For BSD Unix, It's Sayonara (1992)

https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1992/0622.html

by operator-name • 3 years ago

129 80 3 years ago

tech-insider.org

bitwize2• 3 years ago

It's not over till Netcraft confirms it.

kstrauser7• 3 years ago

Clap. Clap. Clap.

jakedata• 3 years ago

So it goes.

bitwize2• 3 years ago

Good, that's still working.

syockit• 3 years ago

(Score:5, Insightful)

Sylamore• 3 years ago

Throwback to my slashdot sig: To misquote Churchill, never has an operating system (FreeBSD) used by so many been administered by so few. - NetCraft

baz003• 3 years ago

So basically it's an anti-Kubernetes?

tiffanyh• 3 years ago

Whatever happened to the old Netcraft site where I type in a url and it’d tell you what OS, webhost, webserver, etc it ran.

Netcraft seems all corporate now.

toast0• 3 years ago

Security checklists.

lukegb• 3 years ago

It's still there, although it too got rebranded: https://sitereport.netcraft.com

npteljes• 3 years ago

I personally used https://builtwith.com/, gave nice reports back in the day.

vondur• 3 years ago

Wow forgot about that, How many times did the Slashdot trolls have the "BSD Is Dying" posts over the years?

kstrauser7• 3 years ago

I bet that continues, but I don't want to be the one to investigate.

EgregiousCube• 3 years ago

The whole copypasta, frequently posted to slashdot back in the day:

It is official; Netcraft now confirms: BSD is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered BSD community when IDC confirmed that BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for BSD because BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for BSD. As many of us are already aware, BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that BSD has steadily declined in market share. BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save BSD from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, BSD is dead.

Fact: BSD is dying

drewg1232• 3 years ago

Not according to the computer I'm typing this on, 31 years later :)

FWIW, Klara has a good series on the history of FreeBSD:

https://klarasystems.com/articles/history-of-freebsd-unix-an...

https://klarasystems.com/articles/history-of-freebsd-part-2-...

https://klarasystems.com/articles/history-of-freebsd-part-3-...

https://klarasystems.com/articles/history-of-freebsd-part-4-...

9front• 3 years ago

The article is about BSD Unix which had a final release in June of 1995. So BSD is sayonara!

Long live FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD, the stepchild(s) of BSD.

voytec• 3 years ago

Nevertheless, it shows an interesting crossroads moment in the BSD history and uncertainty of it's future.

There are still options to secure BSD code, with one company, Berkeley Software Design (Falls Church, Va.), a company employing former Berkeley programmer Mike Karels, planning to offer a commercial version of Unix for SPARC systems based on the 4.4BSD code but free of AT&T source licensing requirements. It currently offers BSD/386, a version of Unix for 386 machines based on the Berkeley NET2 release.

(commented from a laptop running FreeBSD 14.0-CURRENT;)

Paul-Craft3• 3 years ago

Don't forget Darwin, the step-grandchild of BSD. It might not be as free as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD, but it'd be hard to argue it's not as important.

operator-name• 3 years ago

That's a cool series, thanks for sharing!

I didn't grow up during this era, so it was facinating to stumble upon a news article on the (lack of continued) funding for BSD - something I'd never really thought about.

InTheArena2• 3 years ago

It’s neat to start reading and immediately run into professor Evi Nemeth being quoted. I TA”d for her a few year later, and it was axiomatic in her labs that BSD Unix was the only true Unix, that slowaris was a abomination and ATM was the worst network protocol ever devised.

We eventually got her onto this new Linux thing..

rootbear• 3 years ago

I always attended her talks at Usenix. I'm still sad about her loss.

gwright• 3 years ago

ATM was the worst network protocol ever devised

Having 53 byte payloads is something only a committee could love.

matthiasl• 3 years ago

ATM cells have 48 byte payloads.

Supposedly that was because different groups involved in the standardisation process wanted either 32 or 64 byte payloads.

p_l2• 3 years ago

Still better than 193 bit frames

InTheArena2• 3 years ago

yeah. 53 bytes was the total packet size, not the payload size. But oh hey! lets pick a large prime number for the number of bytes that a payload could be transmitted in. Lets also pick a small prime number of bytes so we can't do byte boundaries.

Needless to say, I am glad that TCP/IP won. Moving on.

benglish11• 3 years ago

For a meteorology focused response I don’t think the use of meteorological summer is too surprising. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/meteorological-versus-astrono...

kazinator• 3 years ago

I recognize her as one of the authors of the Unix System Adminstrator's Handbook.

Re: ATM: https://books.google.ca/books?id=uAblPu1lpqIC&pg=PA130

zitterbewegung2• 3 years ago

Yea it’s strange that right now we have four direct derivatives (OpenBSD, FreeBSD ,NetBSD and DragonflyBSD) and an combination of OSF Mach 4 and FreeBSD which has Billions of users (macOS ,iOS)

declan_roberts• 3 years ago

Given Apple’s market share, BSD is actually extremely popular!

