FreeBSD - Deb Goodkin, Linux vs FreeBSD

this is floss weekly i'm doc searles our guest this week on floss weekly is deb goodkin of the freebsd foundation sean powers and i talked about all kinds of stuff having to do with freebsd versus the other bsds freebsd versus linux all of the amazing companies that actually use it like netflix and sony and apple even and lots of other companies how those are involved how um how the whole thing is done it's really different than what you're used to with linux and we just begin to get into all kinds of stuff about that and that is coming up next podcasts you love from people you trust this is twit this is floss weekly episode 662 recorded wednesday january 5th 2022 free bsd this episode of floss weekly is brought to you by collide get endpoint management that puts the user first visit collide.com twit to learn more and activate a free 14-day trial today no credit card required hello again good morning good evening good whenever it is wherever you are anywhere in the world i am doc searles and this is the first floss weekly of the year 2022. so welcome and uh my uh guest host today is uh is sean powers who comes to us from the deepest darkest whitest snowiest um michigan stream northern michigan and today it's cold it's it's been a weird winter but yeah it's cold you know and and uh the votes are in i have been the best co-host of 2022 so far so i'm just saying got my vote got my vote so far yeah are you snowbound yet has that happened uh we have a little bit of snow overnight but it's just it's been a weird year you know it'll be icy and then it'll be sunny and like 60 and then the next day it'll be in the teens so i i don't know well i am in santa barbara california which is rather typically perfect right now it's going to be about 70 today it's sunny it's nice anyway so uh so our guest today is deb goodkin of the free psd foundation are you familiar with her or with it and not with her no freebsd freebsd i mean know what it is and you know a little about it not not a whole lot you know i'm a i'm a linux guy and so um i'm looking forward to hearing some of the the differences and similarities and um yeah i mean who doesn't who doesn't love open source technology that isn't linux i mean it seems like everything this day is linux this linux that so i'm i'm really looking forward to hearing more about freebsd and that's like i mean there's like some original freebsd stuff that went into mac os 10 and maybe she knows some of that in history because i mean it's not running freebsd but there's something freebsd-ish about it so anyway i'm looking forward to asking those questions to somebody who might know yeah so and and me too and because we got a little bit of a late start not that people watching or listening to the recording would know that um i want to get right into it and let people know that this episode of floss weekly is brought to you by collide collide that's kol ide with a k is a new take on endpoint management that asks the question how can we get end users more involved this is in contrast to old school device management tools like mdm which lock down your employees devices without considering their needs or even attempting to educate them about the security of their laptop collide is built by like-minded security practitioners who in the past saw just how much mdm was disrupting their end users often frustrating them so bad that they would throw up their hands and just switch to using their personal laptops without telling anyone and that scenario everyone loses collide on the other hand is different instead of locking down a device collide takes a user-focused approach that communicates security recommendations to your employees directly on slack after collide is set up device security turns from a black and white state to a dynamic conversation this conversation starts with the end users installing the endpoint agent on their own through a guided process that happens right inside their first slack message from there collide regularly sends employees recommendations when their device is in an insecure state this can range from simple problems like the screen lock not being set correctly too hard to solve and nuanced issues like asking people to secure two-factor backup codes sitting in their downloads folder properly and again it's talking directly to employees collide is educating them about the company's policies and how to best keep their devices secure using real tangible examples not theoretical scenarios collide cross platform endpoint management for linux mac and windows devices that puts end users first for teams that slack get endpoint management that puts the user first visit collide.com twit to learn more and activate a free 14-day trial today no credit card required visit k-o-l-i-d-e dot com slash twit today okay our guest today is deb goodkin of the freebsd foundation um she joined as the first employee back in august 2005 which though it's in this in this millennium there's a long time ago she's been there for a long time uh before venturing into the world of open source and operating systems she spent two decades working as an embedded firmware engineer technical marketer and technical sales engineer in the data storage industry besides running the freebsd foundation she now focuses on learning more about operating systems while adding for free bsd around the world so welcome deb welcome to the show oh hello from boulder colorado from boulder colorado that's bolder as in the rock not boulder as in an attitude um you just had some news there yeah to locate this in time this is right after fires roared through your vicinity there i guess you're okay yeah that's true so today is what wednesday and um thursday i was taking i actually took uh the day off as a vacation day and i spent um basically the whole day sitting by my back window watching the fire yeah trying to figure out if we needed to evacuate or not that's heavy as you can see this is my house so yeah it's it's not not a fake background we yeah living in santa barbara we've had three fires that have come close to us here and when i lived in a bay area we got to watch fires like across the bay in oakland and stuff it it's scary living living in the west is kind of a scary thing in general it's all new geology and new botany and it's a lot of it's flammable or avalanches and other things but but anyway it's it's great to have you on the show