If Linux never happened, we would still be using big iron UNIXes, each taking whatever they felt like from BSD variants.
Notice how all the new FOSS operating systems for IoT devices none of them use GPL, NutXX, FreeRTOS, Zephyr, Arduino libs, IDF,...
More than fine if you ask me, giving away your work for megacorps and oligarchs to steamroll your business or otherwise society at large isn’t much of a public service in the end
So if some company/product was open source and then used source available license, the backlash would be so much that they go to something like AGPl most of the time
but that happens because people feel betrayed because some might have contributed thinking its foss forever so its a rug pull
I think a good idea could be to have a source available license from the start so that everybody who ever contributes knows this as a fact.
What are your thoughts? What should I or anyone else pick? As a "foss" advocate, I would prefer AGPL but I don't want to get screwed by Big Tech ever with all the loopholes that they can have (like AWS), Honestly I don't know which is why I am asking really.
I know in the past things like the network stack had been repurposed to other mainstream products.
https://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/support/kb/using-software-pack...
But don't you dare switch to a proprietary license or you will be dragged across social media as an evil selfish person. Even if it's only postponing source releases for a couple of years.
FWIW, this is the first time I have ever seen any mention of donations on any major tech WEB site.
Seems fitting that NetBSD's internal mailing lists still use ossified address syntax from a time before DNS.
There are entire categories of computers that simply cannot run Linux.
SPARC64 as an example in this very comment section.
Having NetBSD around is a net win, and the cost of doing business for them is extremely low for the product they provide.
One of the running jokes is that you can "run it on a toaster" — see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45712368
Years ago I had to get a very old document off of a DOS diskette. So I tried:
* On Linux: accessing the diskette would cause a panic or a reboot or massive read failures.
* FreeBSD: panics all the time
* NetBSD: panics. But then I remembered it had rump. So I said, why not try that. Started up rump, got a few code dumps, but after a some tries I got a bit over 90% of the document off of the diskette. The main system had no issues with the rump kernel crashing.
So that alone is worth the "price of admission" :)
NetBSD has been a labor of love for a long, long time.
In the mid-90's I was a teenager with a 486-25 on a desk in a closet running NetBSD 0.9-1.0, connected to 10base2 going to my dad's office where there was a computer that dual booted to Linux. I learned so much from those systems; systems programming, how to really use the C programming language, sysadmin skills, reading network traces. A whole part of who I am today derives from those early experiences trying to figure out what the $## was going on while tracking -CURRENT.
Here something you might like : CS631 -- Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment - NetBSD https://stevens.netmeister.org/631/netbsd.html
I'm retired from tech and a high school teacher these days and allowed to teach wack/out of level things.
I would love to teach operating systems with NetBSD, but between the space hardware stuff I do and the Verilog/digital logic/microprocessor architecture class I teach, I soak up all the interested students' elective slots.
I suppose after 30+ years, any chance of consolidation is hopeless and undesirable?
For hardware, can a single device driver be made for all variants of BSD? If so, then I agree.
OpenBSD/FreeBSD/NetBSD are open source continuations of the source-available 4.4-BSDlite code (removing AT&T proprietary extensions iirc).
OpenBSD follows BSD principles but focuses on code clarity and security.
FreeBSD tries to be very flexible, putting user-experience over security. (it has to be noted that OpenBSD is very usable, but lacks a lot of nice features like ZFS and DTrace that FreeBSD supports).
NetBSD is all about being incredibly lean and portable. NetBSD will run on basically anything, even things that Linux and other *BSD's have no hope of running on.
So, leaning in to how SSD's behave instead of how HDD's behave- ensuring that the kernel can make effective use of multiple cores etc;
However it goes, the main issue is one no operating system can solve which is modern life relying on the Web and beefier browsers. Unless you want to rebel against that you're probably better off getting a laptop from the past 10 years for < £100 on eBay.
I remember it used to be expensive as heck to do TLS back in 2014~, so much so that we bought accelerator cards and segmented "secure" servers so that load wouldn't hit the ordinary browsing of our sites...
Imagine this, a system which can watch movies, edit texts, create disks, have curl/wget, send and recieve files using piping server (which is a curl thing) , view pdfs, mpv and what not, a desktop manager, file manager etc.
As someone hacking around with the legendary tiny core linux, I am more and more mind blown each day with just how much can happen in 14-21 MB, you can definitely build a mini self hosting rack with just some remastering as tinycore can actually run podman as well (combine this with alpine containers to create a super duper minimalist self hosting things too)
the possibilities are endless. When I ran tiny core linux on my pc and ran nothing else, It took 21 mb in ram for a whole gui with editors and file managers etc. all running in ram so super fast filesystem with a package manager
I personally wanted to build my own operating system to limit myself to the most minimal system so taht I just study and do nothing else, I thought tiny core was it but then I tried to hack around it and there are sooooo many things in 21 mb, makes me appreciate minimalism
I have to say, the sheer fucking irony of this statement made me do a double-take.
