BSD Magazine’s 3 previous issues are all available for download. If you like what you see, please subscribe. (via)
Messylaneous: books, lawsuits, git, more
Dear universe, including DragonFly people: stop doing so much stuff. It’s hard to keep up.
- Git in One Hour, an O’Reilly webcast. You need to register (free) and so on, but what the heck. O’Reilly doesn’t show crap.
- Poul Henning-Kamp is suing to recover the cost of Vista on his Lenovo laptop. (He’s installing FreeBSD.) I hope it comes out in his favor, though it will have little legal effect here in the U.S. (via)
- I didn’t realize this until I chimed in on the mailing lists, but one of the best books about file systems is freely available as a PDF.
- Another benefit of Hammer: you can’t run out of inodes, nor is it possible to have too many hardlinks.
- Some notes on pf usage in DragonFly. I know some parts have been mentioned before, but it’s good to sum up.
BSD licensing, in a number of ways
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.
Donation time
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.
BSD Booth worker wanted in Ohio
Dru Lavigne needs someone for the BSD booth at the Ohio Linuxfest, in late September. Please help out if you’ll be near; it’s a good way to meet people and a way to spread BSD.
I picked this up from the bsdevents Twitter feed – possibly the most comprehensive list of events out there. It’s surprising how many conventions and speaking events and etc. are out there!
EuroBSDCon 2009
EuroBSDCon 2009 is happening the 18th through 20th of September, in Cambridge, UK. There’s usually at least 2-3 DragonFly folks showing up at these – anyone planning to go?
More news, more articles
Dru Lavigne is going to be doing blogging/tweeting for the FreeBSD Project and FreeBSD Foundation. This is a good thing – BSD in general is helped by more of a conversation about what’s going on. I daresay this Digest has established that there’s definitely enough events, just with DragonFly, for daily news.
Also, Dru’s published summaries of the articles in the upcoming July ‘Collaboration’ issue of the Open Source Business Resource.
BSDTalk 175 – Michael Dexter and BSDFund
BSDTalk 175 (the semidemibicentennial?) has a 23 minute interview with Michael Dexter of BSD Fund. Did you know you can get a BSD Fund Visa card (if you are a U.S. resident) that contributes money on each purchase and has a beastie on the card? I did not.
BSD Magazine, free
The whole OpenBSD-focused issue of BSD Magazine is available online as a PDF, plus some other articles from the NetBSD issue. (via)
More compilers, easily
Sascha Wildner has posted a patch that makes it very easy to switch out the compiler used to build DragonFly. This builds on earlier work from Alex Hornung.
This should make it into the base system. Everyone’s looking at compilers that aren’t gcc these days, it seems.
License reading
Here’s some lazy Sunday reading about software licenses. Before you panic and quickly click away to something more fun, these are not flamewars.
This InformIT interview with David Chisnall of Étoilé talks about various things, but has an interesting note about BSD code and Apple about halfway down.
I think this is a much better way of encouraging corporate involvement in open source than legal bludgeons like the GPL. The BSD license is easy for even a non-lawyer to read and understand, so there is no confusion when using BSD-licensed code.
I’m thinking about this because there are people who still can’t figure out the difference.
Along the same lines, I was surprised by the number of open source programs found just by license listing in the new Palm Pre. I wish I had a spare $200.
Wandering even farther off topic, is Étoilé what Windowmaker should have evolved into?
Sampling BSD Hacks
Dru Lavigne’s excellent book ‘BSD Hacks’ is available at Scribd, and a chunk of it is readable through the preview at that site. A good chunk of what’s in there applies to DragonFly.
My copy is sitting on the shelf near by, inbetween ‘Perl Best Practices‘ and ‘The Mythical Man-Month‘.
BSD jails work better
A useful BSD item from the Howling Void: BSD jails found to be more efficient than VMWare in given situations. I am both pleased and not really surprised.
BSDTalk 174: Kris Moore
BSDTalk 174 is up, with 16 minutes of conversation with Kris Moore of iXSystems (neé PC-BSD), from BSDCon 2009.
More BSD cross-pollination: bwi(4)
Sepherosa Ziehau’s bwi(4) driver for DragonFly is going into FreeBSD 8, as mentioned in this Warner Losh blog post.
“Thousands of times more secure than bcrypt”
Mr_Bond on #dragonflybsd passed along a link to Colin Percival’s post about scrypt, a “provably as strong as possible” encryption function that is designed to withstand brute force attacks. This was presented at BSDCan 2009, but his post has more details and links.
Roguelike roguelike hacklike
Two recent roguelike items:
Gamasutra has a 4-page article about Rogue, emphasizing its origins being intertwined with the original BSD UNIX. Read the comments for some BSD history, from that actual people involved. (via)
The latest @Play column about roguelikes is very long, and that will not be a surprise after you read the title: How To Win At Nethack. I find articles like this fascinating, but then again, I also enjoyed reading through the AD&D Dungeon Master Guide for the charts.
A lot of BSD
“FreeBSD – the unknown Giant” has beaten me to the post I was intending to make, noting that there’s 4 different BSD releases this week, all of varying sizes, and showing a lot of vigor in the BSD community.
BSD Book: virtual labs
Hubert Feyrer, for his PhD, put together a Virtual Unix Lab – a whole lab of NetBSD systems for teaching System Administration. It’s a good strategy for an environment where some percentage of the systems will be irretrievably mangled. It’s available as a book.