and um so i i kind of want to get together because um bsd is in a lot of things including the very computer i'm talking to you over right now it's an it's a as somewhat elderly mac um but it's one that works um and bsd is in there and there's and i'm wondering if you could you know fill us in on you know for those of us who like me who spend a lot of time in the linux world to set to the degree it's a world what's what distinguishes bsd free bsd in general are free bsd in particular but um to clarify what distinguishes it from the other businesses or from other operators from linux from linux from from from the unixes from which it was derived you know i i mean i i remember you know working at sun and you know they were trying to work their own bsd well at the same time with their own you know derived one while trying to do keep up with att's svr svr4 or whatever it was at that time back in the 80s but the world seems to be unique now yeah yeah so so um so freebsd descends from berkeley unix which was a continuation of unix out of bell labs and and so berkeley worked on it for quite a few years improving it and it was referred to as research unix and and then when the funding went away basically uh then there are a lot of folks who are still working on it and wanted to continue with that and so that's where uh freebsd and netbsd were basically born or continued or forked from that so it's still considered a unix-like operating system it's different than uh windows and mac because it is open source and free mac to originate or at least darwin originated from uh freebsd so actually they took components of bsd and then over the years they replaced the bsd components with freebsd and so you could say that mac os a lot of folks will will say it's a you know like a freebsd based operating system it's uh different than linux a lot of times people will confuse the two and they'll think previously is a another linux distribution and it's not it's its whole uh operating system like i said it descended from unix um out of berkeley and where linux was created in the early 90s from linus and it's uh it was i believe to be like a minix replacement at that time but it but it's also a unix-like operating system so i um you know my i'm a linux guy my job is linux stuff i do linux stuff all the time but i'm not i told myself i would not dominate this whole show asking like linux contrasting questions so i i'm actually curious about uh the relationship between now you work at the the freebsd foundation and that is separate from the freebsd project itself and and if you could describe like what exactly that is like the project i think is in charge of the operating system and so what does the foundation do and i mean to the point of who reports to who is it independent how are they related all of those things i'm curious where where those things land yeah i mean those are really good questions because a lot of folks get confused over the relationship or actually the differences between like the freebsd foundation and and other foundations like the linux foundation and so the freebsd foundation is a 501c3 which is a us irs tax classification and that means we're for the public good and there's other foundations and i'll use linux foundation as an example they're a 501c6 they are a trade association and so their their purpose is for the industry our purpose is supported the industry but also basically in the community and um and like i said it's for the public good um so we we are a legal entity we've been around for since 2000 so for a long time and um the pr the freebsd project is a project of volunteers who are passionate about supporting the freebsd operating system so so we our mission the foundation's mission is for the project and the community and but we can also step in and um we assign like license agreements uh ndas um do we own the previous eip uh i mean which means like the the trademarks um we can't so we are a separate organization from the project but like i said our whole purpose is this fourth project so we're not an umbrella organization unlike some other foundation so the pr the project is not like under us and we can't tell them what to do and but we can um what we do is we will talk to users out there whether they're individuals or um apparently that disable everything here so so we'll get input from uh companies corporations who are using freebsd users out there other types of organizations like universities uh what they need what they would like to see supported what are they doing and so the foundation we actually have software engineers on staff and so we can move forward and we can implement features and functionality we can also step in quickly and fix bugs and uh review changes from other committers and so we we have the staff who's available to do that versus the project is is really comprised of volunteers i mean you do have employees of different corporations who are also getting paid to work on freebsd but there are areas that maybe no one's interested in working on and so we can step in and support those areas so that that actually uh leads to an interesting question so um we generally like to eat food and and and live in a home when we live in cold weather like you and i do um what where does funding come for the freebsd foundation because it it's i mean the the project sounds like it's a volunteer base which is awesome but there you know if the foundation is supporting the project and doing other things um where does funding come from so we're 100 funded by donations and we get those donations from individuals so usually folks out there who are using previous de or maybe contributing to freebsd and they want to support the efforts and but we got get most of our funding from uh corporate donors and so that would be companies like netflix juniper netapp um actually we have a donor page that that lists the donors there and so uh oh google um back off companies like that and so uh they they trust how we're going to use the money it's never earmarked on how we're going to spend that but we've been around for a long time and we're fairly transparent with how we spend our money and we post it on our website our our financial reports uh the 990 is always available too and so so anyway that that's currently how we get our funding we're always working on trying to get more uh fundraising is the hardest part of my job and so we're working on helping improve that