I might be showing my age a bit, but I'm still remembering when web-browsing was considered a "light" activity (without extensions like Web Java), and watching a video was "very computationally expensive".
I guess some shift happened in the early 2010's where video playback was hardware accelerated more frequently; and complicated javascript started taking off as Google unveiled v8.
Linux (the kernel) may have been ported to more machines and architectures than NetBSD’s kernel, yes. But is all the code present in the same source tree or do you have to go find patch sets or unofficial branches?
More importantly: is there a modern distribution that builds an installable system for that platform?
The special thing about NetBSD is that you get the portability out of a single and modern tree for many more platforms than any single Linux distribution offers.
Some architectures are no longer practical with Linux. The kernel might still support it, but distribution support is sketchy.
For a SPARC64 server refurb project, the choices were pretty much OpenBSD or NetBSD in my case.
Its also one of few OSes where 32-bit 386 is still tier 1 release.
All from single code source code tree.
Emotionally I like this - but thinking more dispassionately, these systems use, by modern standards, a huge amount of power. I wonder if, for many (most?) of them, it whould not be more environmentally responsible to replace them with modern, less power-hungry devices.
The cost of creating new computers has got to be pretty high to the environment (I've heard 85% of lifetime carbon emissions from computers are from the manufacturing process), and I strongly suspect that we don't take that into consideration since we greenwash ourselves by forcing China to do our dirty work, chastising them for it, and then patting ourselves on the back for buying "more energy efficient chips".
I hope you understand how unique netbsd is, it is one of the only systems which can be compiled so easily with just a single script even from linux or other systems and its rump kernel etc. drivers from what I know are (modular?) so they could be used with other kernels as well if any kernel wants ie.
You never know where the innovation can be, I feel like that each kernel/operating system can bring a new idea, as an example, templeOS uses Holy C which basically is Just in time C (iirc) and that means that you can just edit files of templeOS and restart and those changes would occur
I know TempleOS is niche and a meme OS but I feel like that there are a lot of ideas and unique operating systems and I have heard that netbsd can be good in giving driver support to.
This is just one of many things, and I feel like the main point of NetBSD and the likes are fundamental hackability, they can run on things like routers as well although most run openbsd/freebsd but still. I don't see a reason not to unless you are speaking monetary (ie. it may take some extra funds developing/hosting but that is chump change) but I feel like NETBSD is a novel project with respectable goals and they aren't going to change just for this.
More Options are a good thing. if I can have a project run on Netbsd, then its very easy to port it over to any other vast array of hardware as well, and that hardware includes extremely embedded hardware as well I guess
Aren't competing kernels already shipping support for this hardware? Surely the project has to have more selling points than "can be compiled with a single script."
I meant in the sense that since NetBSD supports soooo many devices, it can also help innovation in other kernels if need be as well by being able to take driver support via its rumpkernel as well if need be
And to be honest, I feel like there is this sense of freedom knowing that you can have a system which is portable, if some script can run on my pc on netbsd, chances are if its not too specific, it could run on your pc or even your toaster lol!
https://laughingsquid.com/netbsd-toaster/
Netbsd can run on any device possible and I really appreciate it.
>Surely the project has to have more selling points than "can be compiled with a single script."
Personally I have only heard good things about netbsd but I don't have much expertise in it (sorry), I can recommend you to take a look at smolbsd which looks really cool for uni-kernel purposes as well
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45582758
I feel like that there is a lot more things that can be done with netbsd as well or other open source projects in general as well
Linus hast this with User Mode Linux (upstream) and Linux Kernel Library (out of tree).
> You never know where the innovation can be, I feel like that each kernel/operating system can bring a new idea, as an example, templeOS uses Holy C which basically is Just in time C (iirc) and that means that you can just edit files of templeOS and restart and those changes would occur
That's a while ago, but Fabrice Bellard did a demo with his tiny c compiler where it would would compile the Linux Kernel at boot time and then boot the compiled Kernel.
> This is just one of many things, and I feel like the main point of NetBSD and the likes are fundamental hackability, they can run on things like routers as well although most run openbsd/freebsd but still.
Most consumer grade routers run Linux out of the box.
> More Options are a good thing. if I can have a project run on Netbsd, then its very easy to port it over to any other vast array of hardware as well, and that hardware includes extremely embedded hardware as well I guess
uCLinux (upstream) doesn't even need a MMU. It can run on a Cortex-M4 with 8mb ram.
I always had the same question about cleaning recycling as it went through a recycling plant -- is the water usage environmentally "friendly" versus what is ultimately recycled (which is often not much, sadly).
Come on, look at all the businesses and what's really happening in the space you're commenting on. That laptop literally means nothing.
This argument misses the forest for the trees for non-commercial users.
...and as others mentioned it: the rump kernel.
fallen_comrade•3h ago