[geeks] FreeBSD/Linux, was Wireless Routers

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 @ 14:18 -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke said:

> On Wed, 5 Jul 2006, velociraptor wrote:
> 
> > On 7/5/06, Jochen Kunz <jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de> wrote:
> >> "Jonathan C. Patschke" <jp at celestrion.net> wrote:
> >>> I was rather hoping to avoid Linksys
> >> http://www.pcengines.ch/wrap.htm
> >
> > The guys at damnsmalllinux.org also have a pre-assembled mini-ITX kits
> > that support PCI WLAN.  You'd get karma points for supporting some OSS
> > developers if you purchased from them.
> 
> But it'd be canceled out by supporting the Stallmanist Linux zealots
> rather than the BSD[0] folks.  

Terribly bad reason to not support an OSS project, given the vast
majority of them are pragmatic, not Stallmanist.

There are Stallmanistas in the BSD camps too.  I've met them, and the
only difference is they wear a beastie instead of a penguin.

> [0] I mean, Linus himself says the BSDers are "incompetent idiots", so
>      they're clearly more in need of help and support, right?  

Actually, Linus said:
	
	"I claim that Mach people (and apparently FreeBSD) are
	incompetent..."

This was part of discussions about Mach VM, and changes in FreeBSD
5.x/6.x regarding copy-on-write and zero copy routines.  He seemed to
present his case pretty well.  If the name calling bothers you, well,
the BSD developers have been able to out do him in that regard for many
years now.

VM has been the epicenter of debate in several OS camps in the last
couple of years, including Apple's MacOS X.

It is important to note that quite a few key BSD developers agree with
what Linus said.

What a conundrum... either some of the brightest BSD developers are
really idiots because they agree with Linus, or maybe Linus wasn't so
far off in his comment after all. 

FreeBSD 6.x looks to be improving a lot, and a lot of the pain might be
behind them now.  Given more time to refine the code, backtrack out of
dead ends, and otherwise improve the new code base, it will probably be
fine.

But there is no doubt that the transition from the 4.x code base was one
of the worst in OS history.  It has left a trail of hurt feelings,
failed software, and two forks of FreeBSD.

*ALL* of these OS projects are learning as they go, and it will *always*
involve a lot of emotion and a lot of mistakes.



-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["Consulting wouldn't be what it is today
without Microsoft Windows" -- Chris Pinkham]