this year and and we do apply for grants too so uh so part of our funding comes down from grants i i'm curious that um one of the things that happened in the in the linux world uh when the linux foundation came along and and i think it's really interesting that you characterize that as a trade association um and you know versus what you've got us which is more community oriented and i'm wondering how you keep the community from becoming a trade association in a way i mean you say we you know the funding is not it comes to these companies and it's not earmarked but no doubt some of the committers in the project um work for these companies and these companies have interests these companies have legitimate input in some cases that may have some really good influences on the code base but in others may want to buy us the code base toward their purposes and not others and i'm wondering how you'd navigate that if or if that's even an issue um for us it really isn't an issue we definitely have companies like uh okay netflix is a great example where they contribute a lot to the code base and i mean this is how they get their high transfer rates that they do and um and they so they have uh paid staff who work directly on freebsd they use the current uh branch of the code and they upstream as much as they can so they really upstream most of their code they also financially donate to us and um we'll reach out to companies like them and ask them for you know what what are your challenges and it just helps inform us on what we should address but we don't have any time a company comes to us and they need something specific implemented then we try to connect them to a company that can do that for them and we don't we don't do that so we will only make changes that will help improve freebsd for um you know for most users out there we don't have we currently don't have a technical advisory board and and we have looked at changing our model to like a c6 but it doesn't seem like that would be the right solution for us and and the whole reason why we would consider it would be for the funding and so we're looking at um just getting funding different ways and and you know continuously reaching out to companies whether they use freebsd or not so you know there's companies uh that just want to support the health of the open source ecosystem and so by supporting us that helps because previously has been around for so long i mean we're one of the oldest largest most successful open source projects around and we're growing still you don't hear about us a lot but there's a lot of companies that base their products on freebsd and so we at the foundation we try to promote that when we can we're actually trying to write more case studies and testimonials to promote that but we don't have this big long membership list like the linux foundation has of that we can have logos on it but we do put logos from donors on our donor page so so right now yet we um like you're asking initially we we don't have an issue with companies uh trying to step in and uh and basically tell us what to do because i mean really if a company try to do that we still don't have control of the project and so uh we yeah we we can help influence and guide and make suggestions but we can't tell them what to do which is what the people on the project want i mean they they want to work on the things that they want to work on so if i mean if you think about the purpose of the project it's not frequency is a product and a lot of companies use that in universities and stuff like i was saying but still a lot of people work on it because they're really interested in it they're they're learning they're contributing uh they're part of this community and so there's a lot of other reasons to um yeah for freebsd out there okay so that whole conversation really got my my brain working now um so linux is is a kernel i mean linux is a lot of things but ultimately linux is is the kernel uh freebsd is an entire operating system so i mean there there's some difference there and and i realize that your answer to the question i'll ask kind of will will hinge on that that difference but uh when it comes to linux i mean you know linus is the guy who decides you know he's like the the person who says yes that's going in the colonel no it's not going into the colonel um you said there's not necessarily a tech advisory board for freebsd what i'm curious about is who does make those decisions about what becomes a part of freebsd i can just see a lot of contention and hopefully there's not i mean you know people you know get along open source software uh that would be it would be awesome but i just see a lot of contention especially if there are the companies who participate we don't necessarily do just what the companies want but uh you know if one of those companies happens to be a big donator that's a scary thing to say no um who who does ultimately make those decisions and and i realize the foundation and the in the project are different as well so maybe those layers help alleviate some of those those areas of contention but how does that work exactly so the structure of the project is um is pretty flat so you have you do have a core team that is like the board of directors of the project they're or like the upper management and they do help influence and guide the project and we work we try to work closely with the core team we do have overlap with some of my team members or also on the core team and so we take input from large corporations or corporations using freebsd we take input from users out there and we and we use that to inform what we should be doing and um and the core team is is really that guiding force of the leadership of the project you don't have a benevolent dictator like uh the linux project and um anyone can contribute to the project we don't have the whole lieutenant hierarchy but it doesn't mean that the standards are any less and the code gets submitted and it's reviewed and um it's committed it could be reverted to so um so the difference is is that you just have more people who can step in and help review changes and help decide if yeah this should stay or or be committed to the code base uh one thing actually you know sort of sidestep this here i remember talking to someone uh actually linus's really good friend and big time linux supporter and he and i were having coffee and just a few years ago because you know if i