FreeBSD has released version 6.2.
Kernel updates include the obligatory bug fixes as well as improved networking and file systems. Userland updates include new command line options to a striking number of everyday commands, mainly to improve their coverage of new functionality or produce cleaner output.
For those not already familiar with FreeBSD, Wikipedia says:
FreeBSD is a Unix-like free operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through the 386BSD and 4.4BSD operating systems. It runs on Intel x86 family (IA-32) PC compatible systems (including the Microsoft Xbox), and also DEC Alpha, Sun UltraSPARC, IA-64, AMD64, PowerPC and NEC PC-98 architectures. Support for the ARM and MIPS architectures are under development.
FreeBSD is developed as a complete operating system. The kernel, device drivers and all of the userland utilities, such as the shell, are held in the same source code revision tracking tree (CVS). This is in contrast to Linux, a similar but better-known operating system, in which the kernel is developed by one set of developers; userland utilities and applications by others, such as the GNU project; and all are packaged together by other groups and published as Linux distributions.
As an operating system, FreeBSD is generally regarded as quite reliable and robust, and of the operating systems that accurately report uptime remotely, FreeBSD is the most common free operating system listed in Netcraft’s list of the 50 web servers with the longest uptime (uptime on some operating systems such as some versions of Linux can’t be calculated). A long uptime also indicates that no kernel updates have been deemed necessary, as installing a new kernel requires a reboot and resets the uptime counter of the system.
After a suggestion from Brian Kelly, I’ve added this blog to Technorati, ma.gnolia and del.icio.us
This should make it easier for people to find us in the world of Web 2.0.
A licensing problem has been found which may affect many open source BSD-derived distributions, including the highly-secure OpenBSD. The problem does not affect Linux, which has a similar kernel but which was re-written from scratch rather than being derived from the BSD code.
The problem relates to the change in the BSD licence in 1999 to remove the advertising clause. Minor software contributors should have been tracked down to sign off on the licensing change but were not.
There are two typical approaches to overcoming such a licensing problem. The first is to track down the original contributors and get them to sign off on the change. This is likely to be largely an exercise in paperwork: trawling through old version control changes and checking mailing lists for contributed patches. The second is to re-write the problematic sections of code. I’m not familiar enough with the BSD kernels to know how much effort this is likely to involve, but it could be the matter of hours, or a matter of years.
In this specific case it may also be possible to follow the advertising clause (which was removed in the relicensing), but this is incompatible with the GPL, leading to a new set of problems for some software which links against GPL code (which the relicensing was meant to solve).
Most end-users of BSD-derived distributions should be able to switch relatively easily to Linux if this problem becomes a significant drama.
I’m reassured that this problem was found using internal checks, it suggests that at least some people in the open source world are doing due diligence.
Alpha Learning has complained about the procurement process for the BECTA eLearning platform to the European Commission Competition Commission. Unlike other complaints I’ve written about previously, this appears to be from a proprietary rather than open source vendor.
The gist of the complaint appears to be that BECTA treated some “mandatory” interoperability requirements as optional but other “mandatory” requirements as compulsory. The interoperability requirements in this case relate to the SCORM open standard. Open standards such as SCORM are, of course, central to fostering a genuinely open market in eLearning area, both for the software platforms and the educational content they contain. Without open standards, open source and open content are likely to be restricted in this area by vendor lock-in.
We can expect to see more eLearning news during the BETT Show, which starts tomorrow.
