A quiet week out here in the Land of Enterprise Unix. As the dust settles from the pseudo-departure of Scott McNealy as CEO of Sun Microsystems, the rest of the enterprise Unix community is rather dormant, as if stunned by the news and exhausted from three months of trade shows and conferences all around the planet.
Who can blame them? Still, life goes on, and some progress was made in the Unix world this week. Most notably, the release of OpenBSD 3.9.
You may be wondering why this gets a mention in the Roundup. Sure, BSD fits the "Unix" label, but "enterprise"? Surely not, you think. We'd beg to differ. Although OpenBSD (and FreeBSD and NetBSD) have very little commercial backing compared to the other Unix flavors, there is quite a bit of evidence that the technology of the BSD family is making its presence known in corporate server rooms. OpenBSD's cousin FreeBSD (which popped out the final release candidate of its version 6.1 this week, as well) is found on millions of Web servers. Back in 2000, it was even the primary platform for Yahoo! and Microsoft's Hotmail service.
But unlike Linux, the *BSDs really haven't taken off with huge vendor support. Simply put, there isn't a Red Hat in the BSD community. Nor, we suspect, will there ever be.
This is kind of too bad, since there is some functionality in the *BSD flavors that can't be found yet in other Unix flavors or Linux. This week's release of OpenBSD 3.9 is indicative of that: One highlight of the release is a sensor framework that provides detailed hardware management out of the box. So, if you want to know how hot your server is getting, OpenBSD will gladly talk to your sensors and tell you.
With such hot technology, why hasn't someone tried to make money from it?
They have. But, given the terms of the BSD license, many vendors have simply just taken what they want without giving financial or technological compensation to the BSD developer community. BSD technology, for example, shows up in Microsoft products' IP stacks. And Apple's Mac OS X is based on BSD-style Unix. Under the conditions of the various BSD licenses, though, all that is required on the part of Microsoft and Apple is to include the license with the software and give credit to any developer of that software.
This has led to an unfortunate situation: BSD technology gets widely used, but little support or funding is given back. In contrast, the General Public License (GPL), allows code to be freely shared, but any changes to that code must be shared back up the development chain if a developer plans to distribute the code she changed. That required give-back in the GPL is what enables vendors like Red Hat and Mandriva to take a commercial chance on free software, since they know that the technology they develop will be improved by the enhancements of others.
Under a BSD model, however, software given away and modified will never come back.
The problem with funding was never more evident than this spring, when the OpenBSD project revealed a lack of major donation support, including its two-year funding from DARPA that ended in 2003. This prompted the OpenBSD developers to make a public call for funding. A KernelTrap interview this week with lead OpenBSD developer Theo de Raadt, revealed that there has been some response, but funding was notably lacking from commercial Unix and Linux vendors. de Raadt was understandably ticked off, especially since almost every version of Unix and Linux makes use of OpenBSD technology, in the form of the OpenSSH application. The stinginess on the part of the Linux and Unix vendors indicates much ungratefulness to him, and we'd have to agree in this case.
Nobody will be getting rich from developing and selling OpenBSD and its open BSD cousins. But there is really strong technology out there in the BSD world, and it would be a shame to see this valuable resource wither and die from apathy on the part of those benefiting from the said technology.
In Other News
» The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gave the green light for Linux to land this week.
The FAA switched the computers managing air traffic flow in the Transportation Department's Volpe Center in Cambridge, Mass. from a proprietary Unix to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. By migrating to Red Hat rather than upgrading, the FAA claimed a monetary savings of 60 percent and time-savings of two-thirds.
The change is but one part of a broader service-oriented architecture initiative that will replace proprietary traffic management systems with applications powered by Java, Web services, open source software and Oracle products.
Although Linux is already found on high-powered computer systems in government labs, this deployment is fairly unusual because it is all about the desktop. More than 100 sites rely on the system for air traffic management, including military facilities and international sites.
The agency also consolidated hardware and software installed in 1999.
» The Apache Software Foundation released a maintenance update to the 2.2 httpd branch. Version 2.2.2 is now considered the gold standard that outfits running Apache should be using. It is available for download, here.
As usual, the full cadre of release notes are online. Changes have been made to mod_deflate, so that it works correctly in an internal redirect; mod_proxy_balancer, which now initializes members of a balancer correctly; mod_proxy, so that it no longer releases connections from the connection pool twice; prevent the reading uninitialized memory while reading a line of protocol input; mod_dbd, whose defaults have been updated and error reporting improved; and mod_dbd, which creates its own pool and mutex to avoid problem use of process pool in request processing.
Version 2.2 was initially released in December 2005. Core enhancements include, refactored authentication and authorization modules; a host of changes to mod_cache, mod_disk_cache, and mod_mem_cache; a simplified and modularised default configuration layout; and graceful shutdown for prefork, worker, and event MPMs. Changes were also made to the mod_auth, mod_authnz_ldap, mod_authz_owner, mod_version, mod_info, mod_ssl, and mod_imagemap modules.
The ASF also recommends anyone still running the 2.0 or 1.3 forks that does not plan to upgrade be sure to patch to 2.0.58 and 1.3.37, respectively.
» In other release news, Debian announced a December release date has been set for Etch, the next version of Debian. If on time, Etch will ship a mere 18 months after the previous release, version 3.1.
This is a pretty good track record for a Debian release; some release times have been much longer. The recent commercial and popular successes of Debian-based distros, such as Linspire, Ubuntu, Xandros, and Mepis, have really re-kindled a lot of interest in the Debian Project, which we're glad to see.
» Nothing warms our hearts more than old-time hardware companies partnering with open source entities, so the heat was turned up a bit when we heard the news that Unisys and JBoss had expanded their relationship.
Unisys Thursday became a JBoss Authorized Service Provider (JASP) and JBoss Authorized Training Partner (JATP) for all of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS) on a global level. Under the terms of the agreement, Unisys can deliver a broad range of support services, consulting services and public training for clients developing JEMS-based multi-channel, multi-portal applications.
JEMS products include JBoss Application Server, Hibernate, and Apache Tomcat.
Unisys and JBoss will also expand their collaboration on education, marketing, and sales opportunities, and Unisys will increase its presence on JBoss' OEM/ISV Customer Advisory Board, an organization designed to help JBoss understand and act on the priorities of application architects, developers and systems integrators, and enterprise end users.
Unisys has already tested and tuned the JBoss Application Server for its hardware, completing both performance and scalability testing in conjunction with JBoss.
The OEM has also built a global team of JBoss certified consultants to migrate, implement, and optimize JEMS within the enterprise, and it has established JBoss Centers of Excellence globally to enable customers to benchmark and test business-critical applications in a lab environment before moving them into production.
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