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Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

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Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

#161

Post by nailer »

rbanffy wrote: post #107
nailer wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The effect of Sun licensing dtrace, ZFS and others as GPL-compatible would make Linux more competitive with Sun's Solaris. Yes > That's clearly undesirable Why? Sun's been bleeding customers towards Red Hat and (to a far greater extent) Novell since the early 2000s. Holding onto the Solaris/SPARC combo in the hope the high end customers would the be last to leave (which they were, but sooner than Sun expected) kill…

> Holding onto the Solaris/SPARC combo in the hope the high end customers would the be last to leave (which they were, but sooner than Sun expected) killed the company. Giving Dell all the tools to fight SPARC/Solaris effectively would only kill it faster. As a high-end hardware manufacturer, they were pressed from below by Linux on cheap x86 hardware. One possible solution would be to press back with SPARC/Solaris h…

Also: Sun never had the opportunity to sue anyone else who made a competing Unix-like OS. If they did, then sure, IBM-type tactic would have certainly held off their competitors.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

#162

Post by rbanffy »

nailer wrote: post #161
rbanffy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Holding onto the Solaris/SPARC combo in the hope the high end customers would the be last to leave (which they were, but sooner than Sun expected) killed the company. Giving Dell all the tools to fight SPARC/Solaris effectively would only kill it faster. As a high-end hardware manufacturer, they were pressed from below by Linux on cheap x86 hardware. One possible solution would be to press back with SPARC/Solaris h…

Also: Sun never had the opportunity to sue anyone else who made a competing Unix-like OS. If they did, then sure, IBM-type tactic would have certainly held off their competitors.

In order to do it, they should have never ported Solaris to x86.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

#163

Post by tzs »

avar wrote: post #155
tzs wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But FreeBSD would not stand in your way if you wanted to take their documentation and incorporate it into whatever format documentation you wanted on your system. The GNU folks, on the other hand, will not allow people to take text from Info pages and incorporate it into BSD or Linux man pages.

Relly? When have they ever stood in someone's way if they wanted to do that? And was that GNU policy or just some lone grumpy maintainer?

At least for tar, the info docs are licensed under GFDL with invariant covers, which is not a free license, and so text from it cannot be incorporated in free works. There's an explanation at the Debian site of some of the problems with the license: http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml

Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

#164

Post by ithkuil »

avar wrote: post #38
SageRaven wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used FreeBSD for servers and my personal workstation for quite a few years. I love FreeBSD, and the thought of having to support a Linux variant is not a pleasant one. Not that I have a bone to pick with Linux, since I thought it was an excellent OS for the 10 or so years I used it before trying FreeBSD. But once I tried, and became accustomed to, FreeBSD, there was simply no turning back. However, I take issue…

Yeah point #1 is odd. GNU/Linux doesn't let licenses get in the way of technical decisions. DTrace and ZFS aren't in Linux because Sun explicitly designed their licensed to be GPL-incompatible. Where that isn't the case nobody is seeking to replace code due to license reasons. E.g. you don't see Linux people trying to replace X11 or Sendmail because of their licenses. But the BSD systems are actively trying to phase…

Furthermore, as far as I understood, it would be impossible to change the Linux kernel license today because of the large number of people involved (also because some authors are dead now).

Relicensing linux is not an option, whether you believe GPL is good or not.

There are solutions to this, but you have to act in advance: for example if you want to contribute code to the clojure open source project, you have to sign and send by snail mail a contributor agreement (http://clojure.org/space/showimage/ca.pdf) which regulates the ability of the project funder some freedom in relicensing.

btw, this formality, especially the printing and snail mail thing, actually stopped me from contributing my code to clojure-contrib. You know, I just wanted to quickly share a bugfix, I don't know in advance how much involvement I will have with something which starts only as a side effect of my job

furthermore since I made the contribution during my daily job, my company itself would have to sign that contract etc etc, licensing some stuff with GPL is one thing, granting unrestricted sublicensing right is a different issue ...

Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

#165

Post by chrismsnz »

ithkuil wrote: post #164
avar wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah point #1 is odd. GNU/Linux doesn't let licenses get in the way of technical decisions. DTrace and ZFS aren't in Linux because Sun explicitly designed their licensed to be GPL-incompatible. Where that isn't the case nobody is seeking to replace code due to license reasons. E.g. you don't see Linux people trying to replace X11 or Sendmail because of their licenses. But the BSD systems are actively trying to phase…

Furthermore, as far as I understood, it would be impossible to change the Linux kernel license today because of the large number of people involved (also because some authors are dead now). Relicensing linux is not an option, whether you believe GPL is good or not. There are solutions to this, but you have to act in advance: for example if you want to contribute code to the clojure open source project, you have to si…

Couldn't you contribute the code to a developer under public domain, meaning they can do whatever they want with it (relicense it etc...)?

Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

#166

Post by nailer »

rbanffy wrote: post #162
nailer wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: Sun never had the opportunity to sue anyone else who made a competing Unix-like OS. If they did, then sure, IBM-type tactic would have certainly held off their competitors.

In order to do it, they should have never ported Solaris to x86.

They couldn't have. Sun don't own Unix.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

#167

Post by may »

dharmatech wrote: post #156
may wrote: post #11

I used to play the "what distro are we running this week" game. Most were too big, others too small. Some had great communities, but lacked a killer feature. Etc. etc. Then I found FreeBSD. The learning curve was steeper, you had to know more about how things actually worked under the hood (a plus, in my book) and the system was elegantly clunky. A cohesive whole -- more or less -- instead of endless re-packaging of…

> And it's a single community, without the balkanization of GNU/Linux. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Dragonfly BSD, BSDI, Darwin, PCBSD... ;-) The Linux kernel isn't (at the moment) balkanized.

All right, point taken. Perhaps /less/-balkanized was what I meant.
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