BSDCon Then and Now

Michael W. Lucas <mwlucas@freebsd.org>

At BSDCon 2000, when money was sloshing around the IT business like water over the deck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, attendees had free breakfast and lunch every day at an exclusive Monterey resort, a private seafood buffet at the world-famous Monterey Bay Aquarium, and personal masseuses for when our backsides got sore from lounging in recliners for hours discussing some of BSD's more obscure aspects.

At BSDCon 2003, we got a couple of rounds of finger food and soda. I'm told that if you want a massage you need to go to some of the more, er, interesting areas of San Mateo. Meanwhile, we're sitting in stackable chairs discussing the more obscure aspects of the various BSD operating systems.

It doesn't feel all that different.

While I wouldn't mind dancing elephants at the conference, the quality and quantity of thoughtful and innovative work being demonstrated at BSDCon is nothing short of astonishing. Some of it directly impacts BSD users, such as Colin Percival's automated binary FreeBSD updating system. Others are of interest only to the advanced user, such as Luke Mewburn's cross-building method that makes it possible to compile and release a complete NetBSD system while running almost any operating system: any BSD, Linux, Solaris, or even Cygwin on Windows. The BSD family is progressing far beyond what anyone could have forseen ten years ago.

We in the BSD camps have never been that good at making our presence known. We are archetypal geeks, lurking behind the curtains and running the spotlight to support whatever hit happens to be playing at the time. When email was the big innovation, we were there. When the Web hit the public consciousness, we were there. If you're doing anything on the Internet, BSD is in the middle--even if you don't know it!

So long as we continue demanding technical excellence and practical creativity we're going to attract more and more attention despite our best efforts. Vendors are starting to support FreeBSD operating systems with offerings such as NVidia's 3D card support and the forthcoming FreeBSD version of Crossover Office. OpenBSD recently won an Information Security Leadership Award from SANS. More and more embedded vendors are quietly basing their products on NetBSD. We're infiltrating the world like a particularly persistent kudzu, all thanks to the skillful work of our developers. The mainstream press mentions us more and more -- not a week goes by without some publication carrying a BSD story or mentioning BSD in a positive light. This is an excellent response to our efforts.

I even consider the recent branch of Dragonfly BSD from FreeBSD excellent news. Matt Dillon is in a position to take our venerable BSD codebase in a radical direction that would have been completely impossible within any of the more established BSD projects. I hope that he'll succeed as dramatically as he hopes. If Dragonfly BSD goes completely and spectacularly wrong, however, it will at least have provided an example of how not to do things. In either case, the BSD community as a whole will continue the quarter-century tradition of research, discovery, and freely sharing the results of its efforts.

Some bad news, however, is that Wind River has just announced the end-of-life for the venerable BSD/OS. While many BSD/OS users were already migrating to one of the open source BSDs, this is still regrettable. BSDi played a valuable place in the process of making BSD truly free, and BSD/OS deserved a better end than this. Fortunately, many of the people responsible for BSD/OS in the first place are now involved in open source BSDs, and the BSD/OS code was opened to the FreeBSD development team at the time of the Walnut Creek CDROM / BSDI merger. We're keeping the best of the old and adding skilled new developers all the time.

With the final demise of BSDi, open source developers are now the true inheritors and custodians of the UC Berkeley CSRG legacy. The development of truly free software, usable by anyone for any purpose, is a noble effort--perhaps not up there with caring for the poorest of the poor in the slums of Detroit, but still a worthwhile pursuit.

These developers are now saddled with a heavy burden. Most of you reading this are not developers, but you can support them without being a programmer. Free, Net, and OpenBSD all have lists of ways that you can contribute. I encourage you to check them out and do what you can. If nothing else, answering user questions on mailing lists is always appreciated -- it costs nothing, and it frees developers to do what only they can do.

Looking around BSDCon 2003, I only see one major difference from the 2000 event. Last time, BSDi was buying the beer. This time, we're all taking turns buying rounds. If we can keep this up, the BSD legacy is in good hands.

Michael Lucas lives in a haunted house in Detroit, Michigan with his wife Liz, assorted rodents, and a multitude of fish. He's the author of the Big Scary Daemons column for O'Reilly, Absolute BSD and Absolute OpenBSD, and is currently preparing a book about NetBSD. Michael is an occasional contributor to Dæmon News.