BSDTalk episode 180 is a 25-minute conversation with Girish Venkatachalam about … stuff. (I am posting before listening.)
Jon Birrell, a contributor to a number of BSD projects (primarily FreeBSD), has died. His friend and coworker Craig Rodrigues has posted a notice about his death, along with some memories. It’s always awful when someone dies, but it always strikes me about how when an open source contributor dies, it’s noticed, quietly, worldwide.
I like linkblogging, especially because there’s been a lot of good stuff floating about:
- Matthew Dillon detailed some of the problems he had using hardlinks to create backups – problems Hammer solves.
- The History of the Internet in a Nutshell: pretty good, though it says Unix “influenced” Linux and FreeBSD. Influenced is right for Linux, but there’s parts of the different BSDs that are from UNIX directly.
- From O’Reilly: The War for the Web. The walled garden that failed in the long run for Compuserve and AOL and so on is being resurrected. (via)
- Along the same lines: The Death of the URL.
Where I get more linkbloggy than usual:
- According to the 5th slide in this presentation, Android’s libc, “Bionic”, is BSD-derived. Anyone know which BSD? It looks like “whatever” is the answer.
- There’s a video out about BSD Certification.
- Hubert Feyrer has a note about NetBSD’s not-necessarily-intended moves towards a microkernel architecture. Other “move things to userland” steps have happened in DragonFly; it seems a trend.
- Giorgos Keramidas talks about font substitution in Firefox. This should work on any platform.
- Vim plugins: a.vim lets you switch between .c and .h files with a single command.
- I should have linked to this yesterday: Epitome, a “deduplication engine” for OpenBSD, was mentioned a bit in the most recent BSDTalk. (via)
- Gopher: not dead yet. (also via)
BSDCan 2010 will be May 13th and 14th in Ottawa, Canada, with 2 days of classes beforehand. Maybe I’ll actually make it this year, like I wish every time…
OpenBSD developer Jacek Masiulaniec gets 14 minutes of airtime in the most recent BSDTalk podcast.
If you use any sort of BSD product at work, the BSD Certification group wants you to take a survey. They are building a cross section of what people are doing with BSD, and this will show what requirements should go with the certifications. Any BSD use applies, not just DragonFly. The more results, the better the tests, and the more value to the certifications, so we all benefit.
The first one of the Open Source Business Resource Co-Creation issues is out. Read this if any of the open source software you use has a commercial component. (Chances are, yes, it does.)
BSDTalk 178 is all about Evil! Well, Internet evil. It’s an hour-plus-long conversation wtih Richard Clayton at EuroBSDCon about phishing, spamming, and other things that didn’t have a name a few decades ago.
The next theme for the Open Source Business Resource was to be “co-creation”, focusing on commercial companies and relationships with open source development. There were so many articles that it’s now covering 2 months.
Matthew Dillon went to the Google Summer of Code Mentor’s Conference at Google’s offices in California, and took some pictures. It’s all available on Flickr. He was the only DragonFly attendee, but check to see what developers on other open-source projects look like in person. There’s even the not-related-to-me Joel Sherrill (on the left).
There are now official but experimental git repositories of pkgsrc available. One’s already available for DragonFly, but either should work.
Two items, picked from RSS feeds:
- People get really excited when software on Windows or a Mac manages to automatically install software. BSD systems have been doing this for years.
- What’s the first license mentioned when Palm opens up free access to open source software? BSD.
The October issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with Arts and Media as the theme. The article about film production using open-source tools is especially good, as articles like that tend to be a list of application names only, while this article goes into the whys and wherefores.
Seen via Richard Bejtlich’s excellent Taosecurity blog: the 6th issue of BSD Magazine is out.
Don’t forget, the first 3 issues (scroll down on that link) are free to download in PDF format.
Yay, another BSDTalk! Will Backman talks about where he’s been for the past month in BSDTalk number 177, and plays back a talk with FreeBSD developer Giorgos Keramidas.
Mahdi Montazeri sent in the URL to another new BSD site: irbsd.com. It’s a generic web framework reposting RSS feeds from other people, without linking back to the originals, so nothing new.
Dru Lavigne has found a new cross-BSD news site, BSD News Network. I would like to see it get away from a generic blog layout and hold something other than RSS feed data, since there’s already TheDailyBSD and BSDNews and BSDPlanet for that.
I may be a bit grumpy about it since sites that aggregate BSD news feeds often end up being something close to 50% composed of words originally typed by me, because of the Digest’s regularity. I’d like to see BSD news sources with at least a hint of authorial voice, not machine-operated copying. FreeBSD – the unknown Giant is close to that, for instance.
ÆrieBSD; a fork from OpenBSD. (via) It appears to be GNU-free.
Update: Steven Rosenberg has some further research.