Strong Foundations: FreeBSD, Wikimedia Raise Buckets of Development Money 113
mbadolato writes "On December 9, 2012, Slashdot reported that the FreeBSD Foundation was falling short of their 2012 goal of $500,000 by nearly 50%. For all of those that continued to echo about how FreeBSD is dying, it's less than three weeks later and the total is presently nearing $200,000 OVER the goal. Netcraft continues to be wrong."
And reader hypnosec adds another crowdfunding success story: "The Wikimedia Foundation has announced at the conclusion of its ninth annual fund-raiser that it has managed to raise a whopping $25 million from 1.2 million donors in just over a week's time. ... As compared to last year's fund-raiser, which got completed in 46 days, this year's was completed in just nine days."
non-Oracle ZFS FTW (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you FreeBSD, for having a useful ZFS implementation. Countless devices around the world exist because of you.
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Seconded. My FreeNAS server lifts its monocle to you, FreeBSD.
Re:non-Oracle ZFS FTW (Score:5, Interesting)
That's my use case as well. I gave them some cash, lord knows I've used their efforts enough.
My surprise when setting up the ZFS server was in how well everything has worked so far. ZFS has also caught corruption a few times, so I'm going to give it props. It has me wondering if it is possible to get the same kind of data integrity on Mac or Windows. As a stopgap, I sync everything important with Unison so that I can see bitrot on the Mac/PC side. I once caught a really nasty corruption in the middle of my Photos directory that rendered several jpegs useless. More recently I caught another, though this time it was just in the preview image so it wouldn't have been a big deal. It makes me wonder what is going on in the directories that I don't sync!
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For Mac, try the free Zevo ZFS from Greenbytes: http://www.getgreenbytes.com/ZEVO [getgreenbytes.com]
For Windows, if you are willing to use NTFS on an iSCSI volume hosted on ZFS by a FreeBSD NAS, you could still benefit from the checksumming provided by ZFS. See the comments by 3dinfluence here: http://serverfault.com/a/122408/79266 [serverfault.com]
Or you could run a ZFS NAS in a FreeBSD VM on Windows, of course, and use it via SMB from Windows.
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It's filesystems all the way down!
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For Windows, there is the promise of ReFS, but for now I just don't keep anything irreplaceable on there.
I'll have to give Zevo a spin. I played with the old MacZFS several years ago and decided it wasn't quite ready for prime-time, but I might give it another go. For now, I just end up backing up certain important things to ZFS, and because I use Unison, I have a very high chance of catching corruption as long as the backups are frequent enough. Unison does a two-way sync, but I use that aspect to detect c
Re:non-Oracle ZFS FTW (Score:4, Insightful)
You are correct. Where Unison helps is that I can see when two files differ between the ZFS backup and the original on Windows/Mac. If I see a file with a diff, but the modified dates and sizes are identical, I know something is up. This has occurred a few times now.
This works even without ZFS, but I've never had the ZFS version go corrupt.
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How much pr0n do you really need?
Re:non-Oracle ZFS FTW (Score:4, Interesting)
I use mine for a few things:
- Media server. This uses surprisingly little space, though that may change when I switch to high-def.
- Backup. This is where all the space disappears to. The 3 computers in the house all target it.
- CrashPlan. Every time a friend or relative has me touch their computer, they get CrashPlan pointed to my server.
- Services. My photos, music, and some other data get shared via various services.
It also makes a nice machine to throw a VM on when you need to.
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Seconded. I bought another 8 drives at black friday prices and doubled my RAIDZ2 to 18TB. There just is no alternative to the functionality provided by ZFS. If you need big storage on an open source platform, you either pay a ton for fancy controllers or use ZFS. I've used FreeBSD for over 12 years now and there was only a brief time when I considered an alternative (Dragonfly), but ZFS has me locked in now. I wish the linux guys had gone for it instead of relying on btrfs.
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ZFS has me locked in now. I wish the linux guys had gone for it instead of relying on btrfs.
Do you mean you wish Linux used a more broadly compatible license than the GPL so it wouldn't have had problems figuring out how to directly support ZFS without violating either license?
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I have to admit that it is a little bit funny that the GPL conflicts with a license that differs from public domain only by requiring attribution.
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Ahh, you are right - I was thinking about the BSD. I'll go back to keeping my mouth shut :)
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ZFS has me locked in now. I wish the linux guys had gone for it instead of relying on btrfs.
ZFS was patented by Sun and the license they released it under was incompatible with the GPL.
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ZFS does work under Linux - my understanding is that the only reason you don't find it in the main repositories (Ubuntu has it in a PPA) is a licensing issue. Or is there some technical issue I'm missing?
