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DragonFly BSD

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72-675: DragonFly BSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system forked from FreeBSD 4.8. Matthew Dillon , an Amiga developer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and FreeBSD developer between 1994 and 2003, began working on DragonFly BSD in June 2003 and announced it on the FreeBSD mailing lists on 16 July 2003. Dillon started DragonFly in the belief that the techniques adopted for threading and symmetric multiprocessing in FreeBSD 5 would lead to poor performance and maintenance problems. He sought to correct these anticipated problems within

144-606: A niche role outside of the mainstream of private software development. However the success of FOSS Operating Systems such as Linux, BSD and the companies based on FOSS such as Red Hat , has changed the software industry's attitude and there has been a dramatic shift in the corporate philosophy concerning its development. Users of FOSS benefit from the Four Essential Freedoms to make unrestricted use of, and to study, copy, modify, and redistribute such software with or without modification. If they would like to change

216-564: A resource to be shared among multiple threads. The serializing token code is evolving into something quite similar to the " Read-copy-update " feature now available in Linux. Unlike Linux's current RCU implementation, DragonFly's is being implemented such that only processors competing for the same token are affected rather than all processors in the computer. DragonFly switched to multiprocessor safe slab allocator , which requires neither mutexes nor blocking operations for memory assignment tasks. It

288-424: A similar mechanism, called SRB (Service Request Block). SRB's represent requests to execute a system service routine. SRB's are typically created when one address space detects an event that affects a different address space; they provide one of several mechanisms for asynchronous inter-address space communication for programs running on z/OS. An SRB is similar to a Process Control Block (PCB), in that it identifies

360-581: A single unified term that could refer to both concepts, although Richard Stallman argues that it fails to be neutral unlike the similar term; "Free/Libre and Open Source Software" (FLOSS). Richard Stallman 's Free Software Definition , adopted by the FSF, defines free software as a matter of liberty, not price, and that which upholds the Four Essential Freedoms. The earliest known publication of this definition of his free software definition

432-419: A thread. It uses a fixed priority scheme, but the fixed priorities are differentiating major subsystems , not user processes. For example, hardware interrupt threads have the highest priority, followed by software interrupts, kernel-only threads, then finally user threads. A user thread either runs at user-kernel priority (when it is actually running in the kernel, e.g. running a syscall on behalf of userland), or

504-479: A unit of work to the system. Unlike a PCB, an SRB cannot "own" storage areas. In a multiprocessor environment, the SRB routine, after being scheduled, can be dispatched on another processor and can run concurrently with the scheduling program. The scheduling program can continue to do other processing in parallel with the SRB routine. Only programs running in kernel mode can create an SRB. The Windows Operating System knows

576-480: A user thread runs at user priority. DragonFly does preempt, it just does it very carefully and only under particular circumstances. An LWKT interrupt thread can preempt most other threads, for example. This mimics what FreeBSD-4.x already did with its spl/run-interrupt-in-context-of-current-process mechanism. What DragonFly does *NOT* do is allow a non-interrupt kernel thread to preempt another non-interrupt kernel thread. The mainframe z/OS Operating system supports

648-424: A variety of FOSS projects, including both free software and open-source. Light Weight Kernel Threads Light Weight Kernel Threads ( LWKT ) is a computer science term and from DragonFly BSD in particular. LWKTs differ from normal kernel threads in that they can preempt normal kernel threads . According to Matt Dillon , DragonFlyBSD creator: The LWKT scheduler is responsible for actually running

720-442: Is available under a license that grants the right to use, modify, and distribute the software, modified or not, to everyone free of charge. The public availability of the source code is, therefore, a necessary but not sufficient condition. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term for free software and open-source software . FOSS is in contrast to proprietary software , where the software is under restrictive copyright or licensing and

792-409: Is distributed as a Live CD and Live USB that boots into a complete DragonFly system. It includes the base system and a complete set of manual pages, and may include source code and useful packages in future versions. The advantage of this is that with a single CD users can install the software onto a computer, use a full set of tools to repair a damaged installation, or demonstrate the capabilities of

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864-438: Is running at any given time. Blocked or sleeping threads therefore do not prevent other threads from accessing the shared resource unlike a thread that is holding a mutex. Among other things, the use of serializing tokens prevents many of the situations that could result in deadlocks and priority inversions when using mutexes, as well as greatly simplifying the design and implementation of a many-step procedure that would require

936-534: Is today better known as Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird . Netscape's act prompted Raymond and others to look into how to bring the FSF's Free software ideas and perceived benefits to the commercial software industry. They concluded that FSF's social activism was not appealing to companies like Netscape, and looked for a way to rebrand the Free software movement to emphasize the business potential of sharing and collaborating on software source code. The new name they chose

