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Free Talk Live => General => Topic started by: Alex Libman on February 26, 2011, 11:39:24 PM

Title: Copyfree Software
Post by: Alex Libman on February 26, 2011, 11:39:24 PM
This is gonna be a continuation of my "Software Freedom Scale (http://bbs.freetalklive.com/general/software-freedom-scale/)" thread, since I am no longer allowed to "necro" the old one.  I'll post another one of my "news roundups" shortly.  But first - a simple poll to get things started.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Zhwazi on February 27, 2011, 12:23:29 AM
One vote for yes here. I avoid GPL software whenever I can. Mostly for quality reasons though, proprietary and BSD licensed software tends to be good at what it aims to do, whereas any programming wannabe inspired by The Evil Hippie's arrogance that can hack together something in a script that starts with "#!/bin/bash" will put their crap under GPL.

I try to go BSDL as far as I can. My FreeBSD server has an Apache/PostgreSQL/PHP stack running Serendipity. Apache license is the most restrictive in the entire stack and even it's pretty BSD-like in the end. Can't wait until Clang replaces GCC in FreeBSD base. FreeBSD removing the remaining bits of GNU code from it's source tree are a well-deserved "fuck you" to the culty GPL crowd.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: MacFall on February 27, 2011, 04:50:45 PM
There wasn't an option for "what is this i dont even", so I didn't vote.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Alex Libman on February 27, 2011, 10:29:08 PM
You have the option of not voting until you RTFM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM) on permissive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_free_software_licence) (aka copyFREE (http://copyfree.org/)) vs restrictive (aka viral / "copyLEFT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft)") open source software licenses...  I've been ranting about this (http://forum.freestateproject.org/index.php?topic=19771) for a very long time now (http://bbs.freetalklive.com/general/software-freedom-scale/)...
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Alex Libman on March 04, 2011, 03:54:06 PM
The "Copyfree Software (http://copyfree.org/) News Roundup" is back!



















And, in conclusion...  More Devilettes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devilette)!  ;)


(http://alexlibman.net/img/bak/bsd-devilettes.jpg) (http://alexlibman.net/img/bak/bsd-devilettes.jpg)


Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: LTKoblinsky on March 04, 2011, 10:47:19 PM
Didn't RTFM (read the...?), but I've got Ubuntu on this laptop. I'm decently satisfied with it, but try to avoid all of the commie, hippie BS behind it. So, is this BSD an OS?
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Zhwazi on March 05, 2011, 03:47:49 AM
Rant warning.

I was interested in OpenBSD for a little bit. I eventually got turned off by the indignant attitudes and disregard for security understood to mean anything deeper than lack of vulnerability. No RBAC or ACL's, nothing like jails or zones except the insufficient chroot, it's kinda sad. I also can't stand hero worship. A community where dropping names and following drama is the norm is not a community worth participating in, and OpenBSD's community has a lot of name dropping and drama. You never see that in the FreeBSD community. The FreeBSD foundation puts out a statement against the GPLv3 (http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/2007Aug-newsletter.shtml), and it's very formal, with no bitterness or disrespect to be found. The analogous event in the OpenBSD community was when RMS himself decided to troll (successfully!) the OpenBSD people on their "recommendations" of unFree Software and stirs up the hive.

Who is the hero of GNU? Richard Stallman.
Who is the hero of Linux? Linus Torvalds.
Who is the hero of OpenBSD? Theo de Raadt.
Who is the hero of FreeBSD?
...
Who is the hero of FreeBSD? The biggest names you'll hear dropped aren't specific to FreeBSD, but generally to all BSDs and Unix in general. Marshall Kirk McKusick is sort of a visible name, but isn't anywhere near the relative hero stature for FreeBSD of the other people named. And he's been doing BSD for what 25 years, that aside he's not much of a hero anymore than Dennis Ritchie or Ken Thompson or Bill Joy, these are the names of prominent Unix developers, not of prominent FreeBSD developers. FreeBSD isn't a personality cult, it's a community.

The Linux community is full of microcosms of this, with every wannabe hero starting a new distro to try to scratch their itch. There's little standardization or consensus, everything is about you should do it this way and how everything else either sucks or is only "okay".

The FreeBSD community is more community than personality cult, which cannot be said of the other projects I named. The biggest fork of FreeBSD right now is probably PC-BSD, and PC-BSD is almost deferential in respect to FreeBSD, including a plain vanilla FreeBSD installer on their installation media.

They don't start up hissyfights about the terrible things that make one sound system suck (OSS) and try to reimplement an entirely new audio subsystem (ALSA) that has been nothing but problems since its inception but which remains backward compatible with the old API because nobody wants to use the new API despite marking the old one as depracated. (They're doing the same thing to X with Wayland. They're adding a new layer of complexity that nobody will use directly so they're going to be running X in Wayland anyways. Way to go Linux idiots.) They don't change their startup control mechanism every 3 years, they don't change device enumeration and abstraction every year, they don't change the userland sound system every time the wind changes direction, they don't acrete 50 incompatible filesystems nothing else ever uses, and they don't bump version numbers just to garner excitement after noticing it dying down. They don't reject great technology like DTrace and ZFS and GCD, they don't use gross misunderstandings and complaints of rampant layering violations to comfort them away from their cognitive dissonance, and insist that they can reimplement the same thing better because they're fucking Linux and they can be everything to everyone and power your router and the world's most powerful supercomputer hooah.

FreeBSD's community is open, collaborative, cooperative, respectful, and generally disinterested in stupid drama. It's the biggest operating system community with these traits. And the OS is nice too.

End Rant.


