My experience has been, for each toxic person you eliminate, there are ten decent people waiting in the wings to replace them. The toxic folks are actively harming the project by keeping people away.
Good people don’t wanna work with problematic people.
Look at what’s going on at Basecamp. When it came out just how problematic they were and if they weren’t willing to fix things, they lost 30% of their employees. Reportedly it’s now up to 40-something percent.
For one, problematic refers to a behavior, not a person. If you find your behavior is causing problems for people, you can change that behavior (I encourage all employees/owners with a commitment to problem-solving to do this).
For two, when the word is used in the context of inclusivity, usually the problem is that someone is behaving in a way that's exclusionary -- it's not being nice to encourage them to continue that behavior.
That's putting the cart before the horse -- in that context you would only see it used when the person's behavior already is super exclusionary. It's specifically used to describe that exclusionary behavior that has already happened. Of course people can get it mixed up but that's the job of the people doing the community management to make sure that doesn't happen.
The comment I responded to said "how problematic they were" -- not "they were being".
And it was about a case where a funny names list had circulated, the founders said "yeah, don't do that" but then objected to holocaust references in the reaction to it. This was extremely 'problematic' -- not the references, the objection to them.
So, exclusionary to whom? Some people might value not dragging the dead into a dumb debate about a funny names list. It's not unreasonable.
I didn't make that comment, I agree that comment could have been worded better. I'm assuming by the use of past tense they didn't mean to suggest that they are inherently problematic for life. Edit: I don't have any additional comments on this particular happening, I believe there was several other HN threads with more than 1000 comments where this was discussed extensively.
You would probably see people using it any time a lot of people feel alienated by the behavior.
Usually I see good community managers as people who go out of their way to be agreeable to the whole community, helping to reach common ground and consensus. That's their job, to solve those people problems. The size of the circle is whatever your community defines it to be, for some communities it's obviously easier to find consensus than for others. Example from the reddit post: Linux people seem to be fine with both GPL and BSD license, but BSD people seem to view GPL as problematic. So practically speaking it seems it can be easier to reach consensus in Linux, around some particular code licensing issues anyway (Please don't start a flamewar about this, I personally don't take any sides here when it comes to licensing).
I think 'problematic' when discussing legal terms of a license is a lot less loaded than 'problematic' about a person, or personal behavior if we want to narrow that down.
It raises questions of who gets first right to be alienated. And do we credit their alienation. If I said I feel alienated by the constant social justice signalling, do I get credit for my alienation? Or do I get the stinkeye and maybe fired?
Practically speaking I don't think it's less loaded, for example if someone working on something decides suddenly that they're switching license to GPL, that has historically caused problems for BSD in the past (more than once).
It's really difficult to continue this conversation if you view the concept of justice to be alienating, what is open source if not a means to deliver code to large groups of people who would otherwise be alienated from working with that code? I don't understand. If you're not interested to help customers and be fair and just to them, I would think you would have a hard time working at any company. What is your real goal?
I view cliques as alienating, like I said above. Of course I'm for 'justice', but it's such a fuzzy word that people can have different views of what is just.
If you conducted a gallup poll, what % of Americans do you think self-identify as "I find justice alienating"?
Most reasonable people are for justice and caring, and the vast majority aren't out to find people they can label as 'problematic' and chase them off the island.
>the vast majority aren't out to find people they can label as 'problematic' and chase them off the island.
To me that it always the problem that has faced any minority groups anywhere -- it's never obvious to the majority what the alienating behavior is. So they have to painstakingly explain it, and of course some of them will always get accused of overreacting and attacking the majority. What else can be done?
I suppose we'll have to take it case by case. Sometimes someone was wronged, but much more frequently, they wanted their politics agreed to 100% and someone had a slightly different worldview, let's try to get them fired.
There's no consistency, which really ruins the label 'justice' for me. Conservative star wars lady compares conservatives being criticized to the holocaust? Fired. How dare you disrespect the dead. Basecamp people bring the holocaust into an equally stupid argument? They're heroes, everyone else is problematic.
