Changes are a' comin'!

Gregory Sutter, gsutter@daemonnews.org

There's big news in the BSD community today, as two important mergers are occurring. First, Berkeley Systems Design, Inc., better known as BSDI, and Walnut Creek CDROM, the primary backer of FreeBSD, are merging. The combined company, BSD Inc., will have a strategy of promoting BSD on all levels. This merger, combining the two primary corporate supporters of BSD, will allow the new company to really focus its efforts on the improvement and promotion of BSD.

The other merger is that of the codebases of BSD/OS and FreeBSD. This merger will occur over (hopefully) the next year and result in a single operating system, still named FreeBSD. FreeBSD will remain completely open source and primarily under the BSD license, as it is today. Certain commercial drivers and components of BSD/OS which remain under NDA will be administered by BSD Inc. as add-on components. These components, along with the commercial backing, will be the value-added features separating FreeBSD from BSD/OS, which will continue as a commercial product (with FreeBSD at the core).

But how friendly is the merger? Look no further than the Principal Architect's chair. David Greenman, who has been Principal Architect for FreeBSD since its inception, and Mike Karels, who holds the position's analogue (Chief Systems Architect) at BSDI, will be co-architects for FreeBSD. This will essentially double the architectural leadership for the project.

In addition to the architect position, having the BSDI developers working on FreeBSD should greatly improve response time for creation of new hardware drivers and advanced features. These developers have managed to keep a closed-source BSD competitive with its open source cousins--no mean feat.

As far as the code goes, this merger can do only good--and lots of it. Additional people, energy, and spirit can only result in a more rapid development pace. Right away, the biggest issue will be selecting the code to use from both systems; the second will be merging back changes from the current incarnations of each OS. Now that the business end of things has been cared for, the developers have a great deal of work ahead of them.

Although BSDI is merging its codebase with FreeBSD, the other open source BSDs are not being left in the cold. Both NetBSD and OpenBSD are welcome to either contribute code, suggestions, and improvements to FreeBSD, or to take BSDI's code contributions and use them in their own projects. Once BSDI releases the code to FreeBSD, it will fall under a very liberal license. Basically, if the code is incorporated into an existing open source project, it will fall under the licensing terms of that project. This means that any open source project can incorporate BSDI's code--quite a gift, especially when compared to other commercial entities' offerings.

The BSD community has watched as Linux appeared, exploded, and produced a host of commercial entities. Linux is now the second-most-widely-used PC operating system in the world, firm proof that the open source concept is completely commercially viable. With BSD, Inc. as a backer, and an ever-growing pool of talent to draw from, BSD can be taken from the realm of the hacker, the academic, and the power user into that of the everyday, average user -- without sacrificing any of its power or stability.

Yes, indeed, changes are a' comin'.