Sunspark• 3 years ago

In other stuff too.. PlayStation 3 through 5, but those are closed systems.

slavapestov• 3 years ago

"The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System" is a classic: https://www.amazon.com/Implementation-Operating-paperback-Ad...

assimpleaspossi3• 3 years ago

Don't forget the newer, updated versions, the last release just a few years ago.

pjmlp4• 3 years ago

There is just one updated version, and 2014 was more than just a few years.

https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Marshall-Kirk-McKusick/dp/0321968...

shon• 3 years ago

Ahem… Darwin. Because of Darwin (iOS) and its derivatives, BSD probably powers 10-20% or more of all daily user hours logged on the planet.

CodeCompost• 3 years ago

I don't know what it is about the BSD's. I just keep getting drawn to them, and I don't even use them personally or professionally.

I think it's because they are complete operating systems with their own user-land and complete documentation. Plus the fact that BSD users get excited about little things like when an extra command line switch or a new filesystem flag. All this meticulous attention to detail...

parlortricks• 3 years ago

This is me as well, im excited to know there is a whole solution in one. Ive run them here and there to experiment, but for my needs i still use Debian. I feel Debian gives me some of the BSD vibe, but i still enjoy reading about all the new features the BSDs bring each release. Hope one day they catch up to what my linux box does, so i can enjoy it more.

bch• 3 years ago

Slack and Debian (mostly Debian) were my favorite Linux experience, and indeed Unix experience, until I landed on NetBSD.

LeFantome• 3 years ago

Try Chimera

bilbyx• 3 years ago

I had switched all my customers from CentOS 6 to FreeBSD many years ago, before systemd was introduced into RHEL. They have been running solidly for almost 9 years now, all on various DELL PowerEdge rack mounted servers.

djbusby2• 3 years ago

Back in the day "they" said: what one BSD admin can do in a week, 10 Windows admins could do in a month. (Or something like that).

asyx• 3 years ago

Same. I always look for a reason to run FreeBSD for jails and ZFS but I just can't. Questionable compatibility and the lack of OCI containers (which are an easy way out if you don't want to spend time setting up a jail on your home server in your free time) always ruins it.

I could run a VM for Linux but i could also only run Linux and not deal with that...

Paul-Craft3• 3 years ago

Funny. This reminded me of the old saying "Two of the most famous products to come out of Berkeley are BSD and LSD." Turns out, as a tech person, I'm (very) tangentially involved with BSD and my landlord was pretty deeply involved with LSD decades ago. ;)

1vuio0pswjnm72• 3 years ago

"The University of Colorado's Nemeth, regarded as an expert on Unix security and perhaps best known for having co-authored the Unix System Administration Handbook, said last week that she would like to have her university conduct some of the operating system research that Berkeley is now abandoning."

RIP Prof. Nemeth.

Tragically lost at sea sailing across the Tasman in Winter in a "vintage" 1928 schooner.

"Evi Nemeth had previously used the services of Bob McDavitt for weather forecasts and passage planning during her voyage on her yacht Wonderland. There was no such request for services made to Bob McDavitt from the Nina before she sailed from Opua. Bob McDavitt is a well-known and respected meteorologist who retired in 2012 from the NZ Met office where he had responsibility for marine and aviation weather forecasting. Now as a consultant he provides services to cruising yachts, providing weather forecasts and voyage forecasts. (www.metbob.com.)"

https://nzsar.govt.nz/assets/Downloadable-Files/Nina-Indepen...

https://www.sail-world.com/-123872/ (AUS --> NZ)

mrelectric• 3 years ago

I recommend her book to everyone, get a hard copy!

1vuio0pswjnm72• 3 years ago

Correction: Apparently Met uses June 1 as 1st day of winter but it's officially the solstice. One could argue it was not yet winter.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/113038178/when-does-winter-...

russtrotter• 3 years ago

I started uni in 1990 and went from a kid in his basement banging away on a PC clone with Turbo Pascal 5.x to a place with this thing called "usenet" on a "VAX" running "BSD" off of tapes and the map of the "Internet" could just about fit on a whiteboard. I sponged off the sysadmins all I could learning about renoe, tahoe and all things in between. I had no cognizance at the time that the death of this amazing world was getting thought off just when i thought it was the greatest stuff in the universe. I read the demon book cover to cover when I had no idea what most of it meant. BSD, whether alive or "dead" will always hold a special place in my mind. It's only with the long road since those days that I can appreciate the tone of this article. Thanks OP for posting it here.

johnklos• 3 years ago

As long as we can still run BSD on our VAXen, I'm happy.

http://vlc.zia.io/

For BSD Unix, It's Sayonara (1992)

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