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Confessions of a Recovering NetBSD Zealot (O'ReillyNet)
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Confessions of a Recovering NetBSD Zealot (O'ReillyNet)
Posted Sep 15, 2006 20:45 UTC (Fri) by kothog (guest, #40547) [Link]
Please fork. If things really are this bad, not only will a fork providethe code relief you seek, and not only will you see your principles
mirrored in a project people can believe in again, but you'll be proving
that you're right when everyone follows you out the door.
How many BSDs will there be?
Posted Sep 15, 2006 23:14 UTC (Fri) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link]
too many to tell?
How many BSDs will there be?
Posted Sep 15, 2006 23:22 UTC (Fri) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]
Does it matter? As long as each BSD has a community of developers and users (possibly the same people, possibly not) that care about the project, find the OS useful, and work well together, the size of that community doesn't matter.
How many BSDs will there be?
Posted Sep 18, 2006 17:31 UTC (Mon) by emkey (subscriber, #144) [Link]
I lost interest in the *BSD's over a decade ago in large part because of the constant fragmentation and destructive infighting. Each fork made BSD weaker and less interesting to me. The outcome of all that strife and devision is pretty clear today.
The ideal thing for the BSD camp would be for somebody to grab a large majority of the BSD mind share. They aren't likely to overtake Linux, but they would become a much more viable alternate OS. And diversity of options is a good thing.
Confessions of a Recovering NetBSD Zealot (O'ReillyNet)
Posted Sep 18, 2006 13:07 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
Please fork.
The fork happened over 10 years ago. Hannum was one of the big reasons for it. The result was OpenBSD. Theo de Raadt put up an exhaustive archive of the relevant e-mails at that time; you can still find it if you look for it. Theo comes off in the emails as abrasive, while Hannum comes out as obnoxious -- even more so in the light of what he now says (in the interview he now blames it all on Chris Demetriou and says he, Hannum, "knew" it would "bite them in the ass": the mails at the time make it clear that Chris was looking for ways to get Theo back in and Hannum was the one blocking it, sometimes openly, but mostly behind-the-scenes).
I can't take a word this guy says seriously.
Interesting quote
Posted Sep 16, 2006 8:53 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]
I'm surprised it was not highlighted by LWN:Most of us had a very strong distaste for the so-called "virus" clause in the GPL, [...] In retrospect I think this was naive; if you look at the history, you'll see that neither CSRG nor the X Consortium were really successful in getting third parties to contribute back most of their changes [...].And this from one of the founders of NetBSD. You know, often it takes wit and guts to recognize your mistakes. I think this guy is both very clever and very brave; somebody from Red Hat or Novell should hire him and put him to good use.Linux has not been wholly successful in this either, and today there are myriad distributions which are subtly incompatible. However, they definitely did better.
If I were doing it again, I might very well switch to the LGPL. I'll just note that it didn't exist at the time.
Interesting quote
Posted Sep 16, 2006 19:06 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
That's a big deal in my eyes.
Now you can say: "One of the original founders of NetBSD said that if had a chance to do it all over again he would choose the lesser GPL over the BSD license".
Interesting quote
Posted Sep 16, 2006 19:48 UTC (Sat) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link]
What surprises me about this is the implicit admission that re-release of code was an implicit goal of all of these projects- I guess as a relative newcomer to the licensing game (~1997?) I assumed that all the old BSD-ish folks didn't give much of a damn about requiring/encouraging re-contribution of code, and hence that the freedom to take without giving back was a critical reason they chose to use BSD over GPL.
Interesting quote
Posted Sep 16, 2006 21:09 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]
I'm even newer to free software (c. 2000), but I think sharing of modifications was an implicit goal all along. The argument went that you did not have to force people to share their modifications. Since it was so evident that a common codebase was better and forks were so obviously bad, common sense would eventually prevail: each one would share or perish. Apparently they did not think of the scenario where everyone could be so foolish and arrogant as to collectively kill the golden goose.It would be interesting to apply game theory to a code-sharing scenario and see how the GPL changes things.
For a modern version of hubris, look at Raymond's We don't need the GPL anymore interview (also by Biancuzzi).
