emaste · HackerTrans

2 miesiące temudiscuss

The comment I left on a Reddit thread four years ago still applies:

> This link gets shared around every now and then, and my response is always the same: there is some useful insight, but there's also information that's so outdated it provides no value, outright misinformation, and self-contradiction. Some of the technical points are fair, and should be and are being addressed. But the commentary is often laughably wrong. The document seems more focused on advancing an agenda than a good-faith effort at improving security in FreeBSD.

If anyone is actually interested in discussing mitigations and improved security posture on FreeBSD I'd suggest starting a thread on one of the mailing lists, but I'll also keep an eye out for feedback here and on the Fediverse.

emaste

4 miesiące temudiscuss

The (original) headline is backwards; this is about Anthropic's interest in FreeBSD, not the other way around.

emaste

5 miesięcy temudiscuss

A lot of Linux kernel drivers are permissively licensed, or dual-licensed with a choice of GPL and a permissive license. This is especially common for vendor-developed drivers. From a hardware vendor’s perspective, broad license compatibility directly supports adoption: the more operating systems, hypervisors, and embedded environments that can incorporate the driver code, the wider the potential market for the hardware itself.

emaste

5 lat temudiscuss

This is quite far off the mark.

Many companies using FreeBSD, including Juniper, NetApp, Netflix, Netgate (pfSense), iXsystems (TrueNAS), Dell (Isilon) contribute significant code to FreeBSD. It's very expensive to maintain long-lived changes from upstream, so there's a large incentive not to do so. Code that's "not contributed back" is largely code that isn't suitable for upstream anyhow - because it is incomplete, limited in scope, etc.

Looking at "Sponsored by" tags on the last 6 months of commits to FreeBSD I see the following:

  The FreeBSD Foundation
  Netflix
  Rubicon Communications, LLC ("Netgate")
  Chelsio Communications
  NetApp, Inc.
  Mellanox Technologies // NVIDIA Networking
  Innovate UK
  Klara, Inc.
  Diablotin Systems
  Dell EMC Isilon
  iXsystems, Inc.
  Citrix Systems R&D
  Axcient
  Netflix, Inc.
  DARPA
  Alstom Group
  Eldorado Research Institute (eldorado.org.br)
  Ampere Computing
  Marvell
  Stormshield
  Amazon, Inc.

(and a long list of entries with one or two commits each)

There's a backlog of work that contributors would like to get into FreeBSD; a limiting factor is availability of mentor and reviewer time to guide contributors through the process and iterating on bringing the code into a committable state.

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