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HyperbolaBSD Roadmap: hard fork of the OpenBSD kernel and userspace
- spamizbad 7y ago> Due to the Linux kernel rapidly proceeding down an unstable path.... I've been hearing this argument for 20 years now. What's different today?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- MisterTea 7y ago> What's different today? About 300 system calls.
- IntelMiner 7y agoOne person with an ignorant agenda it seems
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nerdponx 7y agoDiversity is a good thing, but BSD seems like it needs a lot more manpower as it is. Why start a new project instead of contributing to OpenBSD?
- saagarjha 7y ago> Future versions of Hyperbola will be using HyperbolaBSD which will have the new kernel, userspace and not be ABI compatible with previous versions. A bit ironic for a project that claims it's more stable than Linux…
- jimktrains2 7y agoIs this actually a GNU project? I don't fully understand who's behind this. I also don't understand why the name would have been chosen, as it seems to not have a good connotation? I'm also a little confused about their problems with Rust (https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:main:rusts_freedom_flaws https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:main:rusts_freedo...) Firefox also has the same trademark issues, but there are multiple forks/distributions of it with the trademarked material removed. It seems like a petty thing to bring up on an "about" page. Also, it feels weird that they complain that linux is including some things they don't like (e.g. HDCP), but at the same time just gloss over that the BSDs are they base of many proprietary products where you can't get the source at all. I mean, I hate DRM and things like HDCP as much as anyone, but it just feels like an _off_? argument?
- natechols 7y agoMy interpretation of their plan is that the new OS will contain enough GPL code (on top of the BSD base) to effectively prohibit its use in proprietary closed-source products.
- tndl 7y agoI was about to post with the same question about Rust. It looks like there's no issue with using anything other than the "Rust" or "Cargo" names and the logo, as per this: > You are correct that we intended the trademark to apply when > distributing a package or other binary called "Rust" -- and in > particular that if modifications are made, then we would expect a > trademark request outlining the sorts of changes being made (as the > policy notes though, we are inclined to accept such a request). > regards, > Niko https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/53287 https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/53287 This thread in the project's (hyperbola) issue tracker seems silly and needlessly exclusive, given what seems to be a relatively minor restriction: https://issues.hyperbola.info/index.php?do=details&task_id=736 https://issues.hyperbola.info/index.php?do=details&task_id=7...
- tptacek 7y agoHyperbole is bad. A hyperbola is a mathematical object.
- nickik 7y agoI like this kind of announcement, clearly talks about what they want and what they think is important. It tells me that I will not be very interested it but I wish them the best of luck in achieving their goals.
- mikece 7y agoUh, why is it necessary to change the license? BSD code can be compiled into a GPL project without issue; by changing the license you guarantee the BSD crowd won’t help you one iota.
- dragonwriter 7y agoHyperbola seems to be a project driven largely by GNUish licensing ideology.
- mikece 7y agoBut what does that gain anyone? If the Linux/GNU ecosystem were re-licensed to MIT/BSD/Apache2, what would be lost?
- saagarjha 7y agoA number of proprietary extensions to the ecosystem that are never contributed back.
- oropolo 7y agoRight, just like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Sony, Netflix, Juniper and everyone else who uses BSD software never, ever gives their additions back. Oh wait... they do!
- quotemstr 7y agoTell me where I can download the source to nVidia's LLVM-based shader compiler.
- saagarjha 7y agoOnly bits and pieces when they feel like it.
- kick 7y agoApple throws things over the wall after taking it and hiding it. They don't "give back" in any meaningful sense. I'm still bitter at how they murdered KHTML. (Before someone comments "But KHTML is LGPL!": I know. That's the point. The GPL doesn't have these problems. The LGPL is too weak to be meaningful.)
- rvz 7y ago> Future versions of Hyperbola will be using HyperbolaBSD which will have the new kernel, userspace and not be ABI compatible with previous versions. I don't know why they waited so long to do this. While it's a good choice to switch to the OpenBSD kernel, I'm not quite sure if doing it now makes sense. This involves recompiling everything, probably a new toolchain, plus adapting software to work with the new kernel, or even worse: A Linux compatibility layer for existing software / drivers. This doesn't seem like the right time to move to a new kernel for an existing Linux distro. They might as well have created a new Hyperbola from scratch from the side or started with OpenBSD from the start.