It's interesting how you get such different mindsets for software from people with different license philosophies. Copyleft software is generally quick and dirty, the implementation sucks and it's constantly being rewritten or reimplemented. Copyfree stuff is generally higher quality, even if it usually has less bells and whistles. Compare PostgreSQL vs MySQL, tmux vs screen, obviously BSD vs Linux, zsh vs bash, clang vs gcc.

I think copyfree software is winning in the long run. They appear to get 90% as much done with 10% of the effort and nowhere near the corporate backing and manipulation. A copyfree desktop would be great, I've tried to use enlightenment and was impressed by how well it does what it does, but it's still not at the point where I can replace my Qt apps and KDE with EFL apps and Enlightenment.


Quote from: LTKoblinsky on March 04, 2011, 10:47:19 PM
Didn't RTFM (read the...?), but I've got Ubuntu on this laptop. I'm decently satisfied with it, but try to avoid all of the commie, hippie BS behind it. So, is this BSD an OS?
It's more like a family of OSes, including the three big BSD's (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD), Mac OS X (mostly FreeBSD in the middle layers), and to an extent Solaris (less so since the end of the SunOS days). When people say BSD they're mostly talking about FreeBSD, NetBSD, or one of the various derivatives or forks (OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD, lots of smaller ones).

The BSD's have none of that commie hippie BS. There is a little bit of distaste for Windows, but unlike most of the Linux community you'll find, they aren't under any kind of delusion that they're going to destroy proprietary software. I like to put it as, "BSD is for people who love free and open software. Linux is for people that hate proprietary software."

If you're thinking of playing with it get PC-BSD. BSD's are generally rough around the edges, but simple, and if you're like me in this regard you might prefer a simple and robust tool to a beautiful but fragile one. It does almost all the same stuff, and if you must have something that doesn't run natively on BSD it has a Linux binary compatibility layer and Wine for running Windows stuff.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Alex Libman on March 05, 2011, 03:26:12 PM
That's an excellent "rant", Zhwazi, thank you!   :D

I agree with most things that you've said, but I'm a bit less optimistic about FreeBSD.  It is almost as bloated as Linux, with its own accumulation of restrictive licensing crud (http://marc.info/?t=128634321000002).  I was famously (http://bbs.freetalklive.com/hijack-free-zone/best-socialist-forums-to-troll/msg582903/#msg582903) [2] (http://bbs.freetalklive.com/general/software-freedom-scale/msg582991/#msg582991) banned from the official FreeBSD forums (http://forums.freebsd.org/) (and had ALL of my posts deleted, even constructive / technical ones!) by that fascist asshole DutchDaemon for daring to express a contrary opinion in a thread calling for government violence (http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=10174) against Sun and Oracle shareholders...  That is something I do not ever forgive!   :x :x :x  (Ian is an exception I guess.)  The sad truth is that BSD projects get even more government funding than GPL ones, and their culture reflects that quite a bit (http://marc.info/?t=129750909300001)...  At least OpenBSD is a bit farther away from Berkeley and a bit less likely to get government grants (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_de_raadt#DARPA_funding_cancellation).

I don't mind the BDFL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_Dictator_For_Life) / "hero worship" if the guy deserves it and isn't a jerk, because in a Copyfree project people are always free to fork it.  From what I gather Linus is an awesome guy, but sometimes he's too nice, and that leads to bloat - kernel configurability has made it a non-issue, but there might be scaling limits to that as well.  Theo does deserve the recognition that he gets, and he has good reasons for excluding some technologies that people who know what they're doing can do without.  I disagree with his inclusion of perl (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_License) and more userland GNU shit than he had to (especially the super-fugly FVWM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM)), but aside from that he's kept things pretty lean.

OpenBSD's security is aimed at a particular set of applications, or it otherwise becomes a joke.  For example, its inferior package repository and lack of binary updates for -stable leads a lot of people (including myself) to put their "faith" in a lot of side-projects, like that Chromium binary (http://chromium.hybridsource.org/) I've just mentioned, or www.openbsd-stable.org (http://www.openbsd-stable.org/) (which I even mirror (http://alexlibman.net/dl/openbsd-stable/)).  There are also half-dozen other packages that aren't in ports so I have to fetch and compile them myself.  If any of those sources ever becomes malicious, or is hijacked by a third party, a lot of OpenBSD machines are going to get seriously fucked!  (Especially if people running OpenBSD on the desktop are storing ssh keys to other OpenBSD servers.)  Even on Windows you can usually limit your downloads to just Microsoft and one trustworthy freeware downloads site!

Regarding a "copyfree desktop" - that's an aging paradigm.  The Web browser is the new desktop!  OK, you still need xterm with lots of command line / textual interface apps (including for P2P downloads, chat/IM, etc), mplayer for video, an IDE (if you can't do everything in vim), and a tiling window manager like wmii (http://wmii.suckless.org/).  This stack still relies on a few GPL'ed components, but their number will shrink eventually.  I even install Gimp when I need it (and uninstall it when I don't).  However I think in the long run everything will be doable from inside the browser, including tab / tile / window management, command line interaction, etc, etc, etc - even high-end multimedia editing and 3D games!  And it wouldn't necessarily be "trusting the cloud" because the server-side components can run (and/or cache stuff) locally as well.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Zhwazi on March 05, 2011, 06:46:53 PM
I have doubts about the feasibility of a browser replacing native applications. The responsiveness just isn't there and computation can be done much faster in native, machine-and-OS dependent code. There's definitely a lot that it can do, but we aren't there yet.

As it currently stands there aren't any serious operating systems that don't have a history of either corporate or government sponsorship, directly or indirectly. Minix I don't believe gets government grants but it's not quite a serious OS for general use yet. I think this is more an issue of, with all the government induced market insanity, this is how it gets done. I'd take a government grant as well, they'll tax me out of it in the long run anyways. OpenBSD did get military grants but as you said, probably not a lot more on the way.

