Manage Open Source Software | Black Duck Software

http://www.blackducksoftware.com/

Li Mei’s list of debugging secrets

http://www.eetimes.com/design/embedded/4217189/Li-Mei-s-list-of-debugging-secrets?cid=NL_Embedded&Ecosystem=embedded

BayLISA had a some great talks last week

BayLISA a group dedicated to Sysadmins, had a some great talks last week.

• Force 10 bare metal provisioning demo.  (IaaS, Cloud component)
• Arista Networks vmtracer demo
• Logstash, with Jordan Sissel 
• FreeNAS BSD based Open Source NAS sponsored by IX Systems.

Logstash really looks a lot like a Open source version of Splunk.

What is the Cloud?

Components of a Cloud.
There are three main categories of cloud computing service, called the SPI model (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS).

Anything as a Serivce (XaaS) is a term used to all of these.

1. Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network, typically the Internet.
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a paradigm for delivering operating systems and associated services over the Internet without downloads or installation.
3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) involves outsourcing the equipment used to support operations, including storage, hardware, servers and networking components.

What is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)?
Infrastructure as a Service is a provision model in which an organization outsources the equipment used to support operations, including storage, hardware, servers and networking components. The service provider owns the equipment and is responsible for housing, running and maintaining it. The client typically pays on a per-use basis.

Characteristics and components of IaaS include:

• Utility computing service and billing model.
• Automation of administrative tasks.
• Dynamic scaling.
• Desktop virtualization.
• Policy-based services.
• Internet connectivity.
• Virtual Servers, and Virtualization

Sometimes referred to as (HaaS) Hardware as a Service.


Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a way to rent hardware, operating systems, storage and network capacity over the Internet. The service delivery model allows the customer to rent virtualized servers and associated services for running existing applications or developing and testing new ones.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is an outgrowth of Software as a Service (SaaS), a software distribution model in which hosted software applications are made available to customers over the Internet. PaaS has several advantages for developers. With PaaS, operating system features can be changed and upgraded frequently. Geographically distributed development teams can work together on software development projects. Services can be obtained from diverse sources that cross international boundaries. Initial and ongoing costs can be reduced by the use of infrastructure services from a single vendor rather than maintaining multiple hardware facilities that often perform duplicate functions or suffer from incompatibility problems. Overall expenses can also be minimized by unification of programming development efforts.
On the downside, PaaS involves some risk of "lock-in" if offerings require proprietary service interfaces or development languages. Another potential pitfall is that the flexibility of offerings may not meet the needs of some users whose requirements rapidly evolve.
 

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network, typically the Internet.

SaaS is becoming an increasingly prevalent delivery model as underlying technologies that support Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) mature and new developmental approaches, such as Ajax, become popular. Meanwhile, broadband service has become increasingly available to support user access from more areas around the world.
SaaS is closely related to the ASP (application service provider) and on demand computing software delivery models. IDC identifies two slightly different delivery models for SaaS. The hosted application management (hosted AM) model is similar to ASP: a provider hosts commercially available software for customers and delivers it over the Web. In the software on demand model, the provider gives customers network-based access to a single copy of an application created specifically for SaaS distribution.
Benefits of the SaaS model include:

• easier administration
• automatic updates and patch management
• compatibility: All users will have the same version of software.
• easier collaboration, for the same reason
• global accessibility.

The traditional model of software distribution, in which software is purchased for and installed on personal computers, is sometimes referred to as software as a product.


SaaS can be build on PaaS on IaaS


-------------------------------
This is still a draft article from here on down.
I am in the process of still writting.
John 6/17/2011
-------------------------------

Examples:

• Amazon web services, BeanStalk, Elastic Compute EC2
• VMware
• Windows Azure
• SalesForce.com
• Google Gmail
• CloudBees

Scale out vs. Scale up.

Tools:
Enterprise Java three tier application
MySQL, MongoDB
NoSQL, CouchDB

Memory or Cache (Redis, memcached, Gemfire)

RabbitMQ, AMQP, JMS for messaging in the cloud. 
Amazon SNS, SQS

POJO? Apache Hadoop?  HDFS, HBase, Hive

Makara, an open-source software-project for cloud deployment and management managed by Red Hat

MAP/Reduce

CAP Theorem
C: Consistency: All nodes see the same data
A: Availablity: Node failure does not prevent survivors from operating
P: Partition Tolerance: System works even though message are lost

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cloud_computing_providers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_%28operating_system%29

Redis key-value store server.