Oscar Wilde had a quote about how patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel.. maybe we should update it to "calling people toxic is the last refuge of the antisocial". Not that sincere patriots and activists don't exist, of course.
I personally wouldn't take these incidents on twitter as indicative of anything, there is quite a lot of information missing there. You or I probably don't know the full history of the company or what transpired for it to get to that point, only the people who experienced it firsthand really know that. Social media is its own community that is really good at turning things outside itself into polarization and outrage, it's not what a community manager for some open source project would usually turn towards in order to solve problems within a community. Leave twitter's problems to twitter.
From the post and op's comments - they really hate a lot of stuff. I find that people like this who can't really handle changes they don't like have a tough time communicating about it in an effective way or doing anything about it that is meaningful. Mostly I see them try to stir up trouble that could have a negative impact on the people actually doing things and that's about it.
That was exactly the connection I made, then wondering if the author even realised the allusion. Claiming to be a “longtime BSD user”, but starting in 2013 means they’re not, not in the scheme of things, and by some decades.
As a very generic and simple computer person, BSD was off the table for me the moment I had to bother with the terminal to install it with a gui environment. Unlike Linux, BSD has a high barrier to entry similar to arch. And frankly, work, school, and social life take priority over learning how to install an OS that requires more maintenance and messing around to get things to work than even an unstable Linux distro.
I really do like the idea of BSD and have several major OS choices, but honestly Linux seems to be the solution for most "third way" OS problems until programming a new OS becomes common like 100+ years down the road. BSD just failed where Linux succeeded in being able to easily pull in the lazy nerds like me. Short of a basic terminal command and simple troubleshooting of course. BSD is like arch level of difficulty and maintenance and I don't care for it. Also it's kind of ironic that he bashes macOS when historically it's the successor of BSD. What it gets right, this guy complains about. It's simple, I don't need to worry about any of the issues he mentioned, and it's reliable. The reason other BSDs aren't is because you have to waste time making you're system work first before you can do anything else unlike almost every other major OS.
Just another supported operating system. I think it's good that we have somewhat of a variety so that it's not just the big 3. I'd really hate to see an MS and OSX only market 40 years from now.
I don’t see much future for BSD at this point - and I say that as someone who had their MBR overwritten by 386BSD core dumping once upon a time. I love BSD, and it’s simplicity, but outside of dedicated appliances, I think general purpose UNIX is long settled.
What’s more is that Docker has become the one true way to distribute software for enterprises. The dependency and package management problems are not optional anymore, and the lack of a consistent structure makes image based deployments inevitable. Yes, someone will immediately bring up that BSD had these features first, but it ignores the two advantages of universal distribution and simplicity that Docker built.
Calls macOS’s interface “fischer price”, and complains about elitism in the same sentence...
What this guy is observing is that BSD is a subculture getting swallowed by a dominant monoculture. There are a few strategies for dealing with this - one is to accept fate, give up, and join the monoculture. Another is to find a core differentiating purpose, rally around that, and hope that the monoculture sees you as complementary. This harder path does mean foregoing the benefits of economies of scale, such as having lots of other people writing drivers for you for free.
So what is the core differentiating purpose of BSD that will win the hearts of developers and convince them to turn their efforts towards it?
While not differentiating specifically for developers - as an end user, I’m gravitating more towards the BSDs since they don’t have systemd, wayland, pulsesudio, or all the other components that modern Linux has bolted on.
Frankly, there are a few distros which don't require systemd (my laptop runs one, specifically Void). Wayland is not a requirement anywhere. Pulseaudio is also not a requirement; I happily live without it. You can do without all that, unless you want the latest Gnome.
Red Hat way is not the only way with Linux, fortunately.
Lots of good points there, I’m a long time FreeBSD user too and I kinda feel the same about the continuing dependence on Linux in so many areas. I switched to Arch Linux for my day to day a couple of years ago, everything works better. It’s very hard to innovate when all your major drivers are lifted from elsewhere.
I have less sympathy on the codes of conduct complaint. Codes of conduct are pretty straightforward to follow.
I think the poster is not seeing the forest for the trees. BSD has no real use case except as a way to subsidize giant megacorp development with volunteer work.