1008-663: Is used by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to determine whether a software license qualifies for the organization's insignia for open-source software . The definition was based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines , written and adapted primarily by Bruce Perens . Perens did not base his writing on the Four Essential Freedoms of free software from the Free Software Foundation , which were only later available on

1080-486: The FreeBSD Ports collection as its official package management system , but starting with the 1.4 release switched to NetBSD 's pkgsrc system, which was perceived as a way of lessening the amount of work needed for third-party software availability. Eventually, maintaining compatibility with pkgsrc proved to require more effort than was initially anticipated, so the project created DPorts, an overlay on top of

1152-609: The FreeBSD Ports collection. The initial implementation of Common Address Redundancy Protocol (commonly referred to as CARP ) was finished in March 2007. As of 2011, CARP support is integrated into DragonFly BSD. Alongside the Unix File System , which is typically the default file system on BSDs, DragonFly BSD supports the HAMMER and HAMMER2 file systems. HAMMER2 is the default file system as of version 5.2.0. HAMMER

1224-553: The GNU Compiler Collection has an enhancement called the Stack-Smashing Protector (ProPolice) enabled by default, providing some additional protection against buffer overflow based attacks. As of 23 July 2005, the kernel is no longer built with this protection by default. Being a derivative of FreeBSD, DragonFly has inherited an easy-to-use integrated build system that can rebuild

1296-738: The United Space Alliance , which manages the computer systems for the International Space Station (ISS), regarding why they chose to switch from Windows to Linux on the ISS. In 2017, the European Commission stated that "EU institutions should become open source software users themselves, even more than they already are" and listed open source software as one of the nine key drivers of innovation, together with big data , mobility, cloud computing and

1368-665: The hacker community at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , announced the GNU project , saying that he had become frustrated with the effects of the change in culture of the computer industry and its users. Software development for the GNU operating system began in January 1984, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded in October 1985. An article outlining the project and its goals

1440-494: The internet of things . In 2020, the European Commission adopted its Open Source Strategy 2020-2023 , including encouraging sharing and reuse of software and publishing Commission's source code as key objectives. Among concrete actions there is also to set up an Open Source Programme Office in 2020 and in 2022 it launched its own FOSS repository https://code.europa.eu/ . In 2021, the Commission Decision on

1512-609: The open-source software movement are online social movements behind widespread production, adoption and promotion of FOSS, with the former preferring to use the terms FLOSS , free or libre. "Free and open-source software" (FOSS) is an umbrella term for software that is simultaneously considered both free software and open-source software . The precise definition of the terms "free software" and "open-source software" applies them to any software distributed under terms that allow users to use, modify, and redistribute said software in any manner they see fit, without requiring that they pay

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1584-567: The prelinking capability that was being worked on earlier in the project's history, as the resident support is much more efficient. Large programs like those found in KDE Software Compilation with many shared libraries will benefit the most from this support. As with FreeBSD and OpenBSD , the developers of DragonFly BSD are slowly replacing pre- function prototype -style C code with more modern, ANSI equivalents. Similar to other operating systems, DragonFly's version of

1656-576: The x86-64 platform. DragonFly originally ran on the x86 architecture, however as of version 4.0 it is no longer supported. Since version 1.10, DragonFly supports 1:1 userland threading (one kernel thread per userland thread), which is regarded as a relatively simple solution that is also easy to maintain. Inherited from FreeBSD, DragonFly also supports multi-threading. In DragonFly, each CPU has its own thread scheduler. Upon creation, threads are assigned to processors and are never preemptively switched from one processor to another; they are only migrated by

1728-638: The EU. These recommendations are to be taken into account later in the same year in Commission's proposal of the "Interoperable Europe Act" . While copyright is the primary legal mechanism that FOSS authors use to ensure license compliance for their software, other mechanisms such as legislation, patents, and trademarks have implications as well. In response to legal issues with patents and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA),

1800-706: The FOSS ecosystem, several projects decided against upgrading to GPLv3. For instance the Linux kernel , the BusyBox project, AdvFS , Blender , and the VLC media player decided against adopting the GPLv3. Apple , a user of GCC and a heavy user of both DRM and patents, switched the compiler in its Xcode IDE from GCC to Clang , which is another FOSS compiler but is under a permissive license . LWN speculated that Apple

1872-653: The Free Software Foundation released version 3 of its GNU General Public License (GNU GPLv3) in 2007 that explicitly addressed the DMCA and patent rights. After the development of the GNU GPLv3 in 2007, the FSF (as the copyright holder of many pieces of the GNU system) updated many of the GNU programs' licenses from GPLv2 to GPLv3. On the other hand, the adoption of the new GPL version was heavily discussed in