Redis is an advanced key-value store.

It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets.

Written in ANSI C, it's open-source, networked, in-memory, persistent and  journaled. 

Supported languages or language bindings include C, C++, C#, Clojure, Common Lisp, Erlang, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Lua, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Scala, Go, and Tcl.
As of 15 March 2010, development of Redis is sponsored by VMware.

http://redis.io/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redis (data store)
Redis: Lightweight key/value Store That Goes the Extra Mile
Evolving the Key/Value Programming Model to a Higher Level 

Advanced Message Queuing Protocol

The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is an open standard application layer protocol for message-oriented middleware (MOM).  The defining features of AMQP are message orientation, queuing, routing (including point-to-point and publish-and-subscribe), reliability and security.


It's similar to JMS for Java but not language specific. 

http://www.amqp.org/confluence/display/AMQP/Advanced+Message+Queuing+Protocol

Linux based PID Servomotor Control

Great article that talk about implemented the PID, or the Proportional Integral Derivative, algorithm to make a 2 wheeled robot that balences like a segway. 

Linux based PID Control

How Skype gets round firewalls

UPDATE: This protocol is now incorporated in to STUN , TURN and ICE.     Global IP Solutions, the company that made the VOIP system that Skype was using was bought by Google shortly after Skype developed their own technology.  Google then made the original skype technology freely available as WebRTC now supported by many HTML5 browsers.  Microsoft then bought Skype. ----- REPOST FROM: http://www.heise-security.co.uk/articles/82481  No longer on the web. I want to point out this is the same method described in my Paper: Method of passing bi-directional data between two firewalls. 12 /15/2006

 

Jürgen Schmidt

The hole trick

How Skype & Co. get round firewalls

Peer-to-peer software applications are a network administrator's nightmare. In order to be able to exchange packets with their counterpart as directly as possible they use subtle tricks to punch holes in firewalls, which shouldn't actually be letting in packets from the outside world.
Increasingly, computers are positioned behind firewalls to protect systems from internet threats. Ideally, the firewall function will be performed by a router, which also translates the PC's local network address to the public IP address (Network Address Translation, or NAT). This means an attacker cannot directly address the PC from the outside - connections have to be established from the inside.
This is of course a problem when two computers behind NAT firewalls require to talk directly to each other - if, for example, their users want to call each other using Voice over IP (VoIP). The dilemma is clear - whichever party calls the other, the recipient's firewall will decline the apparent attack and will simply discard the data packets. The telephone call doesn't happen. Or at least that's what a network administrator would expect.

Punched

But anyone who has used the popular internet telephony software Skype knows that it works as smoothly behind a NAT firewall as it does if the PC is connected directly to the internet. The reason for this is that the inventors of Skype and similar software have come up with a solution.
Naturally every firewall must also let packets through into the local network - after all the user wants to view websites, read e-mails, etc. The firewall must therefore forward the relevant data packets from outside, to the workstation computer on the LAN. However it only does so, when it is convinced that a packet represents the response to an outgoing data packet. A NAT router therefore keeps tables of which internal computer has communicated with which external computer and which ports the two have used.
The trick used by VoIP software consists of persuading the firewall that a connection has been established, to which it should allocate subsequent incoming data packets. The fact that audio data for VoIP is sent using the connectionless UDP protocol acts to Skype's advantage. In contrast to TCP, which includes additional connection information in each packet, with UDP, a firewall sees only the addresses and ports of the source and destination systems. If, for an incoming UDP packet, these match an NAT table entry, it will pass the packet on to an internal computer with a clear conscience.