were to join open if i was new and i were to join an open service project i would i would join freebsd or contribute to freebsd and um and i was like why because i thought i was so surprised to hear this from him and and he said well because it's so much easier to you know to uh contribute to the project you may wait months to get anything accepted in linux because that whole hierarchy structure and that's when i really understood what um you know that the difference is there and and like i was saying it doesn't mean the standards or the quality you know or any less it's just it's just different and so uh so that's one thing about like if folks are looking at contributing to an open source project previously is nice because it is easier to contribute and to make a notable difference hold on [Laughter] so many so um um so and one other thing to note too is that if there is anything like a technical dispute that came within the project then the core team like i was talking about they would uh be the arbitrator for that and and the core team is made up of nine folks that are elected by the um the committers of the project and um and so an election happens every two years and actually elections will come up this summer it probably starts in may i don't know the dates of it but um but that's how yeah i know that these look really funny but i don't wear them right but anyway that's nice distraction from my answer right did it answer your question that is good um you know we all have our little technical things i was thinking that i mean my headphone problem is they have brand new headphones they're like the best ones bows make and they have such a good seal on my head they're just heating my head right up anyway um i i want to pause for a moment and and we have a question actually from the back channel um but first i want to let people know about club twit joining club twit is another great way to support our network the twit network as a member you get access to ad free versions of all the shows on twit including this one and other great benefits there's a bonus twit plus feed that includes footage and discussions that didn't make the final show edit as well as bonus shows who started such as the untitled linux show hosted by our very own jonathan bennett uh the gives fizz and other monthly members only content uh there's the community aspect we have a really fun discord server that's available only for our club twit members uh there you can chat with other members about the shows and many other uh tech topics and non-tech topics everything's on the table there there's even a beer and cocktails chat on our discord so sign up club twit for the cost of one fancy cup of coffee a month that's just seven dollars a month gets you into the club head over to twit dot tv slash club twit and join today so so let's get to the back channel one um i have to scroll up a little bit to see it because we have a lot of action over there it's about the free bsd license we have hard to say whether the os or the license is the biggest contribution to open source um so tell us a little bit about that and the difference between that another relatively liberal licenses you might say oh gosh okay so i'm not great at licenses but so to compare it to other permissive licenses i'm not either it's easy to ask so i mean really when when i compare when people say well what's difference between previously and linux or what should i use freebsd over linux uh the bsc license is a big reason and so what it means is that it's a permissive license and you can take the code and you can make your changes and you don't have to give those changes back so and that means you could turn into proprietary code so for example um that would be companies like apple like sony uh it's so sony uses uh freebsd um it's the foundation of their operating system and their playstations and um and so you you can't get access for that code if it was a linux a gpl type of a license code then yes you could ask for it they would have to provide it and so that is why a lot of companies use it and um and the philosophy of the project is is they're fine with it they um they are working on a product that they want folks to use and so it's just a different philosophy and um and so it's just really interesting to see those differences because i could also understand being a developer and you know if you're making billions of dollars from the work i'm doing you know i would like some credit for that and and so it's it's it's just different um a lot of companies too um actually most companies out there still contribute or upstream their changes back to us so like so i'll use netflix for example again too just because they are such a large contributors to freebsd uh they upstream almost all their their changes and they just keep a small portion of their code's proprietary code and we actually have a really nice case study written up on on our website if you're interested in in how they use the freebsd and how they get such incredibly high uh transfer rates actually they've they've over the past few years they've given a few talks on how they're using freebsd and so it's really it's pretty cool so speaking of pretty cool how's this for segway um i'm a little bit curious we're talking about licensing we're talking about all these things can you tell me a little bit about the mascot because i'll be honest that that he probably had a name and and i'm a linux guy so i know tux's name but i don't know the the little devil's name but what happened because i don't see him anymore was that just a marketing choice or what happened there so um okay so uh so bc who oh actually i hear i have because i keep looking see that so this is him it's so cute so this was the freebsd logo it's it's it's really the the bsd logo and yeah and you see it on the freebsd.org website um i i really don't know the history um of when it changed but basically so bc was a play on how the there's this in the unix world you have these background processes called demons and so um oh gosh i'm trying to remember the name of the art of the disney artist who created the logo he actually created this design and and the play on was on the demon as well as the bsd name so bc is a play on besd so it was the um so it's like oh i think it's john lester who's really big at disney now but anyway he did the original design uh kirk mccusick owns the trademark for it and um and so it's still