By the way, does OpenBSD still have a giant kernel lock or is its SMP reasonable yet? Last I used it (4.5 I think?) the kernel was single-threaded and the amd64 edition saw only 3.2 out of 6 GB of RAM. If they've gotten beyond this I'd like to give OpenBSD another shot but I dont have any systems that don't have multiple cores anymore and I don't see much sense in running an OS that can't use them fully.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Alex Libman on March 05, 2011, 07:34:17 PM
Replying to the above paragraph by paragraph:

I'm talking about the coming decade.  Google's Native Client will go a long way in bridging the in-browser performance gap.  Even the local operating systems will eventually be 99% managed code, so it doesn't really matter if that code is accessed from the hard disk or via HTTP (although the security policies would obviously differ).

There's nothing wrong with corporate sponsorship.  I'd be running Windows right now (http://bbs.freetalklive.com/general/linux-sucks-java-sucks-i'm-a-microsoft-guy-again!/) if it offered me more as a Web-centric developer.  It certainly does the best job in terms of Web browser selection and performance (http://www.tuxradar.com/content/browser-benchmarks-2-even-wine-beats-linux-firefox) - I need to remote-access / emulate a Windows box anyway, because most clients would be rather offended if their sites didn't work right on IE.  New technologies like AJAX, HTML5, and HTTP(P2P) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP%28P2P%29) might actually be a Linux killer, because the one area where Linux dominates, servers, will diminish in importance, while the importance of hardware acceleration and compatibility will increase.

Yeah, OpenBSD performance still sucks, but if you have enough CPU power it's not so bad.  It is a cilice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cilice) that I wear in the name of freedom.  :roll:
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Zhwazi on March 05, 2011, 10:48:42 PM
What I would be hoping for instead of AJAX interfaces and such would be something more like a client-server model to most applications where zero latency between cause and effect isn't a priority, like transmission-daemon or quassel or mpd, where you could theoretically use any interface you like including web interfaces or native UI widgets to communicate with a server process that doesn't necessarily have to be on the same system. Web browsers might be a universal client with their own, standard, cross-platform, easy-to-learn language for building interfaces, but it seems silly to think that this will be the farthest extent of it, especially as new types of interfaces like touch, and voice control likely to become more mainstream as voice recognition software continues to improve. Your standard AJAX page in a web browser may become the least-common-denominator for development of UI's with native UI clients likely providing better usability.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Alex Libman on March 05, 2011, 11:47:01 PM
I definitely agree about app client-server model with multiple types of clients being able to communicate with the server API.  This API could be accessed by scripts, by command-line clients, and by AJAX interfaces (which could operate in several modes - optimized for phones, optimized for touchscreens, etc).  I just don't see much point in using any existing native widgets anymore (ex. Qt, GTK, wx, etc).  Maybe I'm biased because of the licensing, but it seems that anything native widgets can do, HTML5+ / AJAX will soon do just as well, providing an easily accessible and consistent interface across all platforms.  It's also a lot easier to get users to try an app by simply clicking a link rather than having to install something locally!

Of course there are other in-browser technologies in addition to HTML5, but if even Microsoft is downplaying Silverlight in favor of HTML5, I think JavaFX, AIR, and even the almighty Flash will someday follow.  Something like HTML6 (although they won't use this versioning scheme anymore) can combine HTML5 with what Google is doing with Native Client to provide pre-optimized binary sites, complete with standardized logical objects that are no less accessible than any native widget toolkit.

BTW, here's another point of view in an article once recommended to me by Sprewell (the aforementioned Hybrid Source (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=sprewell_licensing&num=1) / Chromium porting guy) - A New Thin Client (http://www.osnews.com/story/21966/A_New_Thin_Client).
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Zhwazi on March 06, 2011, 01:42:16 AM
I expect competition from browser based UI's to push native-execution UIs to be better. They're different tools, AJAX UI's will be the general purpose ones and natively executing UIs will be for applications where sophistication and responsiveness matter. Neither one is going to completely supplant the other, AJAX UI's are just new so their growth hasn't approached their own limiting factors yet.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: TimeLady Victorious on March 06, 2011, 07:32:18 PM
Stallman pisses me off.

But I do what I want cuz a pirate is free
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: TimeLady Victorious on March 06, 2011, 07:53:03 PM
Although seriously,  when I get the next computer I have - when I get around to _building_ a computer - it's probably gonna be dual-booting a flavor of BSD and a flavor of Linux.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Riddler on March 06, 2011, 09:19:43 PM
where's the re-ban libman button?
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: The ghost of a ghost of a ghost on March 07, 2011, 12:03:20 AM
This thread is geeky for sure.
But it's way more interesting than "me feckin truck" or any other ass clown thread with your half ass ebonic-like typing.
Thats all.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Alex Libman on March 07, 2011, 04:47:41 PM
Please don't feed the troll.


Quote from: TimeLady Victorious on March 06, 2011, 07:32:18 PM
Stallman pisses me off.

But I do what I want cuz a pirate is free

That's like saying, "Obama pisses me off, but I'll wear an Obama t-shirt and vote for him cause I'm a pirate, arrr".  :roll:


Quote from: TimeLady Victorious on March 06, 2011, 07:53:03 PM
Although seriously,  when I get the next computer I have -
when I get around to _building_ a computer -
it's probably gonna be dual-booting a flavor of BSD and a flavor of Linux.

(What's with the double-posting trend?  I'd just edit the previous post, but perhaps that's just me - always trying to maximize the substance per megapixel that I take up.)

