I'm told that at LinuxWorld 2000 somebody put up this poster:
Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?
Linux: Where do you want to go tomorrow?
BSD: Are you guys coming, or what?
There are a couple of interesting things about the poster: first, it puts Linux in the position of being ``better than Microsoft'', while BSD goes its own way. Secondly, and more importantly, it puts BSD in the lead. These are just slogans, of course. What's the truth? I've had some interesting input on that recently, so read on and I'll get back to the point.
``Small chance'', you may say, or maybe ``NIH''. But that wasn't the reaction at all. The suggestion was received with genuine interest, and Justin tells me that he had several followup mail messages and phone calls in the following days. It's still very possible that CAM will not be ported to Linux: the systems are very different under the skin. But the reasons won't be because the Linux community rejects the idea. In fact, in another paper I heard that improvements in the Linux virtual memory system borrowed strongly from BSD.
So why should a BSD person speak at a Linux conference? For the obvious reason that people were interested. I originally went to present a paper about the BSD projects; as a regular reader of Daemon News you'll recognize the relationship with a previous article in this series.
The paper was very well received, and I had a number of questions. The following day I did another talk, standing in for a speaker who was not able to come to deliver his talk about the ease of installation of Linux, so I changed the topic as little as possible and did a talk on the ease of installation of FreeBSD. This time the audience was even larger, in fact larger than most of the audiences at the BSDCon. People were so interested that I was asked to do a repeat performance in Singapore next March.
On the way back home, I stopped off in Singapore. I was only there for one day, but by chance it was the day of the monthly LUGS meeting, to which I went. I mentioned that I was running FreeBSD on my laptop. When the speaker, was talking about security DoS attacks, gave a script which he said was sure to kill inetd on a Linux box very quickly, I tried it out on my laptop, and the system responded fine. A couple of days later I saw a message from one of the participants on the FreeBSD-questions mailing list: he had decided to install FreeBSD on his system.
The reason people were so interested is at least partially because nobody knows BSD in this part of the world. The Singapore Housing Development Board may be running OpenBSD in their lifts (US: elevators), but the average computer user in Singapore and Malaysia has heard of Microsoft and Linux, and that's about it. There's clearly a great scope for advocacy in these countries. I suspect that for many Asian countries that's not much different.
> I'd much rather see Jordan appearing in these articles with on-topic > beliefs about his favourite shell and how useful tar is for unpacking > tarballs than you espousing a "The FSF is evil and we should put them > down where we can". The FSF is seeking to put *us* down. Advocating their software advances that cause, and Jordan should not do that. I don't think he realizes just how much harm this does. ... > Your posts about the evils of the FSF, GPL, and GNU products have > lost FreeBSD more users and credibility than your articles, though. Actually, the only thing that has cost FreeBSD credibility is when people WITHIN the FreeBSD community bash me for those postings. They see this as portending a lack of unity and of perspective. Surely the BSD community should be unanimous in opposing a group that seeks to destroy it and the good it has done! Most of the people who comment to me about this do not understand why the BSD community doesn't link arms and oppose the FSF. They see this as a sign that the BSDers are so much far removed from reality -- isolated in their academic ivory towers, as it were -- that they can't even perceive a direct threat.
If you're a regular on the FreeBSD mailing lists you'll be in no doubt as to who wrote this. I haven't asked him, but I'm sure that not only would he not object to having his name mentioned, he would prefer it. Quite honestly, though, I'm too ashamed.
The fact is, of course, that there are some very bigoted Linux users. The quote above shows clearly that this isn't a phenomenon restricted to Linux. The problem is, they're not completely wrong: their own existence shows that there are some people on the other side who ``seek to destroy'' them. In fact, for some of the more rabid advocates, there are some people on their own side who ``seek to destroy'' them. We need to understand that these people don't represent the mainstream.
It would be wrong to claim that the change is complete. By far the largest proportion of attendees were FreeBSD users, and I didn't meet any ``pure'' OpenBSD person at all (by ``pure'' I mean a user who didn't use NetBSD or FreeBSD). But that was to be expected from an event which only a year ago was a FreeBSD event, and I'm sure that next year's event will be better balanced.
What has remained has been a tendency to let sleeping dogs lie. From the FreeBSD perspective, we've seen a lot of ``don't talk to those NetBSD people, they'll just turn around and bite you''. I'm sure that many NetBSD people will recognize this statement with reversed project names. One of the good things about the Con was that we had a chance (and used it) to get to know some of the other project teams better. The result is a sense of cooperation that goes beyond the conference itself: only a couple of weeks later I was in Melbourne and had dinner with a number of people, including Luke Mewburn (NetBSD core) and Michael Padden of the OpenBSD project.
I usually finish these articles with a ``and what next?'' summary. Looking back, they all look pretty much the same: things are changing rapidly, and we while don't know where we're going, the journey is fun. Gradually, though, I'm seeing a change in the community. We're ``growing up'', and we're realizing that we're no longer isolated pockets of counterculture, but in fact we are becoming a factor to reckon with in the computer industry. That will change us; I hope we'll be able to maintain both our identity and our ideals.