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Unless you're playing tricks with shims and wrappers, such as by running ZFS in userspace somehow, or forcing end users to do all the work of setting up ZFS rather than making it quick and easy to set up, you're probably violating the CDDL and GPL by distributing ZFS with a Linux distribution.
The official position [zfsonlinux.org] is that the license conflict just means you can't compile it into the kernel, not that you can't publish it as a kernel module.
I acknowledge that there is some controversy over whether kernel modules are considered derivative works, but the fact that proprietary drivers do exist and are often available in the non-free sections of repositories contradicts the idea that the licensing issue alone is enough to stop it. Furthermore, Linus' opinion on the matter seems to be that modules dev
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If the driver needs to be integrated into a monolithic whole with the code that makes it compatible with something distributed under the GPL (such as the Linux kernel), there's some danger of being liable for license violation if someone wants to make a stink about it -- and it's not just the GPL that may be the problem, remember: Oracle is the owner of the ZFS copyrights, and the ZFS is distributed under the terms of a copyleft license.
How you go about getting the pieces of software to play well with each
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Is ZFS on OpenIndiana not feature comparable? I thought OI was a few versions of ZFS ahead of FreeBSD?
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Nevermind, as of April FreeBSD caught up and now they're both on ZFS28.
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ZoL is why I moved to OpenIndiana. The performance was terrible, even without dedupe or compression turned on I was getting maybe 10MB/sec writes. Same pool under OI runs at an appropriate 120MB/sec, no changes other than OS. Mind you, this was over a year ago, so maybe they've fixed the performance issues.
With the departure of the lead OI dev [openindiana.org], I may have to start looking for a new ZFS capable OS.
Re:All This Proves Is ... (Score:5, Insightful)
All this proves is that some people are willing to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to things that are important. If only we/they would do the same with some political contributions to those who are trying to change things for the better (human rights, privacy rights, less spying, copyright/patent reform, tort reform, etc, etc, etc).
You must be an absolute blast to hang out with, if on hearing good news, you feel compelled to whine about lack of involvement in unrelated areas.
Happy Man: I got tickets to go see
Whiner: All that proves is that some people are willing to pay to hear live music. If only we/they would do the same for theatre!
Happy Man: I had to study three evenings a week for years, and now I finally got my degree!
Whiner: All that proves is that people will put in time for things important to them. If only we/they would do the same in cleaning up litter in the neighbourhood.
Happy Man: I had to speak up on this one. It's shameful that women are being denied access to birth control.
Whiner: All that proves is that people will speak up on things that matter to them. If only we/they would do the same for Internet whiners who find themselves derided in posts such as this one.
This is very good news for FreeBSD and BSD in general. Go somewhere and do something to help your pet causes.
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Crowdfunding really is gathering some serious momentum though, I'm seeing a lot more projects rapidly exceeding their goals now than a few years back. The word is spreading. Maybe the end of the VC era?
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No, not the end of the VC era. Crowdfunding as it stands now via the popular implementations such as kickstarter is not investing, its just donations and its not even new. Its only new because some silly projects get massive amounts of money when any VC person would know better than to invest. Ouya as an example. Ridiculous amounts of donations for a project that offers no reason what so ever that it will be anymore than just another Android device, and not even a particularly impressive one at that.
VC
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It is doing something different, you pointed out the differences yourself.
VCs earned the nickname "vulture capitalists" because they have a tendency to pump up companies as quickly as possible and then reap the benefits - the dot com bubble was largely a VC creation. Anytime I see a company with a staff of fifty doing a job that could be done by five, sure enough there's a VC trying to float/seeking rounds of investment from bigger fish behind it. The latest buzzword is "nano", the sexier it sounds the more
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This isn't 'good news', its more of a 'look you stupid BSD is Dying morons, once again you dont' fucking get it' as to refute the last retarded article claiming that BSD had fallen utterly short of its goal.
This is more of a finger to Linux fanboys on slashdot than anything else.
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"This is very good news for FreeBSD and BSD in general. Go somewhere and do something to help your pet causes." the poster is pointing out that if this is considered newsworthy in the sense that it is surprising and it should make people happy, we are in a sad state. we should really be complaining that freebsd had to suffer on the path to meeting it's goals, and it took an uprising of good hearted doners to compensate for neglect. this is why the OP is upset, and that comes across. so to talk to you in your own language: you're not being helpful. this is very bad news for consumers and humanity in general. go somewhere and do something intelligent. if youwan't to live in your happy world with happy people go look at some lolcats.
In their own words, it's normal that 50% of their fundraising comes during their end of year campaigns. Where does the suffering come in to this? Fortunately they're looking to change this.