Dual-booting is for people who can't commit.  There's really no reason to install more than one OS on bare hardware.  Whenever I need to test something on Windows (ex. IE9), Solaris, another BSD, Haiku, or Loonix, it's much faster to launch an emulated instance (which can have its memory saved, so it opens instantly), or remote-access a test computer in the cloud (ex. CloudSigma (http://www.cloudsigma.com/)).  The latter is also great for any processing-intensive scripts I gotta run - rent as many gigahertz you want on demand!  I also hear they're coming up with a way to run Windows from a LiveDVD.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: TimeLady Victorious on March 08, 2011, 12:24:33 AM
I seek liberty and I don't give a fuck about software licenses.

That being said, you're damn right I can't commit to a single OS.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Zhwazi on March 08, 2011, 12:31:45 AM
A valid reason to dual-boot is to test if you can run the OS on your hardware and see how well it runs in order to evaluate using it as a full-time operating system. Dual-booting in the long run doesn't usually work out because you always end up using one or the other system and the other one is just taking up space on your partition table.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: TimeLady Victorious on March 08, 2011, 02:00:51 AM
Quote from: Zhwazi on March 08, 2011, 12:31:45 AM
A valid reason to dual-boot is to test if you can run the OS on your hardware and see how well it runs in order to evaluate using it as a full-time operating system. Dual-booting in the long run doesn't usually work out because you always end up using one or the other system and the other one is just taking up space on your partition table.

Yeah, that's kinda why I went to Ubuntu fulltime, because I realized I didn't give much of a shit about Windows after a while.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Sam Gunn (since nobody got Admiral Naismith) on March 08, 2011, 11:10:42 AM
Quote from: TimeLady Victorious on March 08, 2011, 02:00:51 AM
Quote from: Zhwazi on March 08, 2011, 12:31:45 AM
A valid reason to dual-boot is to test if you can run the OS on your hardware and see how well it runs in order to evaluate using it as a full-time operating system. Dual-booting in the long run doesn't usually work out because you always end up using one or the other system and the other one is just taking up space on your partition table.

Yeah, that's kinda why I went to Ubuntu fulltime, because I realized I didn't give much of a shit about Windows after a while.
Same here, except I went the other way and stuck with Windows full time.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Zhwazi on March 08, 2011, 11:54:43 AM
I used to multiboot between 13 different OSes including various Linux distros, all three BSD's, GNU HURD, and Windows XP and Vista (7 wasn't out yet). At the end I wiped them all out and put OpenSolaris on that system because OpenSolaris is pretty awesome.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Alex Libman on March 08, 2011, 03:13:21 PM
WOW - did you accomplish the 13-OS feat with GRUB or something else?

Of course that's just vanity.  Every once in a while I go through an OS-hopping phase, which is made a lot easier by my habit of storing snapshots of my previous installations on a local file server.  (I think this started from all the time I've spent playing around with Gentoo, which sort of encourages you to save everything.)  One can have any OS image backed up and restored in just a few minutes - or even seconds with some scripting, a faster network, and SSD.  My method also has added advantages like being able to open any saved image in virtualization without all the dangers of virtualizing a live partition.


I've never tried OpenSolaris directly, but I've been using Sun's Solaris at work since the 90s - and I always hated it.  For example, a lot of servers didn't have a compiler back then (added licensing cost tens of thousands of dollars!) and getting GNU working on it or finding all the right binaries to do without a compiler was still a major pain in the butt back then.  Then I almost never used Solaris for almost a decade, but decided to give Solaris 11 Express a try a couple of months ago (with added OpenSolaris package repository). 

The first thing I noticed, coming from OpenBSD, was how freaking memory-hungry Solaris 11 was!  (I didn't notice this in the past, perhaps because I always worked on it on humongous Oracle servers - you wouldn't believe the size of the databases I once worked with...)  Also the 32-bit support is a joke - Solaris is not performance-competitive with Linux and perhaps not even FreeBSD unless you have a fast 64-bit machine (especially sparc64) and plenty of RAM.  On an older Intel x86 computer it can be even slower than OpenBSD, even without all the GUI Java crap Sun/Oracle now encourages you to run on top of it! 

So it was a major disappointment.  I might give Solaris another try after I get a new Laptop and after Oracle has had more time to turn it into a viable proprietary UNIX with all the open source shit scraped out.  Having native Nvidia drivers and Flash is definitely a huge advantage on the desktop, but it has little to offer Linux users who are not anti-copyLEFT zealots like myself...


I've been giving a lot of thought to going back to Windows...  (As you know, I've thought about that many times (http://bbs.freetalklive.com/general/linux-sucks-java-sucks-i'm-a-microsoft-guy-again!/) over the past few years...)

Windows feels like a different planet where everything is weird compared to every other planet I've been on, but it's nostalgic as well...  It does offer plenty of advantages, especially as developer focus gradually moves ever-more from the server to the client (i.e. AJAX, HTML5+, HTTP-P2P, etc).  Windows is definitely the best Web developer and Web multimedia workstation you can get, even simply because you do have to test Web-based features as your clients will see them, and a huge fraction of the Internet runs the Web browsers that won't run on any UNIX OS (ex. Linux and FreeBSD are missing native IE and Safari, Solaris is also still missing Chrome, OpenBSD is also missing Opera, etc).  Windows also offers better browser performance for the browsers that are available, and more / better IDE's and other tools available for it as well.

Best of all, Windows liberates you from having struggles of conscience about bowing down to the GNU or Berkeley-loving commies you meet in the FLOSS world!  No one has ever banned me from a Microsoft forum for stating the truth!  (And I never really needed to use a Microsoft forum because everything in the Microsoft world is so well implemented, well-documented, and intuitive.)  And certainly no one at Microsoft has ever called me a "troll"!

On the other hand, can Microsoft really be trusted in a Galt's Gulch / seasteading scenario?  In some ways corporations are the best friends of liberty, but the governments have their hooks in them pretty deep...  :?