Switching

The switching server, with which both ends of a call are in constant contact, plays an important role when establishing a connection using Skype. This occurs via a TCP connection, which the clients themselves establish. The Skype server therefore always knows under what address a Skype user is currently available on the internet. Where possible the actual telephone connections do not run via the Skype server; rather, the clients exchange data directly.
Let's assume that Alice wants to call her friend Bob. Her Skype client tells the Skype server that she wants to do so. The Skype server already knows a bit about Alice. From the incoming query it sees that Alice is currently registered at the IP address 1.1.1.1 and a quick test reveals that her audio data always comes from UDP port 1414. The Skype server passes this information on to Bob's Skype client, which, according to its database, is currently registered at the IP address 2.2.2.2 and which, by preference uses UDP port 2828.

Step 1: Alice tries to call Bob, which signals Skype.

Bob's Skype program then punches a hole in its own network firewall: It sends a UDP packet to 1.1.1.1 port 1414. This is discarded by Alice's firewall, but Bob's firewall doesn't know that. It now thinks that anything which comes from 1.1.1.1 port 1414 and is addressed to Bob's IP address 2.2.2.2 and port 2828 is legitimate - it must be the response to the query which has just been sent.

Step 2: Bob tries to reach Alice, which punches a hole through Bob's Firewall.

Now the Skype server passes Bob's coordinates on to Alice, whose Skype application attempts to contact Bob at 2.2.2.2:2828. Bob's firewall sees the recognized sender address and passes the apparent response on to Bob's PC - and his Skype phone rings.

Step 3: Alice finally reaches Bobs computer through the hole.

Doing the rounds

This description is of course somewhat simplified - the details depend on the specific properties of the firewalls used. But it corresponds in principle to our observations of the process of establishing a connection between two Skype clients, each of which was behind a Linux firewall. The firewalls were configured with NAT for a LAN and permitted outgoing UDP traffic.
Linux' NAT functions have the VoIP friendly property of, at least initially, not changing the ports of outgoing packets. The NAT router merely replaces the private, local IP address with its own address - the UDP source port selected by Skype is retained. Only when multiple clients on the local network use the same source port does the NAT router stick its oar in and reset the port to a previously unused value. This is because each set of two IP addresses and ports must be able to be unambiguously assigned to a connection between two computers at all times. The router will subsequently have to reconstruct the internal IP address of the original sender from the response packet's destination port.
Other NAT routers will try to assign ports in a specific range, for example ports from 30,000 onwards, and translate UDP port 1414, if possible, to 31414. This is, of course, no problem for Skype - the procedure described above continues to work in a similar manner without limitations.
It becomes a little more complicated if a firewall simply assigns ports in sequence, like Check Point's FireWall-1: the first connection is assigned 30001, the next 30002, etc. The Skype server knows that Bob is talking to it from port 31234, but the connection to Alice will run via a different port. But even here Skype is able to outwit the firewall. It simply runs through the ports above 31234 in sequence, hoping at some point to stumble on the right one. But if this doesn't work first go, Skype doesn't give up. Bob's Skype opens a new connection to the Skype server, the source port of which is then used for a further sequence of probes.

Skype can do port scans. Here it succeeds on port 38901 and connects through the firewall.

Nevertheless, in very active networks Alice may not find the correct, open port. The same also applies for a particular type of firewall, which assigns every new connection to a random source port. The Skype server is then unable to tell Alice where to look for a suitable hole in Bob's firewall.
However, even then, Skype doesn't give up. In such cases a Skype server is then used as a relay. It accepts incoming connections from both Alice and Bob and relays the packets onwards. This solution is always possible, as long as the firewall permits outgoing UDP traffic. It involves, however, an additional load on the infrastructure, because all audio data has to run through Skype's servers. The extended packet transmission times can also result in an unpleasant delay.
Use of the procedure described above is not limited to Skype and is known as "UDP hole punching". Other network services such as the Hamachi gaming VPN application, which relies on peer-to-peer communication between computers behind firewalls, use similar procedures. A more developed form has even made it to the rank of a standard - RFC 3489 "Simple Traversal of UDP through NAT" (STUN) describes a protocol which with two STUN clients can get around the restrictions of NAT with the help of a STUN server in many cases. The draft Traversal Using Relay NAT (TURN) protocol describes a possible standard for relay servers.