Linux, for all its warts, is superior to BSD in nearly every way that matters to application developers and to companies who need a server OS. The areas in which BSD is superior to Linux simply aren't important enough to justify using BSD, unless you are a corporate parasite like Sony and need an operating system with a parasitism-enabling license but don't want to pay for more than a handful of developers.
The market just doesn't seem big enough to support Linux and a handful of BSDs, and at the end of the day that's the real reason why BSD appears to be dying, because there's no reason to reach for BSD when Debian and Slackware exist.
Lots of things build on top of BSD. JunOS for example is the software that powers Juniper network devices and is based on FreeBSD (which depending on the platform may itself run in a VM on top of Linux).
Several people with some form of FreeBSD commit access (including past members of FreeBSD Core Team) work for Facebook.
FreeBSD was at one point (and may still be, I haven't checked in a few years) used in the bootstrap process for FB's ISP-hosted cache clusters (because potential GPL headaches IIRC).
It's also useful to test network protocol implementations across multiple platforms (e.g. Linux + FreeBSD) and can be handy if you are working with a standards body that wants to N>1 implementations of a protocol.
Sony is pretty notorious for flipping BSD technology into products. The PS2 and PS3 are notorious for having large portions of their software derived from FreeBSD
I mean, it is definitely germane. Microsoft has always written their own software for their consoles, and Nintendo's history making console firmware is so complicated that they may as well just write it themselves. Building a mass-market console using off-the-shelf components and free software is a little more common now (See: Nintendo Switch running Android on an Nvidia Tegra), but Sony was really the first major console manufacturer to do it.
The "notoriety" portion comes from the OtherOS side of things, as the other commenter mentioned. In the PS2 era, you could order a kit from Sony containing all of the software/hardware you needed to turn your PS2 into a reasonably capable Linux machine. To make a long story short, licensing is always a concern and it blew back in Sony's face. The whole "Linux on Playstation" thing is a blemish on Sony's reputation, and it's why a lot of people call Sony the "biggest offender" license abuse.
Some people really dislike the permissive licence used by FreeBSD. They see large companies, such as Sony, using FreeBSD and they wonder whether any useful code, hardware, or cash are sent to FreeBSD as a result. It can feel to some people as "unfair", perhaps even exploitative.
It's interesting to see the culture clash between different licensing philosophies.
I tell people who want to make money off of FOSS to license as GPLv3 or AGPLv3. Offer a commercial license for money. Some people see megacorps' aversion to GPL and license as BSD, trying to believe that megacorp will come along and decide to hire them or pay them a retainer, despite the many instances of Amazon, Google, et al. ripping off some random permissively licensed project.
So much this, well said. Only issue is with SASS strip-miners muscling you out of your commercial license space. On the one hand Amazon adoption certifies the success of your product, on the other it puts any ambition of financial return to rest.
Giving up on something like that is quite narrow minded. Diversity matters and monoculture is almost never a good thing. The fact that there are open operating systems other than Linux makes Linux better too.
While you're right in terms of technical prowess, there absolutely is a use case for BSD: it has a distinct culture with different values.
There's a large group of people in technology who don't really care how something works, as long as it works for their purposes. That's set against another group who will put up with incovenience in the name of what they think is "correctness". I genuinely don't want to suggest that either group is better than the other - but they are distinct.
Around 2010 I felt that the first group had started to dominate the decisions around the direction of the Linux userland. It was wonderful to be able to switch to BSD, which I sense is used and maintained mostly by the second group. Having an OS that is aligned with your culture is a sort of a "happiness by a thousand cuts": the defaults are already what you would have set them to, you don't have to declutter after the first install and what you do want is in the package repo, your niche use cases get attention when it comes to bug fixes because they're not considered niche in that crowd, etc. When the maintainers think the way you do it feels like they've anticipated your needs - it's presumably the same feeling that Apple-culture people feel when they use an Apple product; like it was made for them.
In a lot of ways, technology has mostly become a matrix for competing cultures. From that perspective it's not a matter of what performance edge the BSDs have over Linux, it's about whether there's a distinct enough culture to justify the costs of the duplication of effort. In my mind that distinction has only grown in the last 10 years.