- MBCook 7y agoSo this is an existing Linux distro? Honestly there is basically no context at the link so I thought this was a brand new project.
- ramshorns 7y agoYes, Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre is based on Arch Linux and focused on user freedom. So a lot like Parabola, but with maybe a stricter freedom definition and slightly different goals. Looks like they found the goals of the project are incompatible with the GNU/Linux operating system and had to find a new operating system to base on.
- duskwuff 7y agoThe Hyperbola Linux distribution already existed, as a fork of Arch Linux. HyperbolaBSD doesn't appear to exist yet.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago> Reasons for this include: > • Linux kernel forcing adaption of DRM, including HDCP. This links to a Linux kernel patch which allows but does not require turning on HDCP in video output. Is that really so bad? > • Linux kernel proposed usage of Rust (which contains freedom flaws “freedom flaws” here means a Firefox-like trademark policy. This does not really affect software freedom in the traditional sense?
- Eikon 7y ago> This does not really affect software freedom in the traditional sense? That’s not the point though. These kinds of people just consistently seek conflict and are bending the reality to fit their narrow field of view. And yet, they don’t see why no one use their projects. Anyway, this article was probably written on a computer booted with a proprietary bios, typed on a keyboard with a proprietary firmware, a proprietary CPU microcode and what else. There’s no code base to “hard fork” to sell as their own nor really something to make outrage of so they don’t care though. In reality, that’s more of a religious issue than anything else. Fingers are pointed at those that are not extremist enough for their taste. Real freedom is letting people do what they want with software. Most so-called free software licenses are actually really restrictive and absolutely not freedom inducing. I guess it’s very important to create confusion not to say exclusion and throw around licences so complex that you actually almost require a lawyer to understand if you can use the software or not so organizations that produce nothing of real importance can exist and preach the “real freedom”.
- m-p-3 7y ago> Anyway, this article was probably written on a computer booted with a proprietary bios, typed on a keyboard with a proprietary firmware, a proprietary CPU microcode and what else. Ah ok, let's give up then.
- duskwuff 7y ago> This links to a Linux kernel patch which allows but does not require turning on HDCP in video output. Is that really so bad? This seems especially silly in light of the fact that the patch doesn't even implement HDCP -- HDCP support is typically a hardware function, and the patch is providing a common interface for drivers to expose that functionality. HyperbolaBSD's description of the patch as "forcing adaptation of DRM" is a wild mischaracterization of the facts.
- geofft 7y agoIn the US at least, you do not need to register a trademark to enforce it, just like you do not need to register a copyright, and one of the specific things trademark law lets you do is prevent people from misrepresenting the origin of a product bearing that name. Neither the BSD or GPL license families grant a trademark license. Therefore, Hyperbola should immediately cease distributing all software that doesn't have an explicit "You may use the name of this software for whatever you like" license and where the original authors might want to go into business with that software, on the grounds that such software is non-free, just the same as it would judge software with no copyright license as non-free. That Rust and Firefox have trademark policies does not make them less free than un-trademark-licensed names anymore than having a BSD license makes code less free than unlicensed code.
- throwaway348954 7y ago"In the US at least, you do not need to register a trademark to enforce it... and one of the specific things trademark law lets you do is prevent people from misrepresenting the origin of a product bearing that name." Unless you register, you cannot sue for damages and you are limited to state courts. So how do you prevent people from using your mark? You apply for an injunction. You would have to do this in every state where you want to enforce the mark. If you target multiple states, you would likely need multiple lawyers. How many of those free software authors will want to pay for this legal expense? Until you succeed in getting your injunctions, and there is no guarantee you will succeed, there is no incentive for someone to stop using an unregistered mark. Whatever damage they cause cannot be recovered under a claim based on trademark law.
- geofft 7y agoSure, but free software projects typically do not work based on the principle of "What's the worst they can do in court" or "Are they really going to sue us," they work on the principle of "What are we actively and explicitly allowed to do." Otherwise they'd have no worries about incorporating clearly abandoned code, or incorporating code with an unclear license and not selling it knowing that they can always reply to a lawyer letter with "Oops, sorry." Otherwise Beerware and WTFPL and the JSON license would be free software licenses. It's quite clear that Mozilla isn't interested in suing Hyperbola or any other free software distro for being a distro and doing distro things, and that in the worst case, they'd send a nice message first and Hyperbola could choose to discontinue distributing Firefox and Rust. Yet Hyperbola wants to take the "explicit permission" principle to an extreme and discontinue distributing them now, proactively. They should be consistent and cease distributing everything else.
