“By now you’ve probably already heard about the new BSDi,
born of the old BSDi and Walnut Creek CDROM, with the recent
addition of Telenet Systems. Since the announcement of BSDi’s
merger with Walnut Creek, there have been questions and concern
about the effect on the continuing development of FreeBSD and
BSD/OS, and you’ve most likely already read at least one or
two other articles that discuss what this might mean to the future
of the BSD community. Will the new BSDi try to bully FreeBSD into
doing things its way? Will BSD/OS simply become FreeBSD with some
add-ons? Telenet, today, will sell you a system with FreeBSD or
BSD/OS installed; what about NetBSD and OpenBSD?”
“If you don’t know the answers to these questions already, then
today’s your lucky day. Last week I spent an hour on the phone with
Mark Garver, BSDi’s new Group Executive, Marketing and Internet
Systems Solutions, to find the answers to the questions above, as
well as a few others. Mark is one of several new faces in BSDi’s
upper management. (If this is the first you’ve heard about BSDi’s
new management, go take a look at their press release for details
on who these people are and what skills they are bringing to the
new BSDi.)”
“For starters, let’s clear up the question of the relationship
between BSD/OS and FreeBSD. Mark made it clear that the two
products are separate and will remain so. They will not be merged
into one source tree and/or one distribution. Now that that’s
cleared up, let’s talk about where they will be working together.
In general, they will cooperate and share technology where it will
benefit both BSD/OS and FreeBSD. This means that in areas where
their technology overlaps, we’ll see BSD/OS and FreeBSD working
together to reduce duplicated effort. There is already one area
that they are working on in this regard, a common set of APIs and
device driver specs.”