It is good news in the sense that a group run on donations can't assume those donations will magically come, and in this instance they exceeded their target by a pretty decent margin. I've no idea where you arrived at that interpretation of the ACs post. By my reading it's about people generally being unwilling to put mon
Memories (Score:3)
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In college I had some fun running OpenBSD [openbsd.org] on a Sun Sparc Classic [wikipedia.org]. Mostly used that machine as an SSH gateway.
Then, don't forget NetBSD (Score:2)
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I did check that page and investigated a bit and found out that the page hasn't really been updated in a while since NetBSD 6.0 has been out for a few months already, and if we check the money gauge image, we get:
Last-Modified: Wed, 30 Dec 2009 21:30:05 GMT
They probably have gone above the ~$13k the image shows. It just hasn't been updated in three years, for whatever reason.
Linux Foundation and graphics/wifi drivers? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe the Linux Foundation (or someone else, they're the first that come to mind) could do a similar thing to raise money for improving the Linux graphics and wireless stacks? How much improvement could we get for a million USD? Or perhaps there are individual developers out there who would do what Poul-Henning Kamp [freebsd.org] did? I'd be happy to contribute to such an initiative. Kickstart it?
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Linux is backed by corporations that sell per-seat licenses.
Linux was just a pawn to drive Sun Microsystems out of business.
Ask Red Hat to do it.
Donate what you can. I give 20 bucks, maybe 40. (Score:2, Interesting)
I donate (small amounts) to FreeBSD almost every year, and I don't even use their software currently. They have an important place in the history of Unix-like operating systems, and I have used their software for some great projects in the past.
Wikipedia is so obnoxious with their fundraising, I've stopped donating. The local news recently reported that the most visited page on Wikipedia was "Facebook", and I rarely use it. I did get a kick out of their previous campaign where the staffers photos were ab
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Wikimedia is doing FSM's work and is well deserving of your support.
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may I see your RAW thistle cheese?
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>> There's no inherent bias in "This is a picture of milk thistle"
Sorry but there is. What format is the image stored in?
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Wow, just wow ...
Your statement pretty much proves why wikipedia shouldn't even be allowed anywhere near school research. No bias? Are you 8?
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This article is misleading (Score:4, Insightful)
if an entity has the following charactoristics:
1- good product (quality)
2- product is appreciated (demand)
3- costs are reasonable (feasibility)
4- has a consumer base with spending power (viability)
then it will NECESSARILY meet it's goals. this is basic economics of supply and demand. didn't we all learn this in highschool?
let me fix this article:
"corporations with crap products who raise money with psychological tactics are increasingly finding it difficult to get funding because of the internet."
i would also add: "projects such as netbsd and openbsd that add enormous value to the lives of every human being are underappreciated because the consumer is ignorant of them, and so they fall short of funding goals some times, and it befalls us as responsible technologists to make sure that they continue to protect our interests with the same selfless, joyful, gracious generosity that we have been able to enjoy for so long without giving much in return"
typing this message just left a bad taste in my mouth. to realize that somehow everyone doesn't get this stuff is sad.
Told ya FreeBSD would make it. (Score:2, Interesting)
Told ya so! [slashdot.org]
But this doesn't mean you shouldn't still donate! ;-)
--libman
Good (Score:1)
Fundraisers vs Time (Score:5, Informative)
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I contributed to both.. (Score:2)
And also to haiku OS. They all were useful or fun' and still are.
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OSX is the FreeBSD for your laptop. Yes, I know its not FreeBSD per say, but FreeBSD isn't trying to be everything, and its certainly not putting much effort into being an awesome desktop.
If you want a fast server with an awesome filesystem or the fastest TCP/IP stack on the planet, then you want FreeBSD. If you want a desktop GUI OS, you want something else.
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Desktop or laptop? Try PC-BSD - "PC-BSD® is a user friendly desktop Operating System based on FreeBSD." http://www.pcbsd.org/
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Sure, PC-bsd is desktop focused, may do it well. May do fine on a laptop as well, I stopped tying to have a bsd desktop years ago and a lot has changed.
I really just meant fbsd isn't so much workstation centric as server centric.
I love Fbsd, haven't had a day without it in my home and office since I switched from Linux and started using 2.2.x back in the day :)
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Wayland (Score:2)
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IPv6 contributions by FBSD (Score:2)
good (Score:2)
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But will you still be laughing after you finish your undergraduate degree?
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No, he'll be to busy working on his custom xmonad config while he's watching anime and posting about lolis.
Re:c++ (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the things I like about FreeBSD is their openess to languages (in contrast to OpenBSD, who think C is the only language around...)
Throughout the years, FreeBSD developers reached out for what they thought were the best languages for the job: Modula-3 (for cvsup, though now deprecated), Forth on the boot loader (ideal, right? Can drop you into a little Forth shell), Ruby for ports infrastructure. In that way, they are not prejudiced about programming languages. Users contribute a great deal too. All the things you get in Debian (lots of languages).