> BSD has no real use case except as a way to subsidize giant megacorp development with volunteer work. Linux, for all its warts, is superior to BSD in nearly every way that matters to application developers and to companies who need a server OS.
FreeBSD has ZFS in-tree as part of the base system with zero kludges (DKMS, I'm looking at you) and perfect compatibility supported directly by the core devs, as opposed to having to deal with a semi-hostile upstream (KH: "my tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existent", Torvalds: "If somebody adds a kernel module like ZFS, they are on their own. I can't maintain it, and I can not be bound by other people's kernel changes."), and it's the default filesystem out of the box for several releases now with good tooling support around it. ZFS can be hacked into a Linux distro, but it'll always be inferior.
I wish for BSD to stay around forever. Sure, on desktop it's a tricky option, but neither Linux meets my standards there. For server use, it's unmatched IMO. A polished product meant to be relied on; well-organized and pleasantly conservative—what works keeps working, what's learnt stays useful. Really hoping this sentiment won't gain too much ground.
What is the issue with dbus? I've seen a lot of complaints about it but I have yet to see anyone bother to create a viable replacement for it, after several years.
Right, but Firefox is its own special case. I don't get that complaint in the context of GTK or Qt apps -- dbus is the native IPC there. Taking it out without a replacement is just going to break things, and any replacement has to happen at the toolkit level. It's not something that the apps would ever really want to handle, unless they're already built like firefox to be self-contained and not need IPC.
>I've used FreeBSD since 2013, NetBSD since 2015.....
May be it is me, but I expect long time to be at least a decade for OS. Especially for a "category" of OS.
> OpenZFS
I do sort of understand the issue especially with OpenZFS. The change-log always mentions fixes were specifically for FreeBSD. Usually I am pessimistic in these scenario as part of a possible EEE cycle. But I do think OpenZFS, or ZFS needs FreeBSD to survive. As long as the economics and political support are there, It should be fine.
And despite being a fan of BSD, there are increasingly less reason to go with BSD as all technical, and financial benefits gravitate towards linux. Minix is dead [1] because of similar reason.
I love that the numbered points 1-3 go on and on about the dangers of "Linuxisms" and the need to use BSD as a desktop vs. MacOS and the problems with taking a patched ZFS-on-Linux as the reference upstream. Basically the standard list of purity arguments one sees, nothing special.
Then number four: "We need to stay out of the politics of the larger FOSS scene"
Dude... (And yes, I know that the author means "politics" in a different sense. But still.)
Those pieces can all be separated, but increasingly few people seem to be interested in putting in the work to do it. In particular, freedesktop is mostly just a set of standards for common protocols and file formats for an open source desktop -- I doubt anyone wants to get rid of that stuff just to have their applications all break.
It's unpopular, but I don't think most users are going to make it point 2 of a 4 point plan if it gets pulled in while installing desktop stuff from ports and packages.
Adoption of ZFS has been a real problem for BSDs. In one hand, ZFS gives them a good storage stack. In the other hand, it does not have BSD license, it does not integrate well with the rest of the kernel, and it does not differentiate them from any Linux distro with ZoL packages.
They should come up with a new file system of their own, for all BSDs, or try to use Hammer, and stop using someone's else file system.
> We are all adults, we know what is and isn't generally acceptable on the internet.
> I also, once upon a time, maintained some ports before getting banned for "conduct issues" shortly after John Marino left FreeBSD
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you are getting banned for "conduct issues" perhaps you don't actually know what is and isn't acceptable.
In 1994 I got a new 486 computer to run a unix as I was using a mix of unixes at work. It was hard to choose technically between the various BSD and Linux disks from Walnut Creek CDrom.
So I took a look into the mailing lists. On the BSD lists they were having some sort of fractious food-fight, if I remember about something like whether to ban people who ask dumb questions. On the linux list it was like "hey we got NCR 810 scsi working in 1.18".
Since I had an NCR 810, and some dumb questions, Linux (slackware) was what I tried first. 27 years later OP's post and the reddit thread confirm it was the right choice.