Interesting quote
Posted Sep 16, 2006 21:24 UTC (Sat) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link]
(sigh) I was supposed to do a game theoretic analysis of the LGPL, GPL and BSD licenses as my senior thesis; unfortunately my advisor left the university and I couldn't find an appropriate replacement advisor. Yes, I'm still bitter.
He's wrong about the LGPL not existing
Posted Sep 16, 2006 20:55 UTC (Sat) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]
The LGPL existed in 1992, before the first NetBSD release, so it was an option that the NetBSD people could have used. But RMS was never particularly comfortable with it and did not promote it the way he promoted the GPL; I think it was the Cygnus people who convinced him that the LGPL was necessary.
Confessions of a Recovering NetBSD Zealot (O'ReillyNet)
Posted Sep 16, 2006 15:59 UTC (Sat) by deepfire (guest, #26138) [Link]
Is the title being a reference to "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" by Jon Perkins?
Confessions of a Recovering NetBSD Zealot (O'ReillyNet)
Posted Sep 16, 2006 16:24 UTC (Sat) by arcticwolf (guest, #8341) [Link]
It could just as well be a reference to Thomas Mann's "Confessions of Felix Krull", or any other work with a title along the lines of "confessions of FOOBAR". I'm sure there are many more, so it's pretty useless to speculate on this...
Confessions of a Recovering NetBSD Zealot (O'ReillyNet)
Posted Sep 16, 2006 21:51 UTC (Sat) by xtifr (subscriber, #143) [Link]
I seriously doubt it. "Confessions of a Recovering X" is a very common title template (Google turns up 139,000 hits). Whatever the inspiration (assuming it was something specific), it's much more likely that it had the word "Recovering" in the title.
Confessions of a Recovering NetBSD Zealot (O'ReillyNet)
Posted Sep 17, 2006 20:50 UTC (Sun) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link]
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was first published in 1821. It is indeed a very common and long-established template.
Confessions of a Recovering NetBSD Zealot (O'ReillyNet)
Posted Sep 19, 2006 2:01 UTC (Tue) by xtifr (subscriber, #143) [Link]
We're getting drastically off-topic here, but that title ALSO lacks the word "Recovering" in the title, so it's not the template I was referring to!
Confessions of an English Opium Eater/of St. Augustine are examples of a broader template, but not examples of the template from which this title was _clearly_ derived. And are therefore, pretty much guaranteed not to be the actual, direct inspiration for the title!
Of course, if anyone really cares, I suspect they could just email the author. :)
Confessions of a Recovering NetBSD Zealot (O'ReillyNet)
Posted Sep 18, 2006 15:32 UTC (Mon) by QuisUtDeus (guest, #14854) [Link]
St. Augustine wrote his "Confessions" around A.D. 397, about his conversion from a proud, worldly student of pagan philosophy to Roman Catholicism, for which conversion his mother, St. Monica, had been praying most of his life.
Many books have used "confessions" in their title about the author's change in world view: what they thought was wrong, they now think is right, and vice versa.
Confessions of a Recovering NetBSD Zealot (O'ReillyNet)
Posted Sep 17, 2006 7:53 UTC (Sun) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
Interesting article.
What is the "official response" of the NetBSD camp? See, e.g., the second reply to the article.
It is also interesting to note that Hannum keeps comparing NetBSD to Linux (the Kernel) and almost never to GNU (in its earlier stages, when it was a software distribution) or to Linux distributions. A comparison of NetBSD to community distributions would be interesting. And even to company-funded distros (RH, SUSE, Mandriva), given his allegations that NetBSD is basically a Wassaby product noawadays.
Confessions of a Recovering NetBSD Zealot (O'ReillyNet)
Posted Sep 18, 2006 18:24 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]
""""What is the "official response" of the NetBSD camp?"""
An erie silence, underscoring the points Charles is trying to make.
Or so it seems to me, anyway.
One get's the impression that there may not *be* much of a NetBSD camp.
I should hasten to add that I am not in a position to know.
If there is another side of this story, someone needs start telling it!