FreeBSD 5.4 Released

FreeBSD 5.4 is out. Reader KFW excerpts from the announcement: "The Release Engineering Team is happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE, the latest release of the FreeBSD Stable development branch. Since FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE in November 2004 we have made many improvements in functionality, stability, performance, and device driver support for some hardware, as well as dealt with known security issues and made many bugfixes." Here are the release notes.

Re:Free BSD

[dmaxwell]

But I always ask this to the Linux guys at my compnay ( ps I also run linux ) why did linux get the market it has now and not BSD ?

Just plain marketing for one. *BSD can and probably is better by any number of measures. "Better" doesn't always equate to "sexier".

The other reason is that GPL can be more business friendly than the BSD license. The trick here is that the GPL is picky about which businesses it is friends with. For strategic reasons, a company like IBM can open something up but place the contribution under the GPL. It is perfectly free from an end user point of view but will require re-implementation on the part of a competitor who wishes to use knowledge from the code in question. This takes nothing away from scenarios where the BSD license is more "business friendly". Personally, I find the "moral" arguments around all of this induce finger drumming. If the choices were BSD or nothing or GPL or nothing then I expect we'd see much less funding of interesting projects by business.

Re:GUI to desktop

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

And that is why you fail.... Seriously, that's not the goal. OSS is your way, the way you want it. Not to replace some software company

Re:good stuff

[jbplou]

You think they could be in a stonger position then they are now. They own the desktop market, have a good position in the server market, own the office suite market, own a decent development and business integration and back end software market(think SQL Server, .NET...). How else could they improve in position in your eyes, no wait lets not worry about your eyes lets worry about reality. Microsoft is doing fantanstic business wise, sure IBM and HP rank higher on the fortune 500 but microsof doesn't do harware or consulting. For a software only company they have dominated there chosen markets for the most part. Going to an OS based on Free-BSD would make it much easier for their competitors to run software on different platforms, it would be stupid, they need product lock-in to maintain their advantage.

Re:good stuff

[IntlHarvester]

When Microsoft wrote their own kernel, *BSD was essentially obsolete, and System V UNIX was ridiclously expensive. FreeBSD is is just now adding features that were in the NT Kernel 10 years ago.

Now they've got decades worth of software designed for the very non-Unix NT kernel, so switching isn't much of an option, nor would it necessarily produce better peformance or stability.

had they gone the Apple route. Can you imagine how different things would be if they had released a Unix-based OS

Apple sells a fairly medicore Unix where all the value is proprietary API layers. I can imagine that if Microsoft had done this, they would have been tarred-and-feathered by the Unix world for Embrace-and-Extending Unix -- rather than accepted like Apple is. Lose-Lose situation.

And it wouldn't that much different either -- Windows users would still be running proprietary Win32 in orange windows and would be just as ignorant of any kernel-level features.

Re:good stuff

[netdur]

microsoft did release UNIX based OS years before they did release ms DOS, and they called it xenix [wikipedia.org], anyway... to have UNIX as OS doesn't help anything, I have IE6 running over wine on linux, lately when I start it (mainly I use IE to test my web site) IE display pop-ups with different ads every time! my homepage set to "about:blank" so the only thing I can think, I have malware running over wine on my linux box, installed trough some hole in IE, in other hand, surfing net via firefox is secure, whatever your OS is, firefox makes it secure, microsoft is in big trouble they have crapy softwares... "it just work" & "fix it later" wont work, end of microsoft has been start...
--
- ah! forgive my stupidness

Re:GUI to desktop

[Aldric]

Not all programmers are good GUI programmers. I'd say leave it to those who are best at it.