DragonFly project statistics

Ohloh.net keeps statistics for a variety of open-source projects, including DragonFly.  It tells a story mostly based on source code analysis.  Which committer for DragonFly has the least commits?  Me!  Of course, it’s my news articles from this blog that show up on the project page, so it’s missing out on what I’ve heard called the “atmosphere” around open source projects.  Hubert Feyrer seems to think the same way.

FreeBSD progress report and comparison

The most recent FreeBSD progress report is out; among other things, it talks about work on multi-IPv4/IPv6 jails, TCP cleanup, and TCP reassembly optimization.   Interestingly, I think there’s related work in DragonFly – the DragonFly jail changes were about a year ago, and Jeff Hsu’s work on the DragonFly network stack seems similar.

I doubt there’s many people on the planet with the brainpower and time for this, but it would be interesting to have a large-scare compare/contrast of the different BSD styles for solving problems in code.

10 years of religion

Bruce Perens has put together a summary for the first decade of open source.  It’s a call to arms, not a news report. though that should not be a surprise.

This being a BSD-centric publication, I have to quibble: He defines open source as having started by his writing about it, 10 years ago, which seems somewhat arbitrary.  Also, he claims the GPLv3 is the ‘strongest’ open source license possible on the basis that people have been looking at it.  I’d argue that the BSD license has already made it through court.   The biggest problem these days appears to be patent law, which is certainly vulnerable to challenge.  (Via OnLAMP)

Non-code contributions

Matthias Schmidt sent along a link to an Undeadly article that details how Will Backman made a major improvement for OpenBSD’s SNMP support without writing any code. “I want to contribute but I’m not a coder” is a common refrain for open-source projects, including DragonFly, and we would benefit from similar testing.

As for examples of non-code contributions: Will Backman is also known for BSDTalk.  In addition, there’s what you are reading right now