FreeBSD developers also have ported important innovations that are open-sourced but lacking in Linux, because of pure ideology (the GPL doesn't play well with others): Apple's Grand Central Dispatch (a framework that implements concurrency *correctly*), and LLVM (which as a side effect, brings C blocks [wikipedia.org] (effectively, closures for C).
Additionally, many vendors support FreeBSD. I, for instance, run Eiffel on FreeBSD (for the world's best introduction to Object Oriented Programming: A Touch of class [touch.ethz.ch]. Common Lisp has vendors that support FreeBSD (LispWorks, Franz), and so has Smalltalk (Cincom, Smalltalk/X). All these vendors have free products and commercial support.
There's nothing stopping anyone from doing whatever they want with C++ on FreeBSD. But seriously, C++? Shouldn't you be looking at D?
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Ruby for ports infrastructure
The ports infrastructure is written in make, not Ruby. You are probably thinking of portupgrade, which is a (deprecated) third-party tool for managing potrs.
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Why convert? UNIX is C, period.
It's a lot of C, but not all C. According to the FreeBSD mirror on GitHub [github.com] the FreeBSD distribution contains the following types of code:
C 78.2%
C++ 12.9%
Shell 5.1%
Perl 1.2%
Other 2.4%
FBSD in Obj-C (Score:2)
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C++ is not about OOP, although it supports it. But I would argue that RAII is a much more fundamental concept - and immensely useful in a systems programming language.
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On Mac OS X, Unix is a whole lot of Objective-C.
It has the semantics of the purest of OO languages (Smalltalk), but you can mix and match with C. That allows for speed and fast development without the pain and the bugs. It's probably the number one factor for the success of Mac OS as the number 1 Unix out there for users (power users included). No, actually, number 1 OS, period.
If you ask me, Steve Jobs was wright.
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On Mac OS X, Unix is a whole lot of Objective-C.
...except for the parts that actually implement Unix behavior, which are mostly C with some amount of C++ and perhaps a small amount of Objective-C.
Re:Go / Rust / Nimrod trump C++ (Score:4, Informative)
We currently have a few C++ things in the base system:
In a few days, there will also be a BSDL replacement for the GPL'd device tree compiler landing. This is a simple tool that converts between source and flattened device trees, and since it is doing a lot of stuff that involves building maps I decided to use C++ and std::map rather than reinvent the wheel or do something ugly involving macros. Performance isn't an issue, since it's intended to parse input files that are typically under 12KB and produce output that is even smaller, so even without optimisation it uses around 10KB of RAM and under a tenth of a second of CPU time. A higher-level language might have been appropriate, but it's also potentially important to be able to include a statically linked copy for recovery, which rules out most high-level languages.
Note that none of the kernel, and no userland utilities essential for operation are written in C++.
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It's glad to see that at least some OS people in the FOSS community pick tools based on how well they are at the particular task at hand, as opposed to their ideological biases ("C good, C++ bad" etc).
Then again, FreeBSD development was always much more pragmatic than Linux, from what I've seen.
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Next-gen OS projects are slowly beginning to start up
Like Plan 9 and Inferno? These have started up a loooong time ago. ;-)
Using C++ is rather stupid, however, if you can get the same performance from much more productive and secure languages like Go, Rust, Nimrod, etc.
Using C++ is stupid even if you can't. The tools support for C++ is outrageous by definition. By the time you have a parser for C++, you have written half a compiler. Give me a break.
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The fact that plan9/etc failed to gain popularity doesn't mean UNIX will be the final idea in operating systems until the heat death of the universe...
For me, they didn't fail. I think they nicely demonstrated that a lot of cute ideas actually work. That's hardly a failure.
I wouldn't call everyone who ever used C++ (which is the majority of major game and app projects) stupid
Neither would I, it's the fact that people had little choice that is stupid, not the people.
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Implement the resource management using the RAII techniques of C++ or lose in the long run.
That's a false dichotomy, if I've ever seen one.
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The tools support for C++ is outrageous by definition. By the time you have a parser for C++, you have written half a compiler. Give me a break.
Once the compiler is already written, though, why is it an issue?
Tools support for C++ took a long time coming, but it's finally here. There are IDEs out there that do 100% accurate code completion on arbitrarily complex C++ code, for examples (templates and all).
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"Nearly $200,000 over" is actually "$180,000" over. I guess 90% is "nearly 100%".
It's currently $184,905K over, and was before TFA was posted. If you're going to be pedantic about rounding, then you probably shouldn't round in your own comment. There are also a few large pledges (e.g. from Netflix), which may or may not arrive in time to be counted towards the 2012 total. If they don't, then the 2013 total will get an early boost. If they do, then they'll easily push it over the $200K-over mark.