the bsd mascot and that hasn't changed but there was a certain time when um i think there was a little pushback or concern about having something that looked like the devil as you know as the mascot and the logo and so all the bsc projects actually changed their logos and so uh freebies you did too and we have this it's a red um trying to see if i have anything here with it on i i can't see anything here uh but it's it's not as cute but it's like a red we call it a bobble head it's like a round uh red ball with with ears on it and um and yeah you have the page of the the history of the bc daemon and then actually if you go back to the freebsd.org page too then um you'll you should see on the top left there that's that's actually the bsd or previously logo now that's the official logo and and right when i joined around 2005 that they had a community competition for the artwork to submit artwork and so that was actually one of the um uh submissions for that competition that's the one that won and then we took over ownership of uh of that logo that graphic and we've had that ever since but it's still people um still we'll call bc freebsd logo and we just over time are you continuing trying to make sure people know that it's really bsd mascot and it's it's not the freebsd logo all right so thankfully there there aren't really any uh controversies with penguins that i know of so i think tux is safe texas safe and tux is cute i may even have that i think i have a tux hiding here so doc did you go ahead you had a question about well actually you know i'm looking around i said uh first of all i'm blown away there's john lasseter who's a pretty famous uh uh animation guy uh yeah doc and i are in the background oh my gosh like whoa um that's that's that's pretty radical i had no idea that he was the guy can i can i interject something here then too in the history so the other thing that's really cool too is so i mentioned kirk mccusick is is the owner of the trademark of bc uh so kirk mccusick is one of the original bsd developers he was at berkeley when they were working on the berkeley unix and he still contributes to the project and he's on our board of directors and he's like we refer to him as a rock star i mean he's so approachable and he loves to talk to folks about freebsd he loves to help he gives tutorials and um and he and when he was actually at berkeley working on uh the berkeley nx uh uh oh gosh now i'm a joy um oh gosh maybe allow me bill joy uh was also there too he worked on for i mean there's a lot of names out there that worked on berkeley unix and so bill joy came up with this idea of this company he wanted to start and he actually asked her to join and the company was son and at the time kirk was like oh no i've got to finish my phd and and so he said it was like one of the biggest mistakes he made and don't get business advice from him but um yeah the story is great and he'll he'll talk about the history of freebsd in fact i i think i included a link to um one of his write-ups on the history of freebsd and bsd too and uh it's it's always really interesting to to hear his talks so you can go on with your next yeah i know it's while you're talking i'm running through uh connections uh kurt b kuzick um uh you know these are names i haven't paid attention to in years and it turns out his spouse is eric allman which is i did not know that either he created send mail there are so many connections in in in the communities i'd like to ask about i mean and this is really old it's not even news this might even be pre-history but um there was a time when there was this kind of conflict going on between freebsd and open bsd and netbsd and all i know other kinds of bsd is any of that still around does anybody care is that is that still an issue of any at any at any level not really we uh so there are bsc conferences that happen around the world uh typically with three or four a year and so all the bsd's folks are there and um and and the each project has its own like purpose or philosophy and uh yeah previously is largest right now and um and netbsd is uh i mean i mean if you if if you think back on like so why why was there not bsd and previously and that bsd wanted to work like on ever any type of platform open bsd uh they wanted to be more secure uh previously is really secure so there's just different philosophies there we share code we actually will have net bsc folks work on freebsd and um and so there's i mean i i would say that there's like rivalries like you have with sports teams and we'll like joke around but when i think about when i'm at these conferences it's fun to hang around with folks from all the projects and um and and it's always really interesting to see like folks from our project work with folks from other projects and because that's how you learn and and share and if if like open bsc has something that we think would be really helpful in freebsd then we try to get someone to port that or even maybe get an open pse person to to help us i i i have a go ahead go ahead well i just had a quick question so um it's something jonathan was talking about in the in the irc um so with linux we have 11 000 distributions that are built on top of the linux kernel for better or for worse there's advantages and disadvantages since freebsd is an entire operating system are there flavors of freebsd i mean i know the the mac os thing where like they used parts of freebsd but that doesn't count because that's that's weird but are there are there different flavors or or just different like uh install use cases how does that work uh compared to what a lot of us would be familiar with with regards to linux and distributions right so we have so we basically free freebsd is one distribution it's the whole operating system if you look at linux it's the kernel like you said there's a zillion different flavors or distributions out there and and you have to try to figure out which one you should use you can't just run or linux by itself so freebsd include you know it's a whole operating system it includes both the kernel uh the user land documentation the tools and uh which makes it attractive to use because it's a you know one cohesive system it's developed all together it's tested together it's created by one community and um but there are you know i'm not exactly sure if we should refer to it as a distribution but there are are different flavors out there for example