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Love FreeBSD but ... Really wish there wasn't a split between FreeBSD & Matt Dillon 20-years ago, since DragonflyBSD is so strong and yet FreeBSD hasn't benefi

Love FreeBSD but ... Really wish there wasn't a split between FreeBSD & Matt Dillon 20-years ago, since DragonflyBSD is so strong and yet FreeBSD hasn't benefited from it's innovations. They'd truly would be better together than apart. Can only imagine how much stronger the BSD ecosystem would be overall today, if the past 20-years these teams had been together. https://www.dragonflybsd.org https://www.dragonflybsd.org Announcement: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2003-July/006889.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2003-Jul... EDIT: "stronger together" meaning, FreeBSD would benefit from the technology innovations, architecture simplicity and performance that DragonflyBSD brings ... and DragonflyBSD benefiting from the larger install base that FreeBSD has (and it's brand recognition).

infofarmer 3y ago
Complexity management is key in any project. Lots of successful forks reduce total complexity. NetBSD and OpenBSD are excellent examples — one could argue that their goals and innovations (in portability and security) would also be useful in the «mainline» FreeBSD, but that would explode complexity. The FreeBSD community is carefully watching progress across many forks and cherry-picking / importing a lot of the cream.
- tiffanyh 3y ago
  As an outsider, I've actually seen the most engagement between OpenBSD & DragonflyBSD. E.g., there's active exploration of bringing the Hammer2 filesystem from DragonflyBSD to OpenBSD. https://github.com/kusumi/openbsd_hammer2 https://github.com/kusumi/openbsd_hammer2
  - nmhancoc 3y ago
    I’m not sure what to make of it, but amusingly your link says “OpenBSD version of netbsd_hammer2”, which itself says “NetBSD version of freebsd_hammer2”, which in turn says “FreeBSD version of openbsd_hammer2”. They’re all under the same profile so I think everyone is sharing?
tw04 3y ago
It's been a long time, but IIRC the split was due to direction on SMP. From what I recall, the FreeBSD team made the right call at the time. https://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/dfly.html https://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/dfly.html
- loeg 3y ago
  It was also a clash of personalities.
  - darkhelmet 3y ago
    It was all truly unfortunate. But sometimes there are no clear right answers - but you have to make a choice between multiple bad options. When doing nothing isn't an option either then you have to make a call as to what you think the least terrible outcome will be and history will be the judge as to whether you were right. Similar issues contributed to there being multiple *BSDs. It's never that simple of course, but it was certainly a part of it. Technical/ideology and Personality all play a part.
  - pxc 3y ago
    Is there any (ideally charitable, historical) writing about this for the uninitiated?
    - inferiorhuman 3y ago
      You've gotta be careful giving vikings a commit bit. Your best bet for information is probably the mailing list archives. To be a bit reductive, Matt had strong opinions about SMP and threading and got his commit bit yanked. As a result he forked FreeBSD (4?) to create DragonFlyBSD. It's not so far off of how we ended up with OpenBSD really. Or as Linus put it, Theo is… difficult. Honestly, I think these forced forks are good. They're a a perfectly natural result of getting a bunch of smart, opinionated people in a group together. They've given some incredibly smart people a much bigger sandbox to play in. As a result we've got things like openssh and hammer.
- blodorn 3y ago
wkat4242 3y ago
I have to say FreeBSD itself is also totally fine on the desktop. You don't need DragonFly for that. FreeBSD is my daily driver.
wk_end 3y ago
Not necessarily in disagreement, but some points to consider: * The nice thing about free software is that FreeBSD can benefit from Dragonfly's innovations! * Dragonfly certainly would benefit from FreeBSD's (relatively) large userbase; but it could also be hurt, because FreeBSD's larger userbase would be more demanding of the kind of stability that could slow down innovation. * ...and, likewise, FreeBSD might suffer if all those innovations harm the OS' reputation for robustness and stability.
philjohn 3y ago
That makes me feel old. I was running FreeBSD back when that split happened, I can't believe it's been 20 years. I think the BSD ecosystem was harmed more by the SCO lawsuit, and the rise of Linux than by the Dragonfly/FreeBSD split.
- tiffanyh 3y ago
  You might be confusing SCO and USL. SCO brought lawsuits against IBM (Linux) in 2003. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group,_Inc._v._International_Business_Machines_Corp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group,_Inc._v._Internati.... USL brought lawsuit against BSD in 1992. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_In....
  - loeg 3y ago
    Novell bought USL in 1993 and sold the corpse to SCO in 1995. They're related entities.
  - philjohn 3y ago
    You're indeed right.
vermaden 3y ago
I also would prefer that this split would not had place and that DragonflyBSD would never start ... but yet it happened ... so what? Recently (as a seasoned FreeBSD user/sysadmin) I tried DragonflyBSD to check how it went ... and it lacks a LOT of things that FreeBSD has - like for example the GEOM framework. On FreeBSD its quite easy to list block devices like: FreeBSD # geom disk list ... but on DragonflyBSD its not possible as there is no GEOM ... so the only thing you can do is to: DFBSD # camcontrol devlist ... but its far from usable and its very limited. On FreeBSD I was able to write lsblk(8) Linux replacement ... I would not be able to do that on DragonflyBSD. Yes - its a pity that such a talented person such as Matt Dillon left FreeBSD project - but DragonflyBSD is not a better replacement also ... Regards, vermaden
- chungy 3y ago
  I think it's fair to say that DragonFlyBSD has diverged with vastly different goals to FreeBSD. It's a good thing it's able to do what it sets out to do. It's not trying to replace FreeBSD.
- canadianfella 3y ago
  [dead]

