BSD Magazine released

In the fall of 2007 I wrote two 30-day series about PC-BSD and DesktopBSD respectively. I was impressed by the ease of use and the level of maturity,not of the software but of the people developing and using BSD.

When I was finished I ran across a blogpost by Dru Lavigne who pointed at a new BSD Magazine to be released in the spring of 2008. Contacting the editor was easy enough and the decision was made to write an article about the two *BSD’s I had tested extensively.

On thing that made the experience all the more exciting were the e-mail based interviews with the key developers Peter Hofer (DesktopBSD), Kris Moore (PC-BSD) and Matt Olander (iXsystems). I am just the curious writer, but these are the guys that actually work on providing us with two great desktop-oriented *BSD’s.

Anyway, the first issue of BSD Magazine is out and it looks superb. It comes with a dvd containing FreeBSD 7.0, pfSense 1.2 firewall and some more. The articles have something for readers on all levels. Dru Lavigne helps you to install FreeBSD 7.0 in the section ‘get started’. Joy Kruizenga explains how to install BSD alongside Vista in the section ‘how-tos’.If you happen to have the Linksys NSLU2, you might want to read Donald Hayford’s article on how to install NetBSD on it. The scope and quality is really amazing and I feel a bit proud to be among this group of writers. Humbled too, because everyone else appears to have tons more knowledge about BSD as well.

I can only recommend getting the first issue or subscribing for BSD Magazine. There aren’t many magazines out there that deal with BSD and this magazine deserves to remain for a long. The annual subscription for four issues is $ 39,99 for the USA and € 29,99 for Europe and the rest of the world. To quote l’Oreal: “you’re worth it.”

Stallman: 'OpenBSD Ports Suggests Non-Free Software'

“East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet.” OSNews reports about an exchange between the ever cuddly Richard Stallman and the always cordial Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD. What is the issue?

According to Richard Stallman the OpenBSD ports collection isn’t as free as he wants it to be. To quote from his post on the OpenBSD-misc mailing list:

Since I consider non-free software to be unethical and antisocial, I think it would be wrong for me to recommend it to others. Therefore, if a collection of software contains (or suggests installation of) some non-free program, I do not recommend it. The systems I recommend are therefore those that do not contain (or suggest installation of) non-free software.

From what I have heard, OpenBSD does not contain non-free software (though I am not sure whether it contains any non-free firmware blobs). However, its ports system does suggest non-free programs, or at least so I was told when I looked for some BSD variant that I could
recommend. I therefore exercise my freedom of speech by not including OpenBSD in the list of systems that I recommend to the public.

I could recommend OpenBSD privately with a clear conscience to someone I know will not install those non-free programs, but it is rare that I am asked for such recommendations, and I know of no practical reason to prefer OpenBSD to gNewSense.

Well, you can imagine this didn’t fall well in the OpenBSD community and frankly, I have to agree with them. I appreciate Stallman’s view on free software and actually support the GPL v3, but his argument here seems a bit silly. He doesn’t know whether non-free software is in the ports collection, but since the ports collection could contain non-free software it is wrong to use OpenBSD. Unless you are a good friend of Richard and he knows you wouldn’t touch non-free stuff with a 10 foot pole.

Not surprisingly Theo de Raadt had his say about it:

There is nothing to discuss with me.
Richard claimed that there is non-free software in OpenBSD. That is not true.
It is no more true than Linux being able to run commercial binaries.
The ports tree is just a scaffold.
Richard, you are wrong. You said very clearly in your interview that the ports tree contains non-free software. It does not. It is just a scaffold of Makefiles containing URLs, and an occasional patch here or there.
You are just plain wrong. And you are not enough of a man to admit that you are wrong.
I may be unfriendly at times, but you are a power-misusing hypocritical liar who attacks projects that try harder than any others to only make free software available.
Shame on you.

No doubt this will turn into a GNU/Linux versus BSD debate again. Interesting as a pass time, but utterly useless in the end.

Tags: BSD, Linux