there's some more desktop oriented distributions like hello systems midnight bsd ghost bsd and those are geared more towards folks who want to use previously as a desktop and make it a little easier to get started because they typically will have a nice gui whereas if you just install freebsd uh the base system uh you and you want that you have to set that up yourself so um there's always people who who want to work improve that like especially like the onboarding process getting new folks to use freebsd and um and so starting with something like a hello systems um makes it a lot easier and then you could always if you install that then you can go to the command line and still um do free vlc things but it is still freebsd so i mean the like package management is still with ports and and all that stuff those don't change with them correct yeah that is correct yep okay and you have and then you have uh derivatives or you have uh other products out there that folks a lot of folks are familiar with pf suns is based on freebsd uh the freenas that was also uh or is based on freebsd [Music] i i'm wondering about yeah good sorry yeah i was i was just trying to think of freenas how they do the package system but i i can't remember so but yeah i mean usually so if and if you look at the base system uh the base system is what you install from freebsd it has everything that you really need to run previously and then there's over 30 000 ports that you can install that so say you want um oh you want to access the internet so you can install firefox and if you want like uh uh word processing you could do libreoffice or another software actually i think the number now is over 40 000 software packages it's pretty unbelievable so i mean so the idea is i mean you can use freebsd as your desktop operating system it's known in the server world um as a great operating system but you can all you can definitely use it on the desktop and that's something that the foundation is working to improve this year is to put more resources into supporting areas like wi-fi and graphics to improve that experience okay so then uh let's let's push that further along right now why should someone try using freebsd right there's a lot of options out there what why would they potentially want to try free asb freebsd of any sort whether it's the the ones you mentioned that are a little more user friendly at first or you know just core freebsd so i mean when when people ask me that um it usually uh what comes first in my mind is the community so if you're so whether you're contributing or using a free freebsd it's a welcoming and inclusive community and so why is that good i mean if you're a contributor then you feel um i mean you're part of this community i mean if you look at like why get involved in open source in general because there's so many open source projects out there you pick it because it might be a technology you're interested in but you also pick it because of the community because these are the people you're going to be working with and if i were to volunteer on a project i wanted to be welcoming inclusive and so if i want to contribute something and maybe i'm not sure about something i want to feel comfortable asking a question and not being put down because i don't know how to do it or even the fact that i'm asking the question so you don't get that in the freebsd community um and it's also you know easy to ask questions because we have so many different uh like forums to be able to ask questions from twitter to facebook to forums to emails so there's there's different ways to do that oh irc too um and then what previously is known for its excellent documentation and so what that means is that it's it's fairly easy to find the information um that you want and so if you're trying to do something um you can google it and usually find the information uh pretty quickly and uh and the previously handbook is actually something you could sit down on a you know snowy day by the fireplace and read and it's actually really interesting i've done that uh and so um you know then other reasons that people uh might want to use or or be part of or learn about previously really is because um it's because of the size of the operating system um it's a much smaller code base to learn from so say you want to become a systems programmer you want to learn about operating systems in general that you have this you know production quality full operating system that you can actually look at that source code and and learn as well as you can also you know start coding as a systems programmer and you can um become a significant contributor because our community is small and so for example we had an intern and who's actually now he's now since graduated and so he's continuing to work for us but he started um at the university of waterloo which we do we work with them on their uh in their co-op program and um and so you started working at risk five and then he um he's continuing to work on that and um and so he's as a student he was one of the main he was able to learn about this like specific area and become a significant contributor to this area and so um i mean it could sound like oh we take these novice folks and they take over significant portions of the code but that's not the case at all it's like we had we have great mentors in that that area too and so it was by having that um you know that mentor philosophy that he was able to come up to speed really quickly and because he had that interest in that area then he was able to take a little more ownership of that too that's uh that's awesome so our um i mean that kind of sounds like the sort of thing that the the foundation was designed for right to uh to bring people in so on that note what are do you i assume you have a road map what are your big plans for 2022 as the freebsd foundation what are you hoping to accomplish what direction are you going um and how could people get involved so okay so that's a lot so uh we do have a technology roadmap that we wrote about um oh i may have to provide the url for that but basically what we did was last year we sat down and looked at like what what areas of previously should we step in and support and so he came up with like four main areas and we staffed up last year and we have i think we have about 11 full-time employees now and then some part-time contractors and so one area that we're supporting um is the arm 64-bit