Talk:FreeBSD

Second Paragraph

Shouldn't we note in the second paragraph that FreeBSD is an operating system while Linux is just a kernel? Even if we want to say that BSD in general offers complete software, then we shouldn't mention it in FreeBSD, but rather in the BSD entry.

Article should be renamed to The FreeBSD Operating System

The first point of the "Proper Use of the FreeBSD Marks" section at https://freebsdfoundation.org/legal/trademark-usage-terms-and-conditions/ mandates that the FreeBSD Marks should not be used as nouns, and includes an example of proper use “I installed the FreeBSD operating system”. I believe that according to these rules this article should be renamed to The FreeBSD Operating System or possibly FreeBSD Operating System. I might also be completely wrong and might have misunderstood these rules and the context of their application, my apologies for the noise if that's the case :) Suzanne Soy (talk) 18:53, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Many (all?) trademarks are adjectives, and the trademark holder's lawyers may decree that the only proper use is "Frobozz brand chocolate-coated rutabaga", as in "I'll have three Frobozz brand chocolate-coated rutabagas, please", rather than "I'll have three Frobozzes, please".

However, in practice, most people don't do that, and Wikipedia has articles such as UNIX rather than "UNIX operating system", Kleenex rather than "Kleenex brand facial tissue", etc.. I don't think The Open Group or Kimberly-Clark have sent their lawyers after us, and I don't think the FreeBSD Foundation are likely to do so, either. I don't see anything obvious in the Manual of Style about this, but, given the existence of several articles with names that are trademarks, I don't see this as a problem. Guy Harris (talk) 03:23, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

The trademark holder's wishes are irrelevant to anyone who is neither an affiliate of the trademark holder nor engaged in competing line of trade. WP:MOSTM is already clear that we do not decorate trademarks with registered-trademark signs, nor do we write them in all caps, nor twist usage in other ways that trademark lawyers tell their clients to demand without any foundation in grammatical reality. The lawyers, in such cases, are simply wrong, and can safely be ignored because there is no possibility of confusion or unfair competition. 121a0012 (talk) 05:03, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

The Wikipedia policy about common names applies here. Mindmatrix 14:35, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

There really isn't a good reason against a WP:Redirect page from FreeBSD Operating System, is there? After all, that's why there are Redirs. --2003:C8:4716:AF00:FCEF:E341:DC23:FB91 (talk) 15:59, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Could do with substantial updating

Hello everyone! I have been reviewing the article, it is good but some of the information is now dated in places. I am posting this to see if there is enthusiasm for a review of the article to perhaps include a more substantial change to some of the sections and was interested if anyone had any ideas. I am very new to the wiki and hope my changes are welcomed, if you notice anything out of place or any serious errors drop me a message please!

In particular,

• Root shell is now sh not tcsh
• Some arch support has changed tiers
• Could mention more about the influence of the tcp stack on other operating systems
• Might be worth mentioning approach to security issues like meltdown, spectre, et al
• Could use more up to date statistics on usage
• Nothing about the switch from svn to git
• Lacking information on package management and in particular not a single mention of the proposed pkgbase
• Would be good to have more detail on the uniqueness of any kernel subsystems and libc
• Nothing about the Forth/Lua bootloader

To name just a few!

Bsdrevise (talk) 21:17, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

New 14.0 release

Please update info about last release, because they release the 14.0 85.119.196.3 (talk) 17:52, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

FreeBSD UNIX 14.1

FreeBSD UNIX 14.1 was out 4 June 2024 but I saw nowhere in the WTML to update the version number.--dchmelik☀️🦉🐝🐍(talk|contrib) 08:50, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

Somebody updated that in this edit. For future reference, click the appropriate [±] button in the "Latest release" section to edit the appropriate (14.x or 13.x) template. Guy Harris (talk) 21:26, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

TrustedBSD

Please leave the subheading where it is now.

• At least one wikilink (FLASK) broke when the paragraph was removed.
• The paragraph itself makes all the argument for TrustedBSD to have its own paragraph, maybe even article page. It is/was a project impacting multiple OSes by a substantial amount. Enough so that interested readers shouldn't have to look for it in the TOC, or a generic "Security" section.

--2003:C8:4716:AF00:FCEF:E341:DC23:FB91 (talk) 16:04, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

What counts as "free software"?

In this edit, "FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system ..." was changed to "FreeBSD is a open source Unix-like operating system ...", with the edit comment "Change FOSS to OSS, since OSS may be more in-line with BSD-style licenses. ..."

I changed open-source to free-software, as the FSF considers the 2-clause and 3-clause BSD licenses to be free software licenses - the Free Software Foundation's licensing page on their web site has a "List of other licenses and whether they are free, copyleft, or compatible with the GPL." link that goes to the GNU web site's "Various Licenses and Comments about Them" page. That page has a GPL-Compatible Free Software Licenses section, which includes the 3-clause BSD license and the 2-Clause BSD/FreeBSD license, so both of those two BSD licenses are considered free software licenses by the FSF.