DIY hole punching

With a few small utilities, you can try out UDP hole punching for yourself. The tools required, hping2 and netcat, can be found in most Linux distributions. Local is a computer behind a Linux firewall (local-fw) with a stateful firewall which only permits outgoing (UDP) connections. For simplicity, in our test the test computer remote was connected directly to the internet with no firewall.
Firstly start a UDP listener on UDP port 14141 on the local/1 console behind the firewall:

local/1# nc -u -l -p 14141

An external computer "remote" then attempts to contact it.

remote# echo "hello" | nc -p 53 -u local-fw 14141

However, as expected nothing is received on local/1 and, thanks to the firewall, nothing is returned to remote. Now on a second console, local/2, hping2, our universal tool for generating IP packets, punches a hole in the firewall:

local/2# hping2 -c 1 -2 -s 14141 -p 53 remote

As long as remote is behaving itself, it will send back a "port unreachable" response via ICMP - however this is of no consequence. On the second attempt

remote# echo "hello" | nc -p 53 -u local-fw 14141

the netcat listener on console local/1 then coughs up a "hello" - the UDP packet from outside has passed through the firewall and arrived at the computer behind it.
Network administrators who do not appreciate this sort of hole in their firewall and are worried about abuse, are left with only one option - they have to block outgoing UDP traffic, or limit it to essential individual cases. UDP is not required for normal internet communication anyway - the web, e-mail and suchlike all use TCP. Streaming protocols may, however, encounter problems, as they often use UDP because of the reduced overhead.
Astonishingly, hole punching also works with TCP. After an outgoing SYN packet the firewall / NAT router will forward incoming packets with suitable IP addresses and ports to the LAN even if they fail to confirm, or confirm the wrong sequence number (ACK). Linux firewalls at least, clearly fail to evaluate this information consistently. Establishing a TCP connection in this way is, however, not quite so simple, because Alice does not have the sequence number sent in Bob's first packet. The packet containing this information was discarded by her firewall.

WebRTC - bringing real time communications to the web.

WebRTC - an open real-time communications project

WebRTC offers web application developers the ability to write rich, realtime multimedia applications (think video chat) on the web, without requiring plugins, downloads or installs. It's purpose is to help build a strong RTC platform that works across multiple web browsers, across multiple platforms.


https://sites.google.com/site/webrtc/blog

Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM)

LLVM is a really interesting alternative to java and it's bytecode jvm.
What's interesting is it can be run in the web browsers Javascript enterpreter allow this to run on web site.

So you can compile C & C++ code to run on the web in a javascript VM.

> Deepak  - Apple is funding the project.llvm-gcc is the default compiler which is shipped with Mac OS and IOS SDK.


http://llvm.org/

Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) is a compiler infrastructure, written in C++, which is designed for compile-time, link-time, run-time, and "idle-time" optimization of programs written in arbitrary programming languages. Originally implemented for C/C++, the language-independent design (and the success) of LLVM has since spawned a wide variety of front ends, including Objective-C, Fortran, Ada, Haskell, Java bytecode, Python, Ruby, ActionScript, GLSL, and others.

Emscripten is an LLVM-to-JavaScript compiler. It takes LLVM bitcode (which can be generated from C/C++, using llvm-gcc or clang, or any other language that can be converted into LLVM) and compiles that into JavaScript, which can be run on the web (or anywhere else JavaScript can run).

From Slashdot: Doom Ported To the Web

"Ever since Id Software released the Doom source code under the GPL, it's been ported to platform after platform. Now, you can play Doom compiled to JavaScript on the web, using standard web technologies like Canvas and without any plugins. If your browser has trouble running it, here's a screencast." The translation was accomplished using Emscripten, a Javascript backend for LLVM. As per the GPL, full source code is available. Pretty neat.

Use the PS3 for your project?

http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2010-07-2010-09.html#FreeBSD-on-the-Playstation-3

Apple TV hacked and turned in to web server.

An Apple TV-Based Webserver - Slashdot

Lua and embedded programming.

Designing a Programming Language For Embeddability - Slashdot

Browse the web from the US

I friend of my is in the Middle east and wishes to browse the web from the US.