arm and that's become a tier one platform for the project and so we have um one and a half folks working on that the other areas like i said earlier was desktop and really to improve the desktop experience and so so that includes the improving the wi-fi and the graphics support and um and making sure that previously is working on newer hardware and so we're purchasing more laptops and newer hardware to make sure previously works we're improving the developer tools and let me think of some other areas the the other thing is too i mean i've been focusing on technology but advocating for freebsd we have a marketing group it's small but we have two full-time employees there and and marketing really is is advocating for freebsd so they spend most of their time uh writing up blog posts to promote different uh you know features and previously what work is being done and it may or may not be stuff that the foundation is doing we're definitely trying to promote a lot or write up a lot of the work that we're doing so folks know out there what we're doing and um especially just how we're spending our money so we're trying to be really transparent with that they also write a lot of how-to guides and we're helping improve the onboarding process so how do so how do we get new people involved in freebsd and so it's providing some of those those guides um you know to set up a virtual machine install freebsd and try try this and that some of the things that that we want to add to that uh are i would really like to provide more training opportunities and maybe doing it online where we have online tutorials but when the pandemics started we realized that we weren't going to be able to do in-person events for a while um i mean who knew it would be this long but we started a freebsd friday series and we have close to 20 talks and they're all like previously 101 type of talks in different areas of freebsd and so you can access that on our youtube well the freebsd's youtube channel and learn about freebsd that way i have a couple questions that might be related and i'm not sure um one is you may have already covered it um when one of your um big corporate uh implementers of free bsd like uh you're on the playstations which is interesting to me and on um and of course on the mac when they make a hardware change like a big hardware change apple made a giant hardware change where suddenly they may have for all i know i don't even know if there's a new instruction set with that or not or if there is does that infl does that show up does that influence development and then i have another question that may or may not be related as well which is what's the split between users that are purely on the server side the ui and everything is all about server applications and being used in mostly in corporate uh circumstances versus pure user you know and is there a large enough code base or a large enough base of ordinary apps that regular users might use and i'm just wondering if those even might be related so oh so the first question what was the first question again the the first question had to do with with when when when a big corporate an operator like like an apple or like uh or like a sony i guess the playstation makes a change they're doing something they're using your os they're rippling and implementing it in a new way maybe a new iron that's what happened with apple when they went from intel to uh to their own iron does that does that cascade upward into into the operating system that they're using or the parts of it that they're using um well as far as apple goes uh there are definitely folks who want to use freebsc on those systems and so they'll run it and and so they'll test uh you know if there's any issues then um then they will try to get that support added as far as like apple goes it diverged so long ago that um i mean that's something that they work on internally and so they and the same with sony too um so i mean there there are companies that will work with us to make sure that frequencies running on their newer products for example um amd has been great about reaching out to us and offering us systems to make sure that previously works on their new processors out the door which has been which has been great for us and and great for them too because that way we have early access and um and we don't um yeah there's no you know we usually take care of any issues before uh their products are released so um so companies like that it's we we really welcome that to be able to um you know get it's usually what cpu is right to make sure it um previously works on them like arm is is a good example too what i used to do in storage actually actually i worked at next um i made it work at next next used um our storage or disk drives and so i would go there and work on site to make sure that there are applications and every software worked with our disk drives and so that was always interesting and always i only bring it up next because next was a bsd shop and when apple bought them um they had you know there were like two versions of operating systems the apple and the next and actually and um and they took the next operating system and that's what everything was based on and so that's why it's bsd and freebsd based okay so yeah we could do a whole other show on um next that was my first love of of unix-based operating systems there was there was a lab of next cubes at college when i was there in those next cubes i mean that took sean out there he goes we took so i took out sean but yeah i mean next next was like you know with that cube it was such a different design and it was it was so cool um you know when they were out there and it was it was just so so different at that time it was it was a pretty cool company that's funny that one of the first next machines i saw was that uh that phil hughes had phil when he started linux journal we were actually thinking of doing a next a next magazine as well we're looking way back and of course the first time the web worked internationally was between two next machines so so there's there's that as well yeah we're we're in there's another whole story unfortunately the person i know who told me the story's gone from earth at this point so i have to have to get tim berners-lee or somebody else in on that one but uh in the meantime we're we're really at the wrap point so we generally close with four questions the first is is there a question that we