Man, why can't anything in life just be freaking straightforward?!  I could have completed a CS Masters and a PhD in the time I've wasted OS-hopping and thinking about the licensing politics crap!
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: blackie on March 08, 2011, 03:40:25 PM
I ended up running windows 7 on my new system cus if the kids want to use it for their games, it pretty much needs to. It is running VMware Server so I can mess around with other OSes. It's worked well so far.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Zhwazi on March 08, 2011, 11:08:35 PM
I used 3 separate disks. One of them had Sun's hacked-up GRUB (needed for ZFS support), one had a normal GRUB, and one had the normal Windows bootloader (though I added entries to other OSes to it).


Opensolaris had pretty good package management for the most part, a big improvement over Solaris Express, had a totally different package management that was more like most Linux distros on the front end, and didn't give me any weird or stupid package dependency issues. The software available wasn't usually very limiting, though it did take a while to find a working Blender binary. The service management was pretty easy too, and the snapshotting (works like Apple's TimeMachine but on the local disk) was well implemented. The transactional and rollbackable upgrades were really cool as well, I've never used another OS that offered anything like it except for the FreeBSD install I did manually to achieve the same effect. It had its hassles but for the most part it was pretty trouble-free. I only stopped using it because of the Oracle deal. I still keep an eye on OpenIndiana and IllumOS. The licensing is not as free as BSD but it's less than GPL and is GPL-incompatible (sort of? there's disagreement). Play with it a little bit, OpenSolaris is different in a number of ways from Solaris. After you dig in deeper than the initial sickeningly ubuntuesque GNOME default there's some neat stuff there that I would like to see default in other operating systems.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: TimeLady Victorious on March 09, 2011, 02:06:25 AM
Quote from: Zhwazi on March 08, 2011, 11:54:43 AM
I used to multiboot between 13 different OSes including various Linux distros, all three BSD's, GNU HURD, and Windows XP and Vista (7 wasn't out yet). At the end I wiped them all out and put OpenSolaris on that system because OpenSolaris is pretty awesome.

I might switch to that instead of Ubuntu eventually because I like what I've read about ZFS.

But I can't think of any other reason not to go BSD unless BSD supports that as well for the /home partition or whatever you call it in BSD.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Alex Libman on March 09, 2011, 10:35:42 AM
FreeBSD lets you mount ZFS partitions with a limited set of features.  (As does NetBSD (http://wiki.netbsd.org/users/haad/porting_zfs/), and to some degree pretty much every major OS except Windows and OpenBSD.)  FreeBSD 8.2's "improved ZFS" is actually just Zpool version (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Comparisons) 15 (`zpool upgrade -v`), while Solaris 11 is at least v31, which means absence of Solaris FS features (http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/appendixa-1/index.html) like ZFS-level encryption, deduplication, RAID-Z (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_RAID_levels#RAID-Z) 3, etc.  However, you can bring FreeBSD 8.2 up to Zpool v28 via a patch (http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2010-December/010321.html), and that's already included in FreeBSD 9-CURRENT (http://www.freebsdnews.net/2011/03/01/zfs-v28-in-freebsd-9-current/).

I tend to stay away from FS-dependent tricks to keep my work portable, and in ZFS's case for license (http://www.sun.com/cddl/cddl.html) purity as well.  OpenBSD is great for conservative grouches like me.  Though I still have big dreams that DragonFly's (http://www.dragonflybsd.org/hammer/) HAMMER (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAMMER) would catch up to ZFS someday, and, because of its licensing, become the universal FS that works on everything - Windows, OpenBSD, Linux, Solaris, AIX, etc.  But I'm not holding my breath...  :roll:
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Zhwazi on March 09, 2011, 12:37:07 PM
Quote from: TimeLady Victorious on March 09, 2011, 02:06:25 AM
Quote from: Zhwazi on March 08, 2011, 11:54:43 AM
I used to multiboot between 13 different OSes including various Linux distros, all three BSD's, GNU HURD, and Windows XP and Vista (7 wasn't out yet). At the end I wiped them all out and put OpenSolaris on that system because OpenSolaris is pretty awesome.

I might switch to that instead of Ubuntu eventually because I like what I've read about ZFS.

But I can't think of any other reason not to go BSD unless BSD supports that as well for the /home partition or whatever you call it in BSD.

You can do ZFS on root, however it doesn't multiboot very well because it works best on a GPT partitioned disk, and most OSes (including Windows) can't boot off anything but MBR on most systems.


Quote from: /sbin/libmand on March 09, 2011, 10:35:42 AM
FreeBSD lets you mount ZFS partitions with a limited set of features.  (As does NetBSD (http://wiki.netbsd.org/users/haad/porting_zfs/), and to some degree pretty much every major OS except Windows and OpenBSD.)  FreeBSD 8.2's "improved ZFS" is actually just Zpool version (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Comparisons) 15 (`zpool upgrade -v`), while Solaris 11 is at least v31, which means absence of Solaris FS features (http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/appendixa-1/index.html) like ZFS-level encryption, deduplication, RAID-Z (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_RAID_levels#RAID-Z) 3, etc.  However, you can bring FreeBSD 8.2 up to Zpool v28 via a patch (http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2010-December/010321.html), and that's already included in FreeBSD 9-CURRENT (http://www.freebsdnews.net/2011/03/01/zfs-v28-in-freebsd-9-current/).

I tend to stay away from FS-dependent tricks to keep my work portable, and in ZFS's case for license (http://www.sun.com/cddl/cddl.html) purity as well.  OpenBSD is great for conservative grouches like me.  Though I still have big dreams that DragonFly's (http://www.dragonflybsd.org/hammer/) HAMMER (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAMMER) would catch up to ZFS someday, and, because of its licensing, become the universal FS that works on everything - Windows, OpenBSD, Linux, Solaris, AIX, etc.  But I'm not holding my breath...  :roll:


I use ZFS root on GPT partitions on all my FreeBSD systems.

