Category: BSD

If you use any sort of BSD product at work, the BSD Certification group wants you to take a survey.  They are building a cross section of what people are doing with BSD, and this will show what requirements should go with the certifications.  Any BSD use applies, not just DragonFly.  The more results, the better the tests, and the more value to the certifications, so we all benefit.

Two items, picked from RSS feeds:

• People get really excited when software on Windows or a Mac manages to automatically install software.  BSD systems have been doing this for years.
• What’s the first license mentioned when Palm opens up free access to open source software? BSD.

Mahdi Montazeri sent in the URL to another new BSD site: irbsd.com.  It’s a generic web framework reposting RSS feeds from other people, without linking back to the originals, so nothing new.

Dru Lavigne has found a new cross-BSD news site, BSD News Network.   I would like to see it get away from a generic blog layout and hold something other than RSS feed data, since there’s already TheDailyBSD and BSDNews and BSDPlanet for that.

I may be a bit grumpy about it since sites that aggregate BSD news feeds often end up being something close to 50% composed of words originally typed by me, because of the Digest’s regularity.  I’d like to see BSD news sources with at least a hint of authorial voice, not machine-operated copying.  FreeBSD – the unknown Giant is close to that, for instance.

Well, technically, the title is “Twenty questions about the GPL“, but I read it more as reasons for using the BSD license.  (via)

Also, I was going to link to this article about increased BSD(ish) license adoption, and then I wasn’t, and then I found that Dru Lavigne had managed to pull out the quote that summarized the idea perfectly.

While I’m on this theme, this Coding Horror “Digital Sharecropping” article complains that people are effectively doing free labor for companies that plan to profit from that labor.  There’s a parallel between free software and the activity he’s worried about.  Not that he’s wrong, mind you, but there’s more to the story.

The FreeBSD Foundation is seeking donations – not that they aren’t always open to it, but they’re asking now instead of at the end of year rush.  The Foundation does excellent work getting developers to conferences and sponsoring projects, all of which increases the amount of free code in the world.  If you’ve got some spare cash, please donate.  It doesn’t have to be a lot, as having a large pool of donors is almost as valuable as total donation size.