative work. A corporation is completely free to use and modify your code to its little heart's content without giving back squat under both the BSD and GPL licenses so long as it doesn't distribute binaries to others. |
| Sander_Marechal May 05, 2008 2:29 PM EDT |
@dino: They were of course referring to large corporate software leech^Wcompanies. You know, the kind who'd just love to pick up some free code, change it around and the sell it for large amounts of dosh to dimwitted users. |
| dinotrac May 06, 2008 6:25 AM EDT |
Sander - And the difference is still smaller than you would think. Let's see... I could design a nifty proprietary app the requirements for which included a number of GPL'd items. Still leeching... |
| thenixedreport May 06, 2008 9:04 AM EDT |
With their "liberal" license, can't somebody fork the whole blasted thing and re-license it under the GPL? |
| gus3 May 06, 2008 9:37 AM EDT |
Not without their permission. They (the UC regents) still retain copyright on the original code base. |
| dinotrac May 06, 2008 10:50 AM EDT |
>Not without their permission Yup. That's the same reason why people can't take GPL'd stuff and re-license under a BSD license. Copyright holders still get to decide the license. |
| thenixedreport May 06, 2008 11:42 AM EDT |
Then I would like to propose a new license type for coding.... One that allows the person to choose their own license. It would be called nixedchoice licensing. As long as the chosen license allows for redistribution of the source code (with important notice of those who made modifications etc...), the developer gets to choose. Thoughts? |
| dinotrac May 06, 2008 12:26 PM EDT |
The developer gets to choose NOW is the developer is also the copyright holder.
For that matter, in the case of software that is dual-licensed, the developer also gets a choice. At some point, in your scenario, the choice gets whittled away unless the license chosen downstream also allows for choice. |
| Sander_Marechal May 06, 2008 1:27 PM EDT |
Quoting:I could design a nifty proprietary app the requirements for which included a number of GPL'd items. Still leeching... It's harder than you think, since those GPL'ed items cannot be libraries. Besides, I don't really consider that leeching. But that's personal. Quoting:With their "liberal" license, can't somebody fork the whole blasted thing and re-license it under the GPL? Yes and no. It's quite technical. For a practical example, read up on the recent wifi spat between BSD and GPL. Gus is technically right that you cannot relicense BSD code under the GPL. But, you can use BSD code in a GPL program. The BSD license allows that. The end result would be partly BSD and partly GPL but in practice you can only distribute it under a GPL license. After some time the BSD code you took gets so mixed up with the GPL code you wrote that the two are inseperable and indistinguishable. This is pretty much what happened with the wifi driver spat. Linux folk took BSD code and integrated it into Linux. The code they took is still BSD but all their changes were GPL making the end result effectively GPL. While that's legal, it's not really nice towards the BSD developers who did the hard work of creating the driver. Then a GPL v.s. BSD flamewar broke out. |
| dinotrac May 06, 2008 1:48 PM EDT |
Sander -
1. Those GPL'd items absolutely can be libraries so long as they are a) dynamically linked instead of statically linked, or b) encapsulated in a GPL'd wrapper that interacts with your proprietary code. The FSF likes to pretend otherwise, but so long as they don't restrict use (as opposed to distribution), they can't easily prevent proprietary code from using GPL'd libraries. There is a murky area with regard to the library calls -- one can make the claim that the actual library calls are themselves protected by copyright, but that's a pretty iffy claim for just about any library I've ever seen. 2. Sander - What they really did was to make a derivative work of some BSD code. The BSD license permits that. The derivative work, not the BSD'd code, was GPL'd. If, for example, you were to take that GPL'd software that incorporates the BSD code, you could cut out the BSD part and reuse it under the terms of the BSD. |
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