haven't asked you'd like to like us to have asked um and think you could answer briefly it's cool like of course drawing a blank uh but if there's anyone out there who's watching who um works at a company who wants to support freebsd toward the health of um yeah the open source software uh you know please reach out to me and so i could talk to the company about um supporting our efforts that would be one thing [Music] that's great that's great so and then i guess some upcoming things too um that i was thinking about um that i just sort of wanted to throw out there was that we are going to have a stand at fosdom yeah because it's virtual again this year uh we're always at fosdom it's a great conference uh we just uh sent out a cfp to um to the community and it's open uh outsiders too who want to get involved with freebsd and maybe have a project idea that we would like to fund um and i'll pro i think we provided the link to that too and like i mentioned earlier is that we do have uh bsd well not us but there's organizers around the world that put on the bsd conferences and the first one that will take place and person fingers crossed would be bsd cam which is in ottawa canada and that will be in early june and then the next one is vienna uh austria which will be in late september so it's all based on yeah what's happening with covet but we also put on we the foundation also puts on developer summits and so we'll we will also put one on uh in person if possible otherwise we'll continue online i don't remember everybody free bsd has always been a really uh aggressive participant i mean in a positive way and conferences i remember it had in some ways the biggest booth at the early linux worlds when linux world was a thing they were just back in 99 2000 turn of the millennium you know with a giant beastie there and a giant booth it was pretty cool um so um three more uh do you have anything to say about blockchain that's one of our kind of control questions that's good um that's easy and what is your favorite text editor and scripting language if you have some uh my favorite text editor is udvi and scripting language um oh script um well so i i mean right now i just use the default in previously which i believe is just a regular shell or the bourne shell that's cool that's uh yeah this is a that's excellent it has been great having you on the show we'll have to have you back um you've you've teed up a whole lot of subjects that we could go deeper into so i'm really hoping to have you back in the near enough future thank you i'm going to be trolling yeah yeah i'm going to be trolling ebay for next cubes now because i i really yeah you guys showing don't just don't get choked up about it sean oh my goodness that was something [Laughter] yeah they were cool they were cool but yeah thank you thank you for having us really appreciate it yeah and thank you too so sean quickly enough how was that for you oh that was cool you know and and i came in expecting to um have to stop myself from just talking about linux the whole time because you know that's that's the world i live in uh but it was interesting to hear uh you know almost like a parallel world experience with an open source operating system and and all of those things that uh you know i love about linux also exist in the freebsd world so yeah it was it was actually really cool i appreciated it the the dynamic between the foundation and the project was interesting and it's still interesting you know to see how how that works uh because it certainly isn't clear on the face you know i mean uh when i heard that she was from the free bsd foundation i didn't realize that there wasn't or that there was a separate group in charge of the actual code so yeah so i learned a lot yeah yeah interesting stuff i found that the thinnest story and the the next story were also pretty interesting yeah i really do wish i had a next cube they're so cool [Laughter] well well this is uh sean what do you want to plug your your how many how many cartoons have you done so far a couple hundred so far in years yeah so i think like getting close to 250 comics um yeah and um today's was was interesting um but um yeah so i didn't i didn't get good sleep last night so it was just a single pain comic today of just me being silly but um yeah so my comic also this year 2022 for me is going to be a lot of um a lot of videos on youtube so youtube.com sean powers with a zero for the o and that's my youtube channel i'm gonna i'm gonna put a lot of linux um stuff on there this year so yeah that's my focus for 2022. i'm going to still do the comic don't get me wrong yeah my big round world my big round right yeah right right so make sure to have the complete plug there okay great well okay thanks thanks sean uh thank you deb thank you everybody this has been another week of flush weekly and as as is the custom i am not up on next week um so so it'll be good sandra hooker okay i can barely hear the voice of my ear telling me that so um sandra henry stocker okay great so that's next week and we will see you then take it easy so you got yourself the brand new latest and greatest iphone or samsung smartphone because you heard about all of the beautiful photography those things can create but for some reason you're just not quite getting it done with when you try to make your photos or you got yourself a brand new camera because you were interested in getting started in photography but your little new inexpensive camera still isn't quite cutting it well you need to check out my show hands on photography here on twit i'm going to show you how to be a better photographer and a better post processor and quite frankly just help you get the most out of that new camera that's that's either on your phone or the brand new one that you just got for your your birthday or gifts or what have you and it's going to be a lot of fun so head on over to twit dot tv slash hop that's twit tv slash hop and subscribe today [Music] you

Channel: Untitled Linux Show

Views: 8,006

Keywords: TWiT, Doc Searls, Shawn Powers, Deb Goodkin, FLOSS Weekly, FreeBSD Foundation, FreeBSD, open source community, inclusive open source project, open source development, operating systems, open operating systems, linux vs freebsd, Linux, linux distro vs FreeBSD, tech news, podcast for open source news

Id: o3yBD668quc

Length: 65min 0sec (3900 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 05 2022