ZFS's license may be impure, but it's not viral like GPL is, so in that sense I find it more tolerable than for example GCC. I'm patiently awaiting 9.0-RELEASE, I don't want to patch an 8.2 system and break backward compatibility in case I need to roll back.

Maybe someday HAMMER will outperform and outfeature ZFS, but it doesn't look like it's going to be soon. Such a shame that Btrfs isn't free (fucking Linux).
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Alex Libman on March 15, 2011, 06:50:14 PM
I'm always experimenting, and I'm running FreeBSD instead of OpenBSD at the moment.  The purpose of this rant is to say "bah, humbug" to the added benefits that FreeBSD claims to offer.


Performance

FreeBSD is faster based on the default settings, since OpenBSD is fanatical about security and stability, but there are many things you can do to equalize the playing field.  I'm not saying that OpenBSD can be as fast as FreeBSD, but the gap isn't as wide as most people think.  Network performance, for example, can be significantly improved with some tweaking (https://calomel.org/network_performance.html).  Other performance differences come as the result of memory management - you'll notice OpenBSD frees up as much memory as possible, which has certain security advantages.  Having to say NO to copyleft and proprietary code in the kernel did reduce OpenBSD's performance a bit, as did the focus on source code readability and simplicity.  And then there's proactive security, crypto, etc...

You must remember that CPU cycles are just a commodity, like the fuel efficiency of a car - Gentoo Linux is a Prius, Fedora is a Honda Civic, FreeBSD is a minivan with half a Honda Civic strapped to the roof, and properly set up OpenBSD is a Hummer with a 5 tons of missile launchers attached.  Sure, the latter is more expensive, but which would you rather drive?  :twisted:

So, yes, I would be willing to pay more for CPU to run a "Copyfreer" and more secure OS, and those added CPU cycles will also benefit the things where OpenBSD is just as fast.  Given enough CPU power, all things are possible - even lighting-fast Windows (http://bbs.freetalklive.com/hijack-free-zone/microsoft/) 7/8 with all the graphical bullshit running in virtualization on top of OpenBSD!

But one thing that isn't a commodity is security - once your secret data leaks, you're screwed for good!  Code auditing and security will become increasingly important as operating systems come to control things like home intrusion detection systems, self-driving cars, robots, medical devices, cyborg implants, holograms / virtualization suits that offer real physical stimulation (and could thus hurt the user if they malfunction), etc, etc, etc.

The Klingons don't care how fuel-efficient your starship is, but whether they can hack past your shields could be a matter of life and death!  :roll:


Alleged Desktop Advantages of FreeBSD

On my computer being able to use Nvidia graphics drivers offers a significant performance advantage in Windows and Linux, and that is also one of the advertised benefits of FreeBSD.  Unfortunately I can't seem to get the Nvidia drivers working right at the moment - they cause flickering and some other weirdness in X.  I've spent over an hour trying various compilation and xorg.conf settings, then gave up.  Being banned from the official FreeBSD forum (http://bbs.freetalklive.com/hijack-free-zone/best-socialist-forums-to-troll/msg582903/#msg582903) sucks ass, and even if I wasn't banned the fact that it's run my such total fascist assholes is a major turn-off from using FreeBSD.  Once again, if you have enough CPU power you don't really need GPU, and GPU is just a waste of money if you don't waste your time on games.

FreeBSD's Adobe Flash support is another benefit and it works fine, but it requires Linux virtualization and a fuckload of Linux components, which is also a major turn-off.  I think it's better to do without Flash, using work-arounds like youtube-dl (http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/) (which can be integrated with an RSS-reading script to pre-download all your favorite channels), as well as certain browser plug-ins and Web-based features that convert Flash to HTML5 (http://www.google.com/search?q=convert+Flash+to+HTML5).  Not having Flash most certainly makes things more secure (http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/vulnerabilities/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229301021&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News)!  And, once again, it's better to emulate / remote connect to a Windows machine if you really need to use a Flash feature, or any of the other things you can't do in a pure Copyfree software stack.

More Web browser choices (ex. native Opera) under FreeBSD is certainly a benefit, but much less so now that it looks like serious work will soon be done to stabilize Chromium under OpenBSD.  You only need one browser for surfing, and if you're doing Web design testing then you need access to a Windows box anyway, so you could also test under Internet Explorer (which looks like it's about to regain some market share thanks to the just released v9), real Silverlight, etc.


Server Virtualization

OpenBSD is alleged to have a very serious virtualization disadvantage, which is becoming increasingly important.  NetBSD's support for Amazon's EC2 (http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/NetBSD-now-available-on-Amazon-EC2-1207149.html) just became official (though I was able to play with it many moons ago), and FreeBSD is getting there quickly as well.  But OpenBSD does run well on cloud providers that use full virtualization like VMware, and prices of real dedicated servers are dropping as well.  I think real servers are still a better solution, because security of virtualization is not bulletproof, and also because there are some freedom advantages to dealing with many small competing dedicated hosting providers (especially those that allow BitTorrent seedboxes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seedbox)) rather than mega-corp cloud giants that are more susceptible to government pressure.

Just compare the Basic package from ServerPronto (http://www.serverpronto.com/compare.php) ($69/month) to a Small EC2 instance (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/) using Amazon's calculator (http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html).   (Note that Amazon's Small instance gets you 0.2 GB more RAM, while the "1 compute unit" is "equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor", compared to AMD 2000+ you get from ServerPronto.)  You'll pay $62.22/month for the Amazon instance (or significantly less if you reserve the instance for a long period of time), but the 7 TB of transfer that ServerPronto includes for free would cost over $1000 with Amazon!  ServerPronto does charge an even more ridiculous $0.89/GB if you go over the 7 TB, so it could actually be more expensive if you overblow your limit significantly, but very few sites would need that much bandwidth and there are many things you can do to offload extra bandwidth to a cheaper host if you ever get close to the limit.

