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| bsd | dude, where's my code? | ||
| code | hacking for the masses | ||
| contact | solo sex does not qualify as reaching out and touching someone | ||
| gnu | what it means to be free | ||
| history | what state of mental health? | ||
| microsoft | on the lack of innovation | ||
| mrt | get out of school, do drugs, don't drink milk | ||
| phil | an ode to my favorite groundhog | ||
| religion | i am write and you are wrong | ||
| schismtracker | what makes good software great | ||
| secure | tightrope walking without a net | ||
( home : bsd ) do you like this page? yes (50% ) / no (49% )
A short introduction
First let me say, I don't have any problems with *BSD; I happen to use OpenBSD myself on production machines and as a teaching aid. NetBSD has saved me many times in the past where I needed a unixish system on a particular [strange] machine.
If you read my GNU page, you'll see that I favor and support the GNU project for largely economic reasons. This page examines the social system of the no-charge software world, and *BSD is a good place to start.
Because in a lot of ways, *BSD is exactly where it began.
As with most systems, you have your intelligent *BSD users, and the fanatical ones. Linux is often commented as being no different [google seems to love the search term linux+elite]. To understand what I mean by an intelligent *BSD user, note that there are no intelligent Windows users, even though there are many intelligent people that happen to use Windows. Even as their primary operating system of choice.
It's one of those Zen things; find the difference for yourself and I think we can continue.
What happened once...
I remember a friend of mine once said that he noticed that on the whole, there seemed to be more intelligent FreeBSD users than intelligent Linux users. I suggested that this could be for a lot of reasons, and that I doubted any of them were highly technical. For example, at the time this was said, many unixish users agreed that Red Hat had produced an installation program that was friendlier and easier to use than the Windows installation. I said that it was possible that Linux was simply easier to install and therefore more accessible.
He tried to remind me that FreeBSD was based on something larger and older, and therefore should be more accessible, but I told him, just as I'm telling you, for a moment, to assume that it wasn't important.
If Linux is/was more accessible, then it should stand that the more capable of the fanatics would gravitate toward FreeBSD for the quite simple reason that it was less accessible. If we could demonstrate that, then we'd have a highly rational case.
Recently, I'm reminded of this because of a series of emails I dialoged. It all started with a rather hostile sequence of:
"and knock out the BSDish insults... in your readme... You probably don't know FreeBSD. debian has apt-get redshat has rpm FreeBSD has pkg_create, pkg_add. Maintain a FreeBSD port and you will automatically gain support."[verbatim]
You see, this friend of mine noticed that one thing that he saw different technologically was that Linux distributions tend to be extremely modular, or at least feeding toward it. FreeBSD, and almost all other unixish systems divide their filesystem into a "base system" and "optional packages". Whereas with Red Hat or Debian, you typically merge a new package into your system with rpm or dpkg, but with FreeBSD the package almost always went into the "optional packages" system.
This basically boils down to the fact that Red Hat considers a program like GhostScript to be part of their Red Hat Linux operating system, whereas FreeBSD does not. I personally think making the difference between the system and the applications stronger is a "good thing", and it helps clueless columnists that consider bugs in GhostScript to be a bug in Linux [as an operating system]. FreeBSD is free of this problem simply because they don't consider themselves in the position of having to maintain everyone else's' software that someone might install on their system.
Proponents of the merging system say that this makes it easy to upgrade and patch for security related problems. I think this is naive. What makes it easier to upgrade and patch for security related problems is a repository of packages- not that those packages merge into the operating system.
The point is to draw attention to the fact that the philosophies differ, not to suggest that one is better than the other. They are different, and let's leave it at that for now.
Back to the hostilities, this email suggests to me that the author thinks that merging user-software into the operating system as Linux integrators do is somehow similar to what the FreeBSD system does, and that this is the point that is the turn-off. Perhaps just my turn-off, or perhaps the turn-off of users of Linux-based operating systems everywhere.
I don't know if his last sentence suggests that FreeBSD fanatics have some hive mind and that I should somehow tap into it, but I think it means that he thinks that I don't make any effort to maintain my software for FreeBSD users, which if I made any effort to maintain my software at all, could really bother me if FreeBSD fanatics had a hive mind. I request suggestions on that one.
"...I can pkg_delete bash-2.05b.007 how do you do that on 200 servers? ssh key's a for loop and an ssh arguement guess some of us BSDish morons have have figured a way to administrator more than a handful of servers."This was news to me. Apparently pkg_delete has some magical properties that allow it to figure out which machines you own, communicate with all of them in parallel and know that you wanted to delete a particular package from those... Oh I can't keep this up.
I resisted the urge to point out this had nothing at all to do with the operating system; that a many server farms use a network disk and thus make package deployment and management easier by simply managing a single disk- instead of 200. I didn't resist too well though.
The only important thing this experience with a FreeBSD Fanatic- and I should note, this individual had bad things to say about OpenBSD and NetBSD, so this isn't the normal social problem I wanted to get into- is what I call the ego problem.
The ego problem works like this: Person A makes decision X. Person B makes decision Y. Person A decides that decision Y is wrong because they already made decision X. I think it's a special kind of ignoratio elenchi.
This is important. The reason we have operating system fanatics (or most other kinds of fanatics) is that for whatever elitism we seek- whether because it makes us feel superior, or it makes us feel comfortable, requires that we ad hominum any contrary stance. Because while if all things are equal it doesn't matter, things are rarely equal, and if we don't know the bad things about the contrary we're stupid.
This is a flawed decision making process; we should instead focus on tasks- if a particular operating system (or other life choice) leads to accomplishment of the required task, then you're fine. You're better than fine if you know why it leads to it, and you're better still if you know all of your other options (which, of course, you never will) and know why this one was better- not why that one was worse.
My problem with *BSD is that it's simply incompatable with the GNU philosiphy- *BSD software doesn't have to remain free, and that's it. I still have a use for OpenBSD and NetBSD, but that's only because-presently- they are the best tools in which to accomplish the tasks in which they do.
The problem has never been with the contributers of *BSD, but instead with those that don't contribute. How much of Microsoft's work on the *BSD network stacks and ftp clients and so on have found their way back into the hands of people who might be able to use it? Why does microsoft need the freedom to keep me from having mine? I support the GNU project because I believe in those freedoms.
I use *BSD software.
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