Episode Details

This week on BSD Now we cover the latest FreeBSD Status Report, a plan for Open Source software development, centrally managing bhyve with Ansible, libvirt, and pkg-ssh, and a whole lot more.

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FreeBSD Project Status Report (January to March 2017)

While a few of these projects indicate they are a "plan B" or an "attempt III", many are still hewing to their original plans, and all have produced impressive results. Please enjoy this vibrant collection of reports, covering the first quarter of 2017.

• The quarterly report opens with notes from Core, The FreeBSD Foundation, the Ports team, and Release Engineering
• On the project front, the Ceph on FreeBSD project had made considerable advances, and is now usable as the net/ceph-devel port via the ceph-fuse module. Eventually they hope to have a kernel RADOS block device driver, so fuse is not required
• CloudABI update, including news that the Bitcoin reference implementation is working on a port to CloudABI
• eMMC Flash and SD card updates, allowing higher speeds (max speed changes from ~40 to ~80 MB/sec). As well, the MMC Stack can now also be backed by the CAM framework.
• Improvements to the Linuxulator
• More detail on the pNFS Server plan B that we discussed in a previous week
• Snow B.V. is sponsoring a dutch translation of the FreeBSD Handbook using the new .po system ***

A plan for open source software maintainers

• Colin Percival describes in his blog “a plan for open source software maintainers”:

I've been writing open source software for about 15 years now; while I'm still wet behind the ears compared to FreeBSD greybeards like Kirk McKusick and Poul-Henning Kamp, I've been around for long enough to start noticing some patterns. In particular:
Free software is expensive. Software is expensive to begin with; but good quality open source software tends to be written by people who are recognized as experts in their fields (partly thanks to that very software) and can demand commensurate salaries.
While that expensive developer time is donated (either by the developers themselves or by their employers), this influences what their time is used for: Individual developers like doing things which are fun or high-status, while companies usually pay developers to work specifically on the features those companies need. Maintaining existing code is important, but it is neither fun nor high-status; and it tends to get underweighted by companies as well, since maintenance is inherently unlikely to be the most urgent issue at any given time.
Open source software is largely a "throw code over the fence and walk away" exercise. Over the past 15 years I've written freebsd-update, bsdiff, portsnap, scrypt, spiped, and kivaloo, and done a lot of work on the FreeBSD/EC2 platform. Of these, I know bsdiff and scrypt are very widely used and I suspect that kivaloo is not; but beyond that I have very little knowledge of how widely or where my work is being used. Anecdotally it seems that other developers are in similar positions: At conferences I've heard variations on "you're using my code? Wow, that's awesome; I had no i