That was changed back to open source in this edit, with the comment "The description "Free Software" may be not clear for nontechnical readers. And FreeBSD may not be considered under Free software, specifically due to "any adapted versions" definition (on the linked Free software article. Which is attributed to multiple sources"

I'm not sure what the issue is with "free software" and non-technical readers. It was linked to free software; is that page not sufficient? If not, why?

As for "And FreeBSD may not be considered under Free software, specifically due to "any adapted versions" definition (on the linked Free software article. Which is attributed to multiple sources". The definition is in the first sentence of the opening paragraph:

Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions.

The first reference doesn't speak of requiring people who distribute modified versions of free software to allow recipients of that software to, in turn, redistribute that modified software. It points to their "What is Free Software?" page, which says:

Freedom 3 includes the freedom to release your modified versions as free software. A free license may also permit other ways of releasing them; in other words, it does not have to be a copyleft license. However, a license that requires modified versions to be nonfree does not qualify as a free license.

It also says, in its "Copyleft" section, that

In the GNU project, we use copyleft to protect the four freedoms legally for everyone. We believe there are important reasons why it is better to use copyleft. However, noncopylefted free software is ethical too. See Categories of Free Software for a description of how “free software,” “copylefted software” and other categories of software relate to each other.

The "noncopylefted free software" link goes to the "Noncopylefted free software section of the "Categories" page; it says

Noncopylefted free software comes from the author with permission to redistribute and modify, and also to add additional restrictions to it.

If a program is free but not copylefted, then some copies or modified versions may not be free at all. A software company can compile the program, with or without modifications, and distribute the executable file as a proprietary software product.

The X Window System illustrates this. The X Consortium released X11 with distribution terms that made it noncopylefted free software, and subsequent developers have mostly followed the same practice. A copy which has those distribution terms is free software. However, there are nonfree versions as well, and there are (or at least were) popular workstations and PC graphics boards for which nonfree versions are the only ones that work. If you are using this hardware, X11 is not free software for you. The developers of X11 even made X11 nonfree for a while; they were able to do this because others had contributed their code under the same noncopyleft license.

The following section of the "Categories" page, "Lax permissive licensed software", says:

{{blockquote|Lax permissive licenses include the X11 license and the two BSD licenses. These licenses permit almost any use of the code, including distributing proprietary binaries with or without changing the source code.

So the first reference does not appear to indicate that, according to the FSF/GNU project, the fact that the BSD licenses permit somebody to take BSD code, modify it, and impose further restrictions on its redistribution does not cause them to not to be free-software licenses and does not cause code licensed with those licenses not to be free software.

(See also Stallman's essay "The BSD License Problem". The problem he discusses is not that BSD-licensed code isn't free software - he explicitly states that it is free software, even though he states there that copyleft licenses are recommended. The problem he discusses is that the "obnoxious BSD advertising clause" of the original BSD license, especially if that license is used by copyright holders other than the Regents of the University of California, can result in a proliferation of advertising notices in free software using those licenses. Eventually, the Regents removed that clause from all software they licensed.)

The second reference is to a page that doesn't say much; it links to other pages that say more, including the "What is Free Software?" already mentioned above, and the Stallman's "Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software" page, which is pretty much what it says on the label. Stallman's primary problem with "open source" is that it's often used to de-emphasize the non-pragmatic goals of the free software movement. He doesn't seem to have much of a complaint with the Open Source Definition:

The official definition of open source software (which is published by the Open Source Initiative and is too long to include here) was derived indirectly from our criteria for free software. It is not the same; it is a little looser in some respects. Nonetheless, their definition agrees with our definition in most cases.

In particular, that definition isn't "you can look at the source code, and that's the only thing required to make software open-source" - that definition requires that the source not be obfuscated, that making modifications and derived works available under the same licensing terms must be allowed, and that if the license doesn't allow distributing modified versions it must allow for distributing the modifications as patch files.

The third reference doesn't speak of copyleft vs. permissive at all.

The fourth reference includes an essay that labels the BSDs as free software; chapter 27 "The X Window System Trap" does make an argument for copylefting rather than "copycentering", to use Kirk McKusick's term for what the BSD license does.

So it appears that the BSD license conforms to the letter of the definition of free software, and the BSD-licensed portions of the *BSDs is thus free software. Some may consider non-copyleft licenses as not following the spirit of the free software movement, but, again, they're still free software licenses.

Perhaps FreeBSD also includes non-free software in some fashion. Binary blobs are one form of non-free software distributed with otherwise free-software operating systems; as Binary blob § Policy by project indicates, "the Linux kernel itself, NetBSD, FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, and most Linux distributions" all support binary-blob device drivers, whereas OpenBSD doesn't. Some of those systems may ship binary blobs; others, such as OpenBSD (obviously) and some Linux distributions, do not. Guy Harris (talk) 06:40, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

References