1944-494: The FreeBSD project. Due to conflicts with other FreeBSD developers over the implementation of his ideas, his ability to directly change the codebase was eventually revoked. Despite this, the DragonFly BSD and FreeBSD projects still work together, sharing bug fixes, driver updates, and other improvements. Dillon named the project after photographing a dragonfly in his yard, while he was still working on FreeBSD. Intended as

2016-444: The ability to act in either a synchronous or asynchronous fashion, and attempts to use this capability to achieve the best performance possible in any given situation. According to developer Matthew Dillon , progress is being made to provide both device input/output (I/O) and virtual file system (VFS) messaging capabilities that will enable the remainder of the project goals to be met. The new infrastructure will allow many parts of

2088-402: The actual causes of the many issues with Linux on notebooks such as the unnecessary power consumption. Mergers have affected major open-source software. Sun Microsystems (Sun) acquired MySQL AB , owner of the popular open-source MySQL database, in 2008. Oracle in turn purchased Sun in January 2010, acquiring their copyrights, patents, and trademarks. Thus, Oracle became the owner of both

2160-470: The author(s) of the software a royalty or fee for engaging in the listed activities. Although there is an almost complete overlap between free-software licenses and open-source-software licenses, there is a strong philosophical disagreement between the advocates of these two positions. The terminology of FOSS was created to be a neutral on these philosophical disagreements between the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Open Source Initiative (OSI) and have

2232-434: The concept of freely distributed software and universal access to an application's source code . A Microsoft executive publicly stated in 2001 that "Open-source is an intellectual property destroyer. I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business." Companies have indeed faced copyright infringement issues when embracing FOSS. For many years FOSS played

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2304-502: The copyright law was extended to computer programs in the United States —previously, computer programs could be considered ideas, procedures, methods, systems, and processes, which are not copyrightable. Early on, closed-source software was uncommon until the mid-1970s to the 1980s, when IBM implemented in 1983 an "object code only" policy, no longer distributing source code. In 1983, Richard Stallman , longtime member of

2376-439: The developers find kernel bugs. Furthermore, as of October 2004, a debug kernel, which makes bug reports more useful for tracking down kernel-related problems, is installed by default, at the expense of a relatively small quantity of disk space. When a new kernel is installed, the backup copy of the previous kernel and its modules are stripped of their debugging symbols to further minimize disk space usage. The operating system

2448-540: The entire base system from source with only a few commands. The DragonFly developers use the Git version control system to manage changes to the DragonFly source code . Unlike its parent FreeBSD, DragonFly has both stable and unstable releases in a single source tree, due to a smaller developer base. Like the other BSD kernels (and those of most modern operating systems), DragonFly employs a built-in kernel debugger to help

2520-562: The functionality of software they can bring about changes to the code and, if they wish, distribute such modified versions of the software or often − depending on the software's decision making model and its other users − even push or request such changes to be made via updates to the original software. Manufacturers of proprietary, closed-source software are sometimes pressured to building in backdoors or other covert, undesired features into their software. Instead of having to trust software vendors, users of FOSS can inspect and verify

2592-416: The goal of developing the most efficient software for its users or use-cases while proprietary software is typically meant to generate profits . Furthermore, in many cases more organizations and individuals contribute to such projects than to proprietary software. It has been shown that technical superiority is typically the primary reason why companies choose open source software. According to Linus's law

2664-567: The government charged that bundled software was anticompetitive. While some software was still being provided without monetary cost and license restriction, there was a growing amount of software that was only at a monetary cost with restricted licensing. In the 1970s and early 1980s, some parts of the software industry began using technical measures (such as distributing only binary copies of computer programs ) to prevent computer users from being able to use reverse engineering techniques to study and customize software they had paid for. In 1980,

2736-491: The historical potential of an " economy of abundance " for the new digital world , FOSS may lay down a plan for political resistance or show the way towards a potential transformation of capitalism . According to Yochai Benkler , Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School , free software is the most visible part of a new economy of commons-based peer production of information, knowledge, and culture. As examples, he cites

2808-496: The kernel to be migrated out into userspace; here they will be more easily debugged as they will be smaller, isolated programs, instead of being small parts entwined in a larger chunk of code. Additionally, the migration of select kernel code into userspace has the benefit of making the system more robust; if a userspace driver crashes, it will not crash the kernel. System calls are being split into userland and kernel versions and being encapsulated into messages. This will help reduce

2880-485: The level of interest in a particular project. However, unlike close-sourced software, improvements can be made by anyone who has the motivation, time and skill to do so. A common obstacle in FOSS development is the lack of access to some common official standards, due to costly royalties or required non-disclosure agreements (e.g., for the DVD-Video format). There is often less certainty of FOSS projects gaining

2952-456: The logical continuation of the FreeBSD 4.x series, DragonFly has diverged significantly from FreeBSD, implementing lightweight kernel threads (LWKT), an in-kernel message passing system, and the HAMMER file system . Many design concepts were influenced by AmigaOS . The kernel messaging subsystem being developed is similar to those found in microkernels such as Mach , though it is less complex by design. DragonFly's messaging subsystem has