- quotemstr 7y agoIt seems strange to fork the least advanced kernel in common use today. OpenBSD still doesn't have a unified page cache (like literally every other mainstream operating system does), and it still implements SMP using a "big kernel lock" strategy from 20 years ago. The opposition to Rust is also strange. Yes, the trademark restriction is annoying, but it's not fatal: the existence of projects like Pale Moon and Waterfox show that forking projects in the presence of trademark restrictions is viable. (I still think Mozilla is really shitty for applying these restrictions in the first place though.) Technically, Rust is a good thing. A way to structurally prevent memory safety defects is a major advance that occurs only rarely. Rust is the only game in town for memory safety if you also want low-level control over the machine. Giving that up over a trademark is just luddism. > Grsec is no longer free software I really hate how various corporate forces in the Linux world have made is socially unacceptable to sue people out of existence for blatant GPL violations.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago> OpenBSD still doesn't have a unified page cache I doubt that they regard that as a flaw; no shared cache is an effective mitigation against cache-based attacks (cache poisoning or information leaks).
- markjdb 7y agoIt means that there are two incoherent caches, not that they aren't shared.
- kick 7y agoRust is the only game in town for memory safety if you also want low-level control over the machine. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21860713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21860713
- Reelin 7y agoAre you aware that Crystal uses GC? (https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/wiki/FAQ#language-x-has-feature-y-why-dont-you-have-such-feature https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/wiki/FAQ#language-x-...)
- cryptonector 7y agoEh, many OSes have been down this road, but the problem is that you end up having to emulate the Linux ABO, but the Linux ABI is large and fast-evolving and underdocumented, and you'll need to be compatible with it, and that's ETOOHARD. Even Microsoft has given up on emulating the Linux ABI.
- quotemstr 7y ago> Even Microsoft has given up on emulating the Linux ABI. Then what's this Linux subsystem that Windows ships? > Linux ABI is large and fast-evolving and underdocumented You don't have to keep up with the latest ABI. You don't need to match tip-of-tree. You only need to match some version of Linux that programs still target, and that version can be pretty old, since enterprise customers scream bloody murder when you force them up upgrade kernels to run new programs.
- aleph- 7y agoA VM
- snuxoll 7y agoWSL2 operates in a Hyper-V environment, there's too many issues with trying to do syscall emulation that WSL1 attempted - while both will remain supported for a while the writing is already on the wall.
- quotemstr 7y agoUgh. I hadn't heard that. WSL2 being a VM is a huge disappointment. There's the technically-cowardly Microsoft from the Ballmer era. Just when I thought Microsoft had rediscovered how to do technically interesting things, they wave the white flag and run away. Using a VM for WSL means that it'll never be possible to write a program that's simultaneously a good win32 GUI citizen and a Unix API user. WSL1 (AFAIK) didn't allow this use case, but there was a path to get there. There's no path from a VM to a native USER32 process. The bright side is that at least Cygwin won't die. Cygwin allows for precisely this use case.
- 3xblah 7y agoThis seems like the first time I have ever seen a GNU/Linux distribution switch to BSD. Has this ever happened before
- duskwuff 7y agoDebian/kFreeBSD comes to mind. It kind of fizzled out and was dropped, though.
- mikl 7y agoGentoo added support for BSD kernels at some point, but it wasn’t a switch, and didn’t see much use as far as I know.
- IntelMiner 7y agoGentoo and Debian both had (have?) support for what they call "Debian/kFreeBSD" or "Gentoo/kFreeBSD" The kernels are FreeBSD but userland is all GNU as far as I understand it? I'm not sure how well supported they are, or if anyone ever used them beyond proof of concept
- boring_twenties 7y agoDebian/kFreeBSD has been discontinued for years. https://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/ https://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/
- 3xblah 7y agoPerhaps this explains the switch Hyperbola was based on Arch but was trying to use Xenocara (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenocara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenocara) as the X display server
- mikl 7y agoAll their complaints are about Linux. Why not just use OpenBSD instead of forking it? GPL puritanism? Seems like an enormous effort for very little benefit.
