Seen several places: Jason Dixon’s humorous “BSD is dying” talk from NYCBSDCon06 is available with audio and slides online on Google Video and in other formats from his site.
An oft-touted benefit of the GNU Public License is that it forces organizations that use GPL code to republish their changes, so that improvements to open code can be shared. That sounds good, in principle.
According to Harald Welte, founder of the gpl-violations.org project, this clause in the GPL has never resulted in any useful code ever being returned to the community. (Thanks, HubertF)
Even though it’s been around forever, awk is still being updated, and Peter Avalos has added the latest version to DragonFly. Notice that it is the One True Awk, not GNU awk.
The call is out for papers for the 2007 USENIX Tech conference. Submissions are due by January 9th, 2007.
This week on UnixReview.com: a writeup on Tile, a new GUI toolkit for Tcl, “Exploring the CCNP Certification“, and “Test Your Knowledge of CCNP Topics“
Sys Admin Magazine is looking for writers. They want it enough to send out an email mentioning the needed topics:
Security
Server Virtualization
Linux Administration
Training and Certification
Backup and Recovery
Clustering
Database Management
Networking
Information Security
Storage
Server Management
Performance Tuning
Scripting
Last call for feedback on a new site design for dragonflybsd.org! (My fault, too.)
Matthew Dillon posted some details on how the problems of traffic were solved at BEST Internet using commodity hardware, which led into a discussion of zero-copy and also why a separate cgi-bin is good for speed.
EuroBSDCon is happening very soon. The early bird discount is ending in a few days, so sign up quickly. Attendance is planned to be in the triple digits.
BSDCan 2007 has been moved back a week because of a scheduling conflict with the hosting organization, the University of Ottowa.
Sepherosa Ziehau has a slew of new/revised drivers for testing: ural(4), rum(4), re(4), and sk(4). They are, I think, all network drivers. They are not yet committed, so please test if you have the right hardware.
OnLAMP.com has a 3-page interview with various OpenBSD developers about the features in the newest release. The interview goes into interesting detail, and for relevance, some of the newer wireless drivers in DragonFly came from this code work.
Matthew Dillon is making major changes to the namecache over the next 24 hours or so; watch out until it stabilizes. These changes should make nullfs mounting more memory-efficient, among other things, and lays a foundation for union or shadowing filesystems.
Sam Smith is looking for DragonFly developers who live in the UK and would be willing to present to the UKUUG Large Installation System Administration conference next spring.
Matthew Dillon has some comments on ssh, passwords, and security.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has managed to create a patch which, among other aspects of Linux binary support, allows the Linux Flash to work.
Firefox 2.0 has been released. If you’re looking to install it from pkgsrc, Geert Hendrickx is planning to create a separate package in pkgsrc, so that Firefox 1.5 can remain supported. Check www/firefox2 (may not exist yet; used to be wip/firefox2) for the new version.
The news may be slow, but at least it’s in-depth at OnLAMP/BSD. In addition to recently interviewing a disgruntled NetBSD committer, they’ve interviewed Kris Moore from PC-BSD and Matt Olander of iXsystems about their recent company merger/purchase.
Matthew Dillon wrote up a short bit on SMP hardware support, and how it needs to improve. Aso, as part of virtual kernel support, he committed the potential future ability to compile kernels on non-native architectures, i.e. cross-compilation, which can be handy.