I am going to try to setup open VPN and tinyproxy on my Virtual Server Co-Lo for him and see how that works.

https://banu.com/tinyproxy/

http://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source.html

Bash: Find the Max in a list of Integers

Max is a little shells script that will find the maximum value and returns that value and the line it was found at.

max

#!/bin/bash
MAX=0
ELE=0
while read line; do
ELE=$[ $ELE + 1 ]
if [ "$line" -gt "$MAX" ]; then
MAX=$line
POS=$ELE
fi
done
echo "$MAX $POS"


Usage Example

-bash-3.2$ cat ttt
1000000001
1000000000002
1000000000007
1000000000033
9999
1000000000000
1000000000005
-bash-3.2$ ./max < ttt
1000000000033 4
-bash-3.2$


Hackers Find New Way To Cheat On Wall Street

From Slashdot:

"The high-speed trading exchanges that conduct the business of buying and selling stocks and mutual funds are so fast that hackers can introduce delays of a few microseconds completely unnoticed by today's network monitoring technology — and manipulate prices in the process to reap millions of dollars to the detriment of everyone else, InfoWorld's Bill Snyder reports. This kind of activity creates new reason to distrust Wall Street and shows how the computer networks we all rely on for conducting business and moving information are ripe for undetectable hacking."

Preserving Great Tech For Posterity — the 6502

From Slashdot:

"For great old hardware products like the MOS 6502 (used in the Apple II, the C64, the Nintendo NES), the details of the designs have been lost or forgotten. While there have been great efforts to reverse engineer the 6502 from the outside, there has not been the hardware equivalent of the source code — until now. As Russell Cox states: 'A team of three people accumulated a bunch of 6502 chips, applied sulfuric acid to them to strip the casing and expose the actual chips, used a high-resolution photomicroscope to scan the chips, applied computer graphics techniques to build a vector representation of the chip, and finally derived from the vector form what amounts to the circuit diagram of the chip: a list of all 3,510 transistors with inputs, outputs, and what they're connected to. Combining that with a fairly generic (and, as these things go, trivial) "transistor circuit" simulator written in JavaScript and some HTML5 goodness, they created an animated 6502 web page that lets you watch the voltages race around the chip as it executes. For more, see their web site visual6502.org.'"

Update All Scripts in One Swoop

First this is old hat for most admins, so they will sigh a collective yawn.

Now, let's say, like me you have a couple of dozen scripts written in wish8.4 and you want to update all the scripts at once to wish8.5.

sed -i 's/wish8.4/wish8.5' *

• sed - the classic stream editor in Unix (yes even linux and windows have it)
  
• -i - option, edit "in-place", meaning don't output the result, just change silently
  
• s /x/y/ - substitute y for x
• * - command line glob

NOTE the last was for LINUX on BSD use -i .bak 's/....
(added 2011-01-30)

tc

Putin Orders Russian Move To GNU/Linux

From Slashdot:

"Vladimir Putin has signed an order calling for Russian federal authorities to move to GNU/Linux, and for the creation of 'a single repository of free software used in the federal bodies of executive power.' There have been a number of Russian projects to roll out free software, notably in the educational sector, but none so far has really taken off. With the backing of Putin, could this be the breakthrough free software has been waiting for?"

Here is another link to the story:
http://mashable.com/2010/12/27/vladimir-putin-free-software-by-2015/

BSD Philosophy

BSD Unix started at Berkeley University shortly after a very turbulent and rebellious time at Berkeley in the late 60's.
During that time there were several major movements happening all at once. The Free Speech, Anti-War, Hippies, Free City, think for yourself, Acid test, civil rights, and a tornado of other forces that lead to several all out riots on campus.
Other influences at Berkeley are a large Asian Population and the study of eastern cultures (Chinese, Japanese and India) and Philosophy.

Many of these memes later incorporated themselves into the BSD Unix culture and Philosophy.

Respect for elders, New isn't always better


Unix and BSD Unix are old operating systems by our modern perception. But, if you were to think this was a bad thing you'd be totally wrong.


At the root of most Modern Operating Systems are design concepts first pioneered in Unix and BSD. Many way DOS, Windows NT,2000,XP, Mac OS X, NeXT OS, operate are based on UNIX concepts.