You do you, but I've been using *BSDs for more than 3x the length of time as this reddit user and I don't find his post or comments to be very representative of my own experience. I don't think anyone should use this comment to confirm their life choices.
> I don't think anyone should use this comment to confirm their life choices.
Same goes for the post itself, actually. You'll find disagreeable people in every domain if that's what you're focused on. Likewise if it was really all that toxic, it wouldn't last. Painting everyone with the same dismal brush does a disservice to the awesome folks that are there.
I’ve been running FreeBSD since 1998, 2.2.2, as well as pfsense and now currently TrueNAS.
I’m satisfied with what I use, but there are some unbaked annoyances, like how jails basically don’t have an orchestrator. Another is how Salt seems to be falling behind, and Ansible just has ok support. No one seems to have bothered making a module for TrueNAS and Ansible.
XI seems to want to move over to Linux with their SCALE product, which would be really annoying if in the end FreeBSD is dropped.
I don’t have a whole lot of doubts, but I do have a wishlist and having more deployments at sites would keep the toolkits flowing.
I hate to say it, but wouldn't a jail orchestrator essentially be the BSD version of systemd, docker, k8s and friends? The (admittedly few) BSD people I've talked to seem to be hostile to this concept because it's too much of a "Linuxism" but I don't think it has to be.
It could be. There is also an opportunity to make a new concept. For example, Joyent’s Triton can manage containers, zones, and servers. They are conceptually the same as FreeBSD and jails.
My thought is having a competing distro is a good thing since there is an avenue for a new spin on the state of the art.
86 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] thread" But if everyone got offended and quit a project over someone saying mean 30 years ago, all FOSS would have quickly died out. "
The snowflakes are invading FOSS and trying to take it out! We must protect ourselves!
Look at what’s going on at Basecamp. When it came out just how problematic they were and if they weren’t willing to fix things, they lost 30% of their employees. Reportedly it’s now up to 40-something percent.
For two, when the word is used in the context of inclusivity, usually the problem is that someone is behaving in a way that's exclusionary -- it's not being nice to encourage them to continue that behavior.
Take a step back and it's cliques all the way down.
And it was about a case where a funny names list had circulated, the founders said "yeah, don't do that" but then objected to holocaust references in the reaction to it. This was extremely 'problematic' -- not the references, the objection to them.
So, exclusionary to whom? Some people might value not dragging the dead into a dumb debate about a funny names list. It's not unreasonable.
Would you break out 'problematic' to describe that? How small is the circle of non problematic people?
Usually I see good community managers as people who go out of their way to be agreeable to the whole community, helping to reach common ground and consensus. That's their job, to solve those people problems. The size of the circle is whatever your community defines it to be, for some communities it's obviously easier to find consensus than for others. Example from the reddit post: Linux people seem to be fine with both GPL and BSD license, but BSD people seem to view GPL as problematic. So practically speaking it seems it can be easier to reach consensus in Linux, around some particular code licensing issues anyway (Please don't start a flamewar about this, I personally don't take any sides here when it comes to licensing).
I think 'problematic' when discussing legal terms of a license is a lot less loaded than 'problematic' about a person, or personal behavior if we want to narrow that down.
It raises questions of who gets first right to be alienated. And do we credit their alienation. If I said I feel alienated by the constant social justice signalling, do I get credit for my alienation? Or do I get the stinkeye and maybe fired?
It's really difficult to continue this conversation if you view the concept of justice to be alienating, what is open source if not a means to deliver code to large groups of people who would otherwise be alienated from working with that code? I don't understand. If you're not interested to help customers and be fair and just to them, I would think you would have a hard time working at any company. What is your real goal?
If you conducted a gallup poll, what % of Americans do you think self-identify as "I find justice alienating"?
Most reasonable people are for justice and caring, and the vast majority aren't out to find people they can label as 'problematic' and chase them off the island.
To me that it always the problem that has faced any minority groups anywhere -- it's never obvious to the majority what the alienating behavior is. So they have to painstakingly explain it, and of course some of them will always get accused of overreacting and attacking the majority. What else can be done?
