I'm not sure what the purpose of revisiting this is beyond provoking a flamewar on a slow Sunday.
That the hypervisor is effectively an operating system/kernel I have always held, and that it is a smaller and thus less vulnerable kernel is an appropriate explication I think. It's very hard to secure an all purpose kernel like Linux without actually building it yourself (and even then..)
https://www.forbes.com/2005/06/16/linux-bsd-unix-cz_dl_0616t...
Imagine being so hard you're labelled as "difficult" by no other but Linus Torvalds
"De Raadt says BSD could have become the world's most popular open source operating system, except that a lawsuit over BSD scared away developers, who went off to work on Linux and stayed there even after BSD was deemed legal."
There is some truth to that. And who knows where BSDs might have been if the lawsuit never happened.
However, I think Linux has always has and till today has better leadership, and management compared to OpenBSD.
I also think GPLv2 was another good that happened to Linux. It just creates an irresistible force to contribute back. With *BSD, a company might contribute back or it may not.
The lawsuit didn’t help. But the BSD developers shot themselves in the foot when they refused to support x86, referring to it as a “toy”.
It wasn't until Linux came along and started eating up all of BSD's user base that they freaked out and decided x86 support might be a good idea. But by then it was too late.
Generally speaking the BSDs seems really fork-a-phobic and it kinda shows given how little dynamism is there in the development those systems.
Even the Solaris derivatives have a faster tempo.
Yeah, i'm sure the lawsuit was crappy and set things back. But if you can't recover after 35 years, then its something deeper than what happened 35 years ago.
And I guess I do think that FreeBSD had a saner organization pattern than the sort of haphazard ecosystem of projects that grew up around GNU and Linux. Maybe the chaos was necessary for growth, but it still seems to be a hurdle for new Linux users in the current day.
it's dead as of july 2023: https://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/ :
> The development of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD has officially terminated as of July 2023 due to the lack of interest and volunteers. You may find the official announcement here[1]
here[1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/07/msg00176.html
oh boy its' much worse than that: KDE/GNOME were already largely precarious before that.
The whole Xorg thing was really dependant on gpu drivers and the story between linux gpu drivers and *bsd gpu drivers was so much different. Having the BSDs be fairly different didn't really help (eg: only FreeBSD had official nvidia drivers, albeit proprietary).
Gnome did take a lot of backlash and Gnome essentially became a meme at some point ("what's the use case for that?")
Gnome did take a strong dependency on systemd (both gnome and systemd are developed by Red Hat, btw).
And Gnome also did push a lot for wayland (that wasn't implemented on the various BSDs for a long time).
I haven't checked in a while, but I think Gnome is wayland-only nowadays ?
Ultimately, the real issue with KDE/GNOME and the BSDs is that the BSDs are largely irrelevant and essentially only relevant for some specific use-cases where desktop usage is not involved.
EDIT:
Since I am posting waaaaaayyyyy too fast for HN's Commodore 64 to keep up with, here is my inlined response to tverbeure below:
> There are many extremely competent engineers who can’t deal with the idea of exposing themselves to public humiliation.
I don't classify thin skinned snowflakes who do stupid things that get them screamed at by Linus, and then are butthurt about it for years, as being "extremely competent."
Imagine going through military basic training, getting screamed at by a drill instructor, and being scarred for life by that. Weak.
> There is no reason to believe that there is a causation between being a “thin skinned snowflake” and being competent.
Agreed. Being a thin skinned snowflake does not lead to competency.
Neither Linus nor Theo insult people just to insult them. They have to do something really stupid to elicit that response.
> Personally I believe being an asshole to people is doing something wrong.
You mean like downvoting and censoring posts because you don't like them, also blocking the victim from further participation in the discussion because he's now "posting too fast"? (Along with doing exactly the same to the guy who tried to help undo the censorship.) Yes, that is truly despicable, total asshole behavior. I'm waiting patiently for HN's apology tour.
And waiting..... and waiting.....
It’s perfectly possible to critique without being a bully.
What Theo and Linus are doing wrong is scaring away a large pool of potential contributors who don’t want to take that risk.
"I like Theo and the old Torvalds way better than I like most people. Too bad Torvalds allowed the Perpetually Offended Brigade to shame him into an apology tour. He did nothing wrong. EDIT:
Since I am posting waaaaaayyyyy too fast for HN's Commodore 64 to keep up with, here is my inlined response to tverbeure below:
> There are many extremely competent engineers who can’t deal with the idea of exposing themselves to public humiliation.