Amazon's data transfer (especially if you use CloudFront) is certainly faster than ServerPronto, but I think the best way to host a site is to mainly use static files, so you could use one "processing server" (ideally hosted in your home if there are no bandwidth constraints, or using something like ServerPronto) and to have multiple mirrors on cheap shared hosts in different countries.  For example, this forum could have all the threads as static HTML files, which would load more quickly, and the comparatively rare occasion where someone posts would trigger a server-side script to regenerate the thread HTML file and push it to all the mirrors.  Use of richer client-side technologies like AJAX can make this process a lot more effective and efficient.  You can use some server-side (ex. GeoIP) or client-side (ex. HTTP ping) tricks to route the user to the fastest mirror, or let them pick one manually.  You can also offer your larger downloads via Metalink (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalink) and/or BitTorrent with HTTP seeds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrent_file#HTTP_seeds), which, given enough mirrors / seeders, can offer even faster performance than any single CDN, but more resilient and significantly cheaper!  And, of course having multiple mirrors in multiple countries is also the most effective anti-censorship precaution - never forget how Amazon gave WikiLeaks the boot!


Summation

FreeBSD's advantages over OpenBSD are rather shallow.  OpenBSD's supposed limitations actually encourage you to do thing right - invest in CPU power, use scripting, avoid cloud giants, avoid Web server inefficiencies, avoid GNUshit, maintain a rational attitude toward Microsoft (http://bbs.freetalklive.com/hijack-free-zone/microsoft/), etc.


(EDIT: this post was modified a zillion times, because I can be very disorganized sometimes, but I eventually decided that I wanted to make it good enough to cross-post on other forums.)
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: blackie on March 15, 2011, 07:03:45 PM
Quote from: /sbin/libmand on March 15, 2011, 06:50:14 PM
Once again, if you have enough CPU power you don't really need GPU.
Some of the games my kids play require a specific GPU. I've got a system that has  8 cores running at 2.9GHz, with 24GB of RAM, and it's running windows so they can play those games on it.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Fred on March 15, 2011, 07:04:46 PM
24 fucking gigs of ram?!~~~~~~~~~~!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Alex Libman on March 15, 2011, 08:50:23 PM
Quote from: blackie on March 15, 2011, 07:03:45 PM
[...]  and it's running windows so they can play those games on it.

I agree that Windows is the rational choice for you, and I would be running it myself if it had a bit more to offer me.  The only thing I need Windows for is AJAX compatibility testing, which I need maybe for one hour every two weeks, so virtualization (or remote access to a Windows instance in the cloud) is good enough.

I almost never ever play games (unless I get some 1990s nostalgia like once a year, but emulating those games on OpenBSD requires very little).  The pointy clicky GUI's are great for minimizing the learning curve, but I'm more productive editing configuration files directly.  I never even use (Open)Office apps, because I do everything through scripting and the Internet.  Who needs a word processor when it's faster to type things in forum / wiki syntax to post on the Internet?  I most definitely don't need an HTML authoring app - I remember all the syntax by heart, or I write Web content in my own syntax and then use a generator script to produce HTML files and mass-upload them to multiple mirrors.  I even find it more productive to use text data files (or rarely SQL) and scripting instead of spreadsheets.  Visual Studio is a temptation, especially with the new Python component, but not tempting enough.


Quote from: Fred on March 15, 2011, 07:04:46 PM
24 fucking gigs of ram?!~~~~~~~~~~!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dude, go to amazon.freetalklive.com (http://amazon.freetalklive.com/) and search for "24gb ram" - prices start at just $240!

My routine coding setup of OpenBSD + X + wmii (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wmii) + xterms + console apps like vim uses ~256MB RAM, and another 512MB is more than enough for all the GUI apps I ever run: browsers and mplayer.  Another half a gig to virtualize Windows XP, or a gig to visualize Windows 7 (without any desktop GUI effects, just enough to run IE9).  But you do need lots and lots of RAM for good high-end database and Web-server performance - and you get special performance benefits if you use a DMA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_memory_access) NIC that can serve static pages from RAM, bypassing the OS and the CPU completely!

Investing in good connectivity and hardware infrastructure is very important.  Most people spend 10x more on their car than their computers - I'd rather walk but have high-end local hardware, fast Internet connectivity with fallback redundancies, a super-powerful neighborhood wifi hotspot, lots of foreign Web site mirrors, etc, etc, etc.  The Internet is our most powerful weapon in the fight for freedom, and good weapons don't come cheap.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Fred on March 15, 2011, 08:53:23 PM
but 24 gigs?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! what do you need that for?
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: blackie on March 15, 2011, 09:56:29 PM
Lots of RAM for virtual machines. Each vm gets it's own memory. I want to be able to run 10 2GB virtual machines at the same time.

Some day I am going to build a private cloud. The system won't be running windows then.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Zhwazi on March 15, 2011, 11:26:53 PM
Does OpenBSD have KDE 4 yet?
Can I use more than 4 GB of RAM on amd64 yet?
Does it have anything similar to jails yet?
MAC? ZFS?

