A non technical article to those who migrated to FreeBSD because of systemd

[fr0xk]

What is a “*BSD”?

Considering a *BSD With the arrival of a certain “init system”, more Linux users have at least dabbled with *BSD derived OS of late. There is a renewed interest as it’s perceived …

sysdfree.wordpress.com

- In terms of the “corporate” aspect, if “Fortune 500 Company Inc” takes NetBSD and wraps it up as a proprietary offering and sells it as some kind of network appliance – and gives nothing back to NetBSD, (or maybe throws a donation of < $5k at them), that doesn’t affect the project or a user of NetBSD, it doesn’t make NetBSD “less free”. If that same company takes over a GPL v3 licenced project, employs and pays the developers, funds the project, decides the direction it will now take – decided ultimately who they will sell that subsidiary onto when it no longer serves a purpose – I’ll leave the reader to decide which is the “freer” .

- “With the arrival of a certain ‘init system,’ more Linux users have at least dabbled with *BSD derived OS of late. There is a renewed interest as it’s perceived as an ‘escape route.’”

- “Some Linux users see *BSD as their ‘last resort’ to escaping systemd if it becomes unavoidable in their Linux distribution.”

- “*BSD is not Linux, not GNU, not a GNU/Linux distribution, nor is it based on Linux… the term ‘BSD’ is just an umbrella term and is often about as meaningful as ‘*nix.’”

- “The *BSDs are much older than Linux... Linux came about as a necessity – because the GNU/Hurd kernel was simply not ready.”

- “Those who just want a ‘works out of the box’ system should move on. Those wanting to complain that *BSD isn’t ready yet or is ‘too difficult’… should just move on.”

- “If you want the wifi driver for the ‘Made UP Name Athercomtel WXS20005ZXL’ to work, you will need to do something: i.e., send working hardware to the developer or do some research…”

- “Look no further: % man man, % man, refer to the operating system’s online handbook.”

- “Software apart from the base system is referred to as ‘port’... A pre-built port is called a package and is obtained either by a ‘Linux-like’ package manager… or by the ‘legacy’ package tools.”

- “No *BSD uses sysvinit... An ‘escapee’ from systemd will still find themselves in unfamiliar territory.”

- “There is another common sentiment... ‘I’m hesitant because RMS has said bad things about the BSD style licenses.’”

- “The BSD license is extremely simple and unrestricted, in that sense it’s the very essence of ‘free.’ The GNU GPL ‘copyleft’ licenses tend to be ‘militantly free.’”

- “If ‘Fortune 500 Company Inc’ takes NetBSD and wraps it up as a proprietary offering... that doesn’t affect the project or a user of NetBSD, it doesn’t make NetBSD ‘less free.’”

- “We can, if we have skills or the funds, contribute something in order to get what we want… No one will do it for you.”

- “The real danger that ideological or political lines of reasoning can easily blind one to technical facts and leave one susceptible to fearmongering.”

- “The *BSD’s have their own filesystem. Usually a variant of the UNIX FFS/UFS. FreeBSD in particular has support for ZFS – which is superior to Btrfs in most respects.”

- “Don’t expect ‘out of the box’ dual boot with other OS. Install the *BSD on its own hard disk or better yet its own computer.”

- “It’s stunning how little Linux fans know about the software, the licenses, the origins and the people and companies involved in its development.”

- They are not platforms for ideological or political pontificating/rants. In fact the OpenBSD project in particular strongly discourages this and you will probably be asked to leave their mailing lists if you start “advocating”, etc.

- The *BSDs are not binary compatible, so the term “BSD distribution” as an analog to “Linux distribution”, which you will often see bandied around in Linux circles, is also meaningless.

 

[Cath O'Deray]

Thanks ?

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The broken link https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.IS%E2%80%A6k/history.html is similarly nonsensical (abbreviated) in the first Wayback Machine capture of the page, maybe it was a copy-and-paste error from the outset.

From the Project's 11.3-RELEASE archive, here's a view of a history.html page as it would have appeared in mid-June 2019:

Contributors were named. Jordan Hubbard:

「The goals of the FreeBSD Project are to provide software that may be used for any purpose and without strings attached. Many of us have a significant investment in the code (and project) and would certainly not mind a little financial compensation now and then, but we are definitely not prepared to insist on it. We believe that our first and foremost “mission” is to provide code to any and all comers, and for whatever purpose, so that the code gets the widest possible use and provides the widest possible benefit. This is, I believe, one of the most fundamental goals of Free Software and one that we enthusiastically support.

「That code in our source tree which falls under the GNU General Public License (GPL) or Library General Public License (LGPL) comes with slightly more strings attached, though at least on the side of enforced access rather than the usual opposite. Due to the additional complexities that can evolve in the commercial use of GPL software we do, however, prefer software submitted under the more relaxed BSD copyright when it is a reasonable option to do so.」

The current edition of the FreeBSD Handbook is without these attributions – "we", not "I", and so on.

More importantly:

• the clear and unwavering goal of the FreeBSD Project is not what's in the current edition

– is not the set of goals that was contributed by jkh.

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Nowadays, it's possible for an enthusiast to publish imaginary goals as if they're goals of the Project (they're not) … if there's a feel-good factor, most other enthusiasts will share them, or agree, without question.

The blur is not surprising, for a project that's more than thirty years old, it's just unfortunate that a shared vision is not more widespread.

HTH