Change isn't the same as improvement

"The Great Wall of China wasn't built by swapping any bricks in and out" - John Sokol.

"The devil you know is better than the one you don't"

Unix development started more than three decades ago, and the versions of operating system available today is the product of thousands upon thousands of developers hard work and constant improvements. Along the way, Unix has pioneered some very powerful design concepts and some elgant solutions to hard problems common in computing.

"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." - Mark Twain


"I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short" (Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue parceque je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte) - Blaise Pascal, Lettres Provinciales (1656-1657), no. 16.

"Anyone can make something complex, but it takes a genius to make it simple" - Albert Einstein

Elimination of unnecessary complexity is a Key part of the BSD Philosophy

Much of the "Unix way" is based on the idea of abstracting interfaces into the simplest possible terms, BSD trys to take this to it's limits.

Initially, this was simply because the OS was considered experimental, and the simplest possible interface, one that wouldn't change later, .was the most easiest to construct.
This spend time upfront to think of how to "do it the easy way" methodology has evolved into a many of the most powerful design concepts in OS design. Abstraction that started in Unix is the core of many parts of a modern OS. From Files, Devices, Sockets, Modules, Processes, Memory Management, File Systems, directories, and Pipes.

Even the Internet is based on BSD technology and concepts. The BSD 4.2 OS was the first to Implement TCP/IP and part of that was the concept of network Sockets and Ports. Many other more complex network technology had been around for a while, but BSD Sockets allow for two computers to communicate in a way that uses the exact same commands as file access. Open, Read, Write, Close. It also uses another concept, Streams.


Simplicity and elegance though consistent software interfaces

Where:

elegant : adj. [common; from mathematical usage] Combining simplicity, power, and a certain ineffable grace of design. Higher praise than `clever', `winning', or even cuspy.

"The challenge is keeping it simple while providing the people with functions. This is harder to do. Anyone can make something complex." Dauphin A German Chair company

Try to understand the intent of the original authors' style and intent, and make changes consistent with this


This means not just going in slashing and hacking changes into the Kernel or User space code without researching and thinking them through first. Find a clean way to do what ever your trying to do. Spaghetti code is not tolerated.


All too often a quick and dirty little hack that was meant to be temporary become permanent and hard to fix later.

KISS, Keep It Simple, Stupid or maybe Keep it Short and Simple, I like the first one.

Working on BSD code is basically working on other people code for the most part. Most likely what ever you do, someone else will have to work on after you.

Working on someone else code is something many application programmers realy suck at. Also they think using the latest cool tricks that just came out in the latest language spec or the new compiler supports it so it's really Cool.
F*ck them! These guys need to be slapped up side the head a few times.
I see time and time again the Linux guys keep making a mess for those who need to update there code and drivers over to the latest OS version. Often is is almost as bad as a cross platform port, nothing works out the box everything is broken and it becomes a major undertaking!

The Mac OS-X darwin they are mixing C++ and Objective C into the kernel source tree! It's full of broken locks and is nearly impossible to understand anymore. Leaving some messy and hard kernel hacking to the customers having to make there code work on a pig of an OS. I hope that doesn't sound like I'm venting too much, does it?


"A program with a colorful GUI is like a woman with too much makeup. Shiny on the outside - awful on the inside."

Quote from the NET



Are you going to run a gui or from the command line etc... over SSH?
If you want a gui I would go Linux maybe Fedora, for SSH use FreeBSD...I used to be against it but I am now a convert to the Church of BSD.

Why would I ever want a GUI? It may sound odd but I have never ran X on any of the 100's of FreeBSD systems I have worked on. Command line Interfaces Rull, and for most of the stuff I do is much faster. Even this web page is edited in "VI".


We are not Linux, We were here before them; and well be here after them

So what's the difference, much of the same code get's passed between BSD and Linux Right? That's only partly true. The Licenses are incompatable between the two for starters.

"I must say the linux community is a lot nicer than the unix
community. a negative comment on unix would warrant death
threats. With linux, it is like stirring up a nest of butterflies."
             -- Ken Thompson author of C Language. 1999 

BSD vs. Linux, Any questions?