There's no consistency, which really ruins the label 'justice' for me. Conservative star wars lady compares conservatives being criticized to the holocaust? Fired. How dare you disrespect the dead. Basecamp people bring the holocaust into an equally stupid argument? They're heroes, everyone else is problematic.
Oscar Wilde had a quote about how patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel.. maybe we should update it to "calling people toxic is the last refuge of the antisocial". Not that sincere patriots and activists don't exist, of course.
They're literally responding to:
> Good people don’t wanna work with problematic people.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27169569)
- Me
1. Basecamp is not OSS, and the people involved were all employees.
2. As employees, if you worked with someone for years,"it came out just how problematic they were" is a stretch.
Maybe Netcraft can be reached for comment on whether BSD is alive.
That was exactly the connection I made, then wondering if the author even realised the allusion. Claiming to be a “longtime BSD user”, but starting in 2013 means they’re not, not in the scheme of things, and by some decades.
I really do like the idea of BSD and have several major OS choices, but honestly Linux seems to be the solution for most "third way" OS problems until programming a new OS becomes common like 100+ years down the road. BSD just failed where Linux succeeded in being able to easily pull in the lazy nerds like me. Short of a basic terminal command and simple troubleshooting of course. BSD is like arch level of difficulty and maintenance and I don't care for it. Also it's kind of ironic that he bashes macOS when historically it's the successor of BSD. What it gets right, this guy complains about. It's simple, I don't need to worry about any of the issues he mentioned, and it's reliable. The reason other BSDs aren't is because you have to waste time making you're system work first before you can do anything else unlike almost every other major OS.
What do you consider to be the idea of BSD?
What’s more is that Docker has become the one true way to distribute software for enterprises. The dependency and package management problems are not optional anymore, and the lack of a consistent structure makes image based deployments inevitable. Yes, someone will immediately bring up that BSD had these features first, but it ignores the two advantages of universal distribution and simplicity that Docker built.
What this guy is observing is that BSD is a subculture getting swallowed by a dominant monoculture. There are a few strategies for dealing with this - one is to accept fate, give up, and join the monoculture. Another is to find a core differentiating purpose, rally around that, and hope that the monoculture sees you as complementary. This harder path does mean foregoing the benefits of economies of scale, such as having lots of other people writing drivers for you for free.
So what is the core differentiating purpose of BSD that will win the hearts of developers and convince them to turn their efforts towards it?
Red Hat way is not the only way with Linux, fortunately.
I have less sympathy on the codes of conduct complaint. Codes of conduct are pretty straightforward to follow.
Linux, for all its warts, is superior to BSD in nearly every way that matters to application developers and to companies who need a server OS. The areas in which BSD is superior to Linux simply aren't important enough to justify using BSD, unless you are a corporate parasite like Sony and need an operating system with a parasitism-enabling license but don't want to pay for more than a handful of developers.
The market just doesn't seem big enough to support Linux and a handful of BSDs, and at the end of the day that's the real reason why BSD appears to be dying, because there's no reason to reach for BSD when Debian and Slackware exist.
FreeBSD was at one point (and may still be, I haven't checked in a few years) used in the bootstrap process for FB's ISP-hosted cache clusters (because potential GPL headaches IIRC).
It's also useful to test network protocol implementations across multiple platforms (e.g. Linux + FreeBSD) and can be handy if you are working with a standards body that wants to N>1 implementations of a protocol.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free...
You'll see regular "Sponsored by" lines in FreeBSD commit messages from Intel, Chelsio, Mellanox/NVidia for their products. Also:
* https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/products.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS
The "notoriety" portion comes from the OtherOS side of things, as the other commenter mentioned. In the PS2 era, you could order a kit from Sony containing all of the software/hardware you needed to turn your PS2 into a reasonably capable Linux machine. To make a long story short, licensing is always a concern and it blew back in Sony's face. The whole "Linux on Playstation" thing is a blemish on Sony's reputation, and it's why a lot of people call Sony the "biggest offender" license abuse.
It's interesting to see the culture clash between different licensing philosophies.
There was previously a post on HN about this.