OpenBSD may be less vulnerable (the base system at least, no telling about the third-party stuff or admin misconfiguration), but FreeBSD's jails provide a level of fault isolation that OpenBSD doesn't have an equivalent for. I have an atom box running FreeBSD with 16 jails on it running DHCP, DNS, apache, mpd, postgresql, SMTP and IMAP and tons of other stuff. If something in a jail gets compromised the only way to access the rest of the system is effectively through network sockets. The host runs nothing but sshd. mpd is by far the largest user of CPU, when it isn't playing the CPU is >99% idle. To get the same kind of fault isolation on OpenBSD I'd have to either run a dozen instances of qemu (soooo slooow, and I don't wanna store tons of stuff on a virtual hard drive image just so I can have a file share) or buy a dozen servers that will each be constantly at <1% utilization. And I still won't get the same level of seamlessness as I get with FreeBSD jails or Solaris zones.

Jails are kind of a big deal. Not just chroots, but full OS-level virtualization.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Alex Libman on March 16, 2011, 03:24:59 AM
Quote from: Zhwazi on March 15, 2011, 11:26:53 PM
Does OpenBSD have KDE 4 yet?

Yuck, using KDE4 on OpenBSD?  Um, why?!  KDE sucks in general, KDE4 sucks even more, and most desktop OpenBSD setups are already polluted with GTK or Swing - why add the completely unnecessary Qt GNUshit as well?!  To me it doesn't even feel like OpenBSD unless it's running a minimalist Copyfree tiling window manager like dwm or wmii.  (The one included by default, FVWM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM), is the biggest OpenBSD brainfart of them all.)

But, yes, the porting work (http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/x11/kde4/) has been done even three years ago (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20080218230748).


Quote from: Zhwazi on March 15, 2011, 11:26:53 PM
Can I use more than 4 GB of RAM on amd64 yet?

Yes, again, three years ago (http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20080610050603).


Quote from: Zhwazi on March 15, 2011, 11:26:53 PM
Does it have anything similar to jails yet?

There was a sysjail (http://sysjail.bsd.lv/) project for OpenBSD, but it was abandoned because it's generally a flawed idea.  If BSD auth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_Authentication) + chroot + systrace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systrace) aren't enough, you might as well use kqemu (http://openports.se/emulators/kqemu).  The only advantage of jails over full virtualization is CPU efficiency (if you use the very same OS as the host), and there are plenty of disadvantages.  So get more / bigger CPU's (and bigger solar panels or whatever to power them).  Another alternative is use dedicated routers and cheap plug computers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_computer) to separate out the security-critical tasks.  Good server infrastructure does cost money.


Quote from: Zhwazi on March 15, 2011, 11:26:53 PM
MAC?  ZFS?

OpenBSD's approach to security is primarily focused on writing quality code, with the aim being to eliminate bugs and related vulnerabilities, while keeping things as minimalist and simple as possible.  They don't add more bells and whistles unless there is a darn good reason to do it, and for some reason the security gurus at OpenBSD weren't all that impressed with MAC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_access_control), RBAC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-based_access_control), ACL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_control_list), Veriexec (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veriexec), and other new security technologies.  I'm not going to go into all the details of this discussion, but this is definitely a good opportunity for someone to port the remainder of TrustedBSD (http://www.trustedbsd.org/) to OpenBSD, finish sysjail, etc - and then release it as proprietary software, or better yet TLHS (Time-Limited Hybrid Source (http://hybridsource.org/))...  ;)

And ZFS is a licensing issue, obviously.  I'm sure they'll import HAMMER once there's a sufficiently good reason to do so.  But relying on filesystem features is a poor way to do things, as it reduces the portability of your solution, especially for the possibility of deploying it on cheap / shared hosts.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: Zhwazi on March 17, 2011, 01:13:24 AM
I happen to like KDE more than all the other DE's available. I've long hated GNOME and xfce is too minimalist for my liking. Non-DE WM's have their place but I don't have a place for them. KDE 4 started sucking a lot less after 4.2, and and the latest releases are getting better and better as KDE 4 matures.

Glad to hear those improvements have been made, that's two of my major sticking points down. You've already said the giant kernel lock is still in place and that does have a big impact on performance and scalability.

How is jail a flawed idea? What are the disadvantages you speak of? I love jails and ZFS because they are conceptually simple in a way that using chroot and systrace aren't. It leaves me time to learn how to do other things so I don't have to worry much about them, and lets me efficiently use the resources I have, so I can cheap out on hardware and get more done with less.

Does OpenBSD have anything that offers a level of compartmentalization equivalent to FreeBSD's Jails? Not just sandboxing of services and stopping them from doing things they shouldn't be, but binding each one to a single IP address to let your configurations be simpler and more portable. If you give somebody a chrooted OpenBSD system and they try to run apache on it, it'll be using the system's port 80. You could configure it with multiple IP's and tell the person with control of the chroot to listen on a specific address, but they can create an issue more complex to troubleshoot than needed by missing that directive. Most services will listen on the only interface on the system by default, in a jail I can just leave that unspecified and it'll listen on the only address it has, and won't conflict with anything else.

This makes the configuration more portable. The way I have things set up, none of my jails depends on the jail infrastructure. If I wanted to move to a single userland for everything, I'd basically have to concatenate the jail-specific rc.conf variables to the host's, change a couple of mountpoints (by removing a /jails/$(jailname)-root prefix), and install the packages on the host instead of in the jails.

Nothing I'm doing depends on ZFS. I can move the files over to UFS and lose the extent of my snapshotting abilities and start having to worry about what size I should make /var, /usr, and /tmp, but why bother? It doesn't reduce portability, it only enhances manageability if it's there. zfs send | zfs recv is an excellent and well-integrated way to make robust transactional incremental backups and while I'd hate to have to switch to using some other backup tool, most other backup tools don't rely on the underlying filesystem much.

ZFS may be copyleft, but it's not viral copyleft like the GPL.
Title: Re: Copyfree Software
Post by: TimeLady Victorious on March 17, 2011, 01:26:48 PM
Pff. Superior Fluxbox master race.