FreeBSD, OpenBSD and SuSE 6.2 Eval Review by Keith Rankin:
"The differences between FreeBSD and Linux used to be much more obvious than they are now.
Now it comes down to theology. The BSD world is still the 'high church' or Druid Unix. Blood will be spilled on a stone altar at midnite when star systems are in a certain alignment to learn the ways of this tribe. Linux is a happier world. The spirits of Captain Kirk, Peter Pan and good beer come to mind."

Hackers and the bushido code

For much of the early life of BSD Unix was spent running campus MiniComputers. PDP/11, Vax 11/750 and the like.

One way to attain elite status (enlightenment or become the master or Guru) was to "break root", break in or even just be able to crash the server.

This was not viewed as a federal offense, or even as something inappropriate but as an exciting challenge and testing the limits of the box.

For the many years it was an arms race between the OS developers and students to see if the box could be crashed by malicoius code or commands, the end result is something rock solid.

Now crashing a windows box usualy requires little more then power it up, but most BSD systems can go for years without rebooting, crashing or having it security compromised. Even on my own servers, like the one that ran the LeonardoDicaprio.com site, despite countless attempts to take out the box, it had little effect.

Part of Hacker Philosophy directly stems from these early BSD days, although not all of it. One of the thing was to not damage or sabotage, but to report and inform people of the bug or security hole. Maybe a little Kilroy was here on the administrators console ;)

Reboots, re-compiles and Re/Installations are EVIL and to be avoided at all costs.


One important thing about BSD is the belief that you should be able to stress the system in any number of ways, like open up and infinite number of files, sockets, programs, memory, or any other resource and have the system respond gracefully. But this I mean not to have a Blue Screen of Death, or Kernel Panic.


Linux groups have installfests, while BSD groups have installathons. Clearly an installfests sounds festive and much happier then an installathons that is more like a Marathon to try to race through it.

We are the one true Path, all non-believers (can go to hell) are damned to hell

This is in the tradition of all great religions.

From: Nick Moffitt nick@zork.net , With some paraphrasing.


Tue, 22 Aug 2000 14:02:47
Basically, user groups nowadays are either:

 Lame talking-heads lecture series.

 Cowtow to the windows users installathons.


  I say that's bullsh*t, and we all know it. F*CK the newbies.

We'll hold installfests, sure, but we'll be perfectly justified in telling people to take their 386s with 15 year-old RLL drives and GO HOME. This will be a meeting of COOL PEOPLE to show off COOL STUFF!

We'll not be limited to a particular OS, either. We'll have Linux weenies, FreeBSD weenies, and cypherpunk weenies clutching their precious OpenBSD! We'll have the AMAZING GEORGE PERRY and his BEARDFUL OF FORTH!

I think that expresses the attitude fairly well...

BSD License

Do what is right and be hated by those around you. Do what is popular and be hated by history.
The BSD License allows anyone to use the code for any reason and any way with no restrictions other then credit is given to the Authors
Transparency Begets Trust - Expertise in niches, transparency in motives and thought process and owning up to mistakes publicly create a trust relationship" - Will Pate



In General people in the BSD world view people and Individuals who do not share code and improvements as pompous idiots. There are a ton of smart people in the BSD world and no one individual or company (M$) not sharing code is really going to make any difference, the reality is we probably wouldn't want there code anyhow.

Trust builds Confidence

They will loose the benefits of having 1000's of eyes screening the code for holes and bugs as well as tightening things up and making improvements.

This is very much same philosophy as the Private vs. Public research in almost any scientific field. If you keep your research to your self, then you don't get credited for it. Also your work never gets confirmed, there is a good chance of deluding yourself about how secure and bug free your code is. (take Microsoft for an example)

The BSD approach is consider by most people to be better for businesses, companies such as Apple and Microsoft benefited their users by incorporating BSD-licensed code without having to share there code or changes to this code.

When questioned, most GPL programmers did not want the work they released to be used in a manner they did not support.


The BSD philosophy seems to hold that creating and giving away code, then seeing it used by others, is victory and reward enough.


But most of the GPL supporters disapproved of allowing "others" to close off source code and hide enhancements.