- elagost 7y agoI love the concept of using OpenBSD on my personal machine as my primary OS, but it's much slower and the drivers are less stable than Linux these days. I wonder if this move will either shrink or grow the audience of this admittedly small distribution.
- Hello71 7y ago"Many GNU userspace and core utils are all forcing adaption of features without build time options to disable them. E.g. (PulseAudio / SystemD / Rust / Java as forced dependencies)" "core utils" hm... "SystemD" um... "Rust" hold on... "Java" wtf is this. this is basically Terry A. Davis levels of ridiculousness, except with, apparently, much less technical competence. there are some programs which require systemd (maybe Systemd, but not SystemD, SYSTEMD, or SyStEmD), but Java is utterly schizophrenic. Gentoo has had poor support for Java for as long as I can remember, and functions just as well without it.
- yellowapple 7y ago> this is basically Terry A. Davis levels of ridiculousness But at least Terry actually went out and wrote his own OS (in his own JIT-compilable programming language!) instead of pretending that stripping binary blobs out of a BSD-licensed codebase and slapping the GPL on it counts as a "hard fork" or is in any way being a good free software citizen. That is: it's all the ridiculousness, but with none of the technical merit.
- Hello71 7y agoisn't that what I said?
- yellowapple 7y agoI was just expanding/elaborating upon it.
- linusnext 7y agoWon't be a "distro"... What do they think the D in OpenBSD stands for?
- mhd 7y agoThis is/was Yet Another Arch Distro, right? So I highly doubt that they have the personpower to continue with this project. Even Devuan (Debian w/o Lennart-ware) had more people behind them, this would be closer to Mastodon, the Linux distro that wouldn't switch to ELF. Not that I'm entirely against the general idea, I think it's scary how common corporate-ware is getting these days compared to early Linux. For example, I'd much prefer a language that's not controlled by a commercial entity (and without a "BDFL", while we're at it), preferably with several implementations for example.
- notaplumber 7y agoUnless it's not immediately obvious-- there are no OpenBSD developers associated with this project, past or present. This isn't some splitting of existing communities. There was nothing "hard" about this fork, it's funny how a few GNU aficionados think that deleting a few freely redistributeable firmware files constitutes significant "new code" contributions. It's in the same vein as projects like "libertybsd" or "libreboot"-- misleading people into thinking they are anything but a agenda driven project, onboarding like-minded and inexperienced new users, meanwhile offloading most (if not all) the support/technical burden on other communities.
- ramshorns 7y agoI take "hard fork" to mean they aren't going to rebase on future versions of OpenBSD.
- notaplumber 7y agoI'm sure they won't, if history tells us anything. It'll forever remain "liberated".
- zamadatix 7y agoSo what do you take hard fork to mean then?
- notaplumber 7y agoWhat it means. It's glib remark implying there was any difficulty.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- yellowapple 7y agoWhat really irks me about this is the implicit intent to ensure that anything Hyperbola adds to its OpenBSD fork can't be ported back to OpenBSD due to the one-way street of license compatibility (BSD-licensed code can be included in a GPL-licensed project, but not the other way around). Pretty ironic/hypocritical given that in the same breath they mention the existence of (and desire to replace) GPL-incompatibly-licensed OpenBSD code (where? how?). If they have any desire to be good free software citizens they'd release the OpenBSD modifications under the ISC license or something else suitably copyfree so that OpenBSD can use those modifications. ---- Also, I fail to see how a copyfree-licensed binary blob is non-free. Sometimes code only exists as binary code (i.e. if it's been written by hand). Whether or not that's the case here is beyond my skillset/expertise, but it seems silly to declare code to be inherently non-free if it's not human-readable, actual license terms be damned. As long as you have the freedom to use it / modify it / distribute it (verbatim or modified) / etc., then that's free. Like, if someone wrote a device driver in Brainfuck, I probably wouldn't be able to make sense of it, either, but that doesn't make that Brainfuck code inherently non-free; it just means I don't know how to read Brainfuck code.
- razzmataz 7y agoWhatever happened to the other openbsd fork, bitrig?
- otoburb 7y agoBitrig doesn't seem like it is maintained any longer.[1][2] [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Bitrig-Fork-Dead https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Bitrig-F... [2] https://github.com/bitrig/bitrig https://github.com/bitrig/bitrig
- gdm85 7y agoI am a great supporter of open source diversity and ambitious projects, but the rationale behind this one...leaves me skeptical.