I don't classify thin skinned snowflakes who do stupid things that get them screamed at by Linus, and then are butthurt about it for years, as being "extremely competent."
Imagine going through military basic training, getting screamed at by a drill instructor, and being scarred for life by that. Weak.
> Personally I believe being an asshole to people is doing something wrong.
You mean like downvoting and censoring posts because you don't like them, also blocking the victim from further participation in the discussion because he's now "posting too fast"? Yes, that is truly asshole behavior. I'm waiting patiently for HN's apology tour."
There is no reason to believe that there is a causation between being a “thin skinned snowflake” and being incompetent. That said, it doesn’t surprise me at all that some kind of people would make that assumption.
https://taviso.decsystem.org/virtsec.pdf
He’s not wrong based on the research at the time. The mistake is presenting this as if it’s something that will be true for all time. Is virtualization a panacea? No. CPU manufacturers can’t even protect against side channel attacks. But it’s completely missing what this provides which is that the difficulty and cost of creating an exploit is higher today than 20 years ago. And it’s amusing to hear someone blasting away at the security of others when BSD has its own share of problems and architectural weaknesses are discovered through popularity of your system being an attack target, not because you’re smarter than everyone else and made better choices (sometimes it can be true in places, but harder to maintain for a big piece of software like an OS)
https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1tf1iy/imap_inventor...
>From: Mark Crispin, To: comp.lang.emacs
>What mindless cretin thought that it should be a good idea to make line-move-visual be the default in emacs 23? I just found out about this charming "improvement" in the worst possible way. Investigation determined that a "routine" software update had just installed emacs 23 and gave me this "improvement".
>People wonder why everybody hasn't dumped proprietary desktop software. This is an example why. Emacs' line behavior has well over 30 years of history, and some bagbiter goes and changes it BY DEFAULT.
>Add all the cute new features you want. But leave the goddamn defaults alone.
>If you want to have your own playpen where you twiddle defaults to your hearts content, have at it. But don't pretend that you produce software for a production environment, and stop telling the Linux distributions that they should "upgrade" to your "improved" versions. People doing real work depend upon those distributions.
>It does no good to say "read the release notes" when the affected users don't get the release notes and don't even know that a new release happened. It is also unreasonable to expect users to subscribe to every obscure newsgroup, forum, and wiki to hear about changes that will turn their expectations upside down.
>Yes, I fixed my .emacs file. And I'm putting in the same change to all the .emacs files on all the dozens of other machines I use, even though they still have emacs 22, because otherwise this unpleasant surprise will repeat itself over and over again.
>Grr.
>From: Mark Crispin, To: comp.lang.emacs
>They made the wrong decision. Changes to default behavior are a bad idea. Changes to default behavior of the most basic functionality are an extremely bad idea.
>I don't care if M-X fart-noisily-with-spray changes its default scent from skunk to lemon. But I damn well do care about the most basic operations: all CTRL single letter and ESC single letter. After 33+ years of using emacs, I expect these to be reliable and not suddenly change.
>I wasted hours trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with my file, or my terminal emulator window, or my system. The fact that the problem went away on a different system added further confusion. It was only when I did ESC <n> CTRL/N and saw that it moved me the wrong number of lines, but only on one system, that I realized that emacs changed. And that's when I did ESC X describe-key CTRL/N and read about line-mode-visual, although it did not mention that this was now the default.
>Surprise. Grr.
"My favorite part of the "many eyes" argument is how few bugs
were found by the two eyes of Eric (the originator of the
statement). All the many eyes are apparently attached to a
lot of hands that type lots of words about many eyes, and
never actually audit code." -Theo de Raadt
OpenBSD is only secure because because it does pretty much nothing and does it very slowly (its firewall just recently broke the 4gbps firewalling capabilty, for example) but somehow a cult has formed around it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A smart person can come up with post-hoc rationalizations that hold up under some scrutiny, to the point it is very hard to convince them otherwise. Add to that people who became famous or successful on the back of "being right" on some subject matter, getting used to "being right even in the face of overwhelming push back", and you have a recipe for very smart people being very wrong in very visible/loud ways.