infofarmer 3y ago

Complexity management is key in any project. Lots of successful forks reduce total complexity. NetBSD and OpenBSD are excellent examples — one could argue that their goals and innovations (in portability and security) would also be useful in the «mainline» FreeBSD, but that would explode complexity. The FreeBSD community is carefully watching progress across many forks and cherry-picking / importing a lot of the cream.

tiffanyh 3y ago
As an outsider, I've actually seen the most engagement between OpenBSD & DragonflyBSD. E.g., there's active exploration of bringing the Hammer2 filesystem from DragonflyBSD to OpenBSD. https://github.com/kusumi/openbsd_hammer2 https://github.com/kusumi/openbsd_hammer2
- nmhancoc 3y ago
  I’m not sure what to make of it, but amusingly your link says “OpenBSD version of netbsd_hammer2”, which itself says “NetBSD version of freebsd_hammer2”, which in turn says “FreeBSD version of openbsd_hammer2”. They’re all under the same profile so I think everyone is sharing?

tw04 3y ago

It's been a long time, but IIRC the split was due to direction on SMP. From what I recall, the FreeBSD team made the right call at the time. https://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/dfly.html https://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/dfly.html

loeg 3y ago
It was also a clash of personalities.
- darkhelmet 3y ago
  It was all truly unfortunate. But sometimes there are no clear right answers - but you have to make a choice between multiple bad options. When doing nothing isn't an option either then you have to make a call as to what you think the least terrible outcome will be and history will be the judge as to whether you were right. Similar issues contributed to there being multiple *BSDs. It's never that simple of course, but it was certainly a part of it. Technical/ideology and Personality all play a part.
- pxc 3y ago
  Is there any (ideally charitable, historical) writing about this for the uninitiated?
  - inferiorhuman 3y ago
    You've gotta be careful giving vikings a commit bit. Your best bet for information is probably the mailing list archives. To be a bit reductive, Matt had strong opinions about SMP and threading and got his commit bit yanked. As a result he forked FreeBSD (4?) to create DragonFlyBSD. It's not so far off of how we ended up with OpenBSD really. Or as Linus put it, Theo is… difficult. Honestly, I think these forced forks are good. They're a a perfectly natural result of getting a bunch of smart, opinionated people in a group together. They've given some incredibly smart people a much bigger sandbox to play in. As a result we've got things like openssh and hammer.
blodorn 3y ago

wkat4242 3y ago

I have to say FreeBSD itself is also totally fine on the desktop. You don't need DragonFly for that. FreeBSD is my daily driver.

wk_end 3y ago

Not necessarily in disagreement, but some points to consider: * The nice thing about free software is that FreeBSD can benefit from Dragonfly's innovations! * Dragonfly certainly would benefit from FreeBSD's (relatively) large userbase; but it could also be hurt, because FreeBSD's larger userbase would be more demanding of the kind of stability that could slow down innovation. * ...and, likewise, FreeBSD might suffer if all those innovations harm the OS' reputation for robustness and stability.

philjohn 3y ago

That makes me feel old. I was running FreeBSD back when that split happened, I can't believe it's been 20 years. I think the BSD ecosystem was harmed more by the SCO lawsuit, and the rise of Linux than by the Dragonfly/FreeBSD split.

tiffanyh 3y ago
You might be confusing SCO and USL. SCO brought lawsuits against IBM (Linux) in 2003. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group,_Inc._v._International_Business_Machines_Corp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group,_Inc._v._Internati.... USL brought lawsuit against BSD in 1992. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_In....
- loeg 3y ago
  Novell bought USL in 1993 and sold the corpse to SCO in 1995. They're related entities.
- philjohn 3y ago
  You're indeed right.

vermaden 3y ago

I also would prefer that this split would not had place and that DragonflyBSD would never start ... but yet it happened ... so what? Recently (as a seasoned FreeBSD user/sysadmin) I tried DragonflyBSD to check how it went ... and it lacks a LOT of things that FreeBSD has - like for example the GEOM framework. On FreeBSD its quite easy to list block devices like: FreeBSD # geom disk list ... but on DragonflyBSD its not possible as there is no GEOM ... so the only thing you can do is to: DFBSD # camcontrol devlist ... but its far from usable and its very limited. On FreeBSD I was able to write lsblk(8) Linux replacement ... I would not be able to do that on DragonflyBSD. Yes - its a pity that such a talented person such as Matt Dillon left FreeBSD project - but DragonflyBSD is not a better replacement also ... Regards, vermaden

chungy 3y ago
I think it's fair to say that DragonFlyBSD has diverged with vastly different goals to FreeBSD. It's a good thing it's able to do what it sets out to do. It's not trying to replace FreeBSD.
canadianfella 3y ago
[dead]