There's a large group of people in technology who don't really care how something works, as long as it works for their purposes. That's set against another group who will put up with incovenience in the name of what they think is "correctness". I genuinely don't want to suggest that either group is better than the other - but they are distinct.
Around 2010 I felt that the first group had started to dominate the decisions around the direction of the Linux userland. It was wonderful to be able to switch to BSD, which I sense is used and maintained mostly by the second group. Having an OS that is aligned with your culture is a sort of a "happiness by a thousand cuts": the defaults are already what you would have set them to, you don't have to declutter after the first install and what you do want is in the package repo, your niche use cases get attention when it comes to bug fixes because they're not considered niche in that crowd, etc. When the maintainers think the way you do it feels like they've anticipated your needs - it's presumably the same feeling that Apple-culture people feel when they use an Apple product; like it was made for them.
In a lot of ways, technology has mostly become a matrix for competing cultures. From that perspective it's not a matter of what performance edge the BSDs have over Linux, it's about whether there's a distinct enough culture to justify the costs of the duplication of effort. In my mind that distinction has only grown in the last 10 years.
FreeBSD has ZFS in-tree as part of the base system with zero kludges (DKMS, I'm looking at you) and perfect compatibility supported directly by the core devs, as opposed to having to deal with a semi-hostile upstream (KH: "my tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existent", Torvalds: "If somebody adds a kernel module like ZFS, they are on their own. I can't maintain it, and I can not be bound by other people's kernel changes."), and it's the default filesystem out of the box for several releases now with good tooling support around it. ZFS can be hacked into a Linux distro, but it'll always be inferior.
Unfortunately linux community is not a well defined term anymore, because there are too many people and interests involved.
>I've used FreeBSD since 2013, NetBSD since 2015.....
May be it is me, but I expect long time to be at least a decade for OS. Especially for a "category" of OS.
> OpenZFS
I do sort of understand the issue especially with OpenZFS. The change-log always mentions fixes were specifically for FreeBSD. Usually I am pessimistic in these scenario as part of a possible EEE cycle. But I do think OpenZFS, or ZFS needs FreeBSD to survive. As long as the economics and political support are there, It should be fine.
And despite being a fan of BSD, there are increasingly less reason to go with BSD as all technical, and financial benefits gravitate towards linux. Minix is dead [1] because of similar reason.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26451540
Then number four: "We need to stay out of the politics of the larger FOSS scene"
Dude... (And yes, I know that the author means "politics" in a different sense. But still.)
What exactly is this? Linux features not standardized by POSIX?
They should come up with a new file system of their own, for all BSDs, or try to use Hammer, and stop using someone's else file system.
FreeBSD defaults to the Unix File System (UFS). I'm not sure about NetBSD and the others, but I assume they are pretty much either FFS or UFS.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Fast_File_System
> I also, once upon a time, maintained some ports before getting banned for "conduct issues" shortly after John Marino left FreeBSD
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you are getting banned for "conduct issues" perhaps you don't actually know what is and isn't acceptable.
So I took a look into the mailing lists. On the BSD lists they were having some sort of fractious food-fight, if I remember about something like whether to ban people who ask dumb questions. On the linux list it was like "hey we got NCR 810 scsi working in 1.18".
Since I had an NCR 810, and some dumb questions, Linux (slackware) was what I tried first. 27 years later OP's post and the reddit thread confirm it was the right choice.
Same goes for the post itself, actually. You'll find disagreeable people in every domain if that's what you're focused on. Likewise if it was really all that toxic, it wouldn't last. Painting everyone with the same dismal brush does a disservice to the awesome folks that are there.
I’m satisfied with what I use, but there are some unbaked annoyances, like how jails basically don’t have an orchestrator. Another is how Salt seems to be falling behind, and Ansible just has ok support. No one seems to have bothered making a module for TrueNAS and Ansible.
XI seems to want to move over to Linux with their SCALE product, which would be really annoying if in the end FreeBSD is dropped.
I don’t have a whole lot of doubts, but I do have a wishlist and having more deployments at sites would keep the toolkits flowing.
My thought is having a competing distro is a good thing since there is an avenue for a new spin on the state of the art.
Good to foster open discussion early.