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3024-545: The more people who can see and test a set of code, the more likely any flaws will be caught and fixed quickly. However, this does not guarantee a high level of participation. Having a grouping of full-time professionals behind a commercial product can in some cases be superior to FOSS. Furthermore, publicized source code might make it easier for hackers to find vulnerabilities in it and write exploits. This however assumes that such malicious hackers are more effective than white hat hackers which responsibly disclose or help fix

3096-477: The most popular proprietary database and the most popular open-source database. Oracle's attempts to commercialize the open-source MySQL database have raised concerns in the FOSS community. Partly in response to uncertainty about the future of MySQL, the FOSS community forked the project into new database systems outside of Oracle's control. These include MariaDB , Percona , and Drizzle . All of these have distinct names; they are distinct projects and cannot use

3168-403: The need for pre-populated /dev file system hierarchy. It was implemented as a Google Summer of Code 2009 project. DragonFly BSD supports Amiga -style resident applications feature: it takes a snapshot of a large, dynamically linked program's virtual memory space after loading, allowing future instances of the program to start much more quickly than it otherwise would have. This replaces

3240-450: The next DragonFly BSD version (5.0.0) would include a usable, though still experimental, version of HAMMER2, and described features of the design. With the release after 5.0.0, version 5.2.0, HAMMER2 became the new default file system. In 2007 DragonFly BSD received a new device file system (devfs), which dynamically adds and removes device nodes, allows accessing devices by connection paths, recognises drives by serial numbers and removes

3312-640: The open source licensing and reuse of Commission software (2021/C 495 I/01) was adopted, under which, as a general principle, the European Commission may release software under EUPL or another FOSS license, if more appropriate. There are exceptions though. In May 2022, the Expert group on the Interoperability of European Public Services came published 27 recommendations to strengthen the interoperability of public administrations across

3384-544: The parties stipulated that Google would pay no damages. Oracle appealed to the Federal Circuit , and Google filed a cross-appeal on the literal copying claim. By defying ownership regulations in the construction and use of information—a key area of contemporary growth —the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) movement counters neoliberalism and privatization in general. By realizing

3456-478: The passing of an inter-processor interrupt (IPI) message between the CPUs involved. Inter-processor thread scheduling is also accomplished by sending asynchronous IPI messages. One advantage to this clean compartmentalization of the threading subsystem is that the processors' on-board caches in symmetric multiprocessor systems do not contain duplicated data, allowing for higher performance by giving each processor in

3528-400: The real kernel. These include the kqueue -based timer, the console (mapped to the virtual terminal where vkernel is executed), the disk image and virtual kernel Ethernet device ( VKE ), tunneling all packets to the host's tap interface. Third-party software is available on DragonFly as binary packages via pkgng or from a native ports collection – DPorts . DragonFly originally used

3600-467: The real kernel: it lacks many routines for dealing with the low-level hardware management and it uses C standard library (libc) functions in place of in-kernel implementations wherever possible. As both real and virtual kernel are compiled from the same code base, this effectively means that platform-dependent routines and re-implementations of libc functions are clearly separated in a source tree. The vkernel runs on top of hardware abstractions provided by

3672-418: The required resources and participation for continued development than commercial software backed by companies. However, companies also often abolish projects for being unprofitable, yet large companies may rely on, and hence co-develop, open source software. On the other hand, if the vendor of proprietary software ceases development, there are no alternatives; whereas with FOSS, any user who needs it still has

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3744-484: The right, and the source-code, to continue to develop it themself, or pay a 3rd party to do so. As the FOSS operating system distributions of Linux has a lower market share of end users there are also fewer applications available. "We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable -- one that would give us in-house control. So if we needed to patch, adjust, or adapt, we could." Official statement of

3816-477: The same resource at the same time. In order to prevent multiple threads from accessing or modifying a shared resource simultaneously, DragonFly employs critical sections , and serializing tokens to prevent concurrent access. While both Linux and FreeBSD 5 employ fine-grained mutex models to achieve higher performance on multiprocessor systems, DragonFly does not. Until recently, DragonFly also employed spls , but these were replaced with critical sections. Much of

3888-441: The size and complexity of the kernel by moving variants of standard system calls into a userland compatibility layer , and help maintain forwards and backwards compatibility between DragonFly versions. Linux and other Unix-like OS compatibility code is being migrated out similarly. As support for multiple instruction set architectures complicates symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support, DragonFly BSD now limits its support to

3960-696: The source code is hidden from the users. FOSS maintains the software user's civil liberty rights via the " Four Essential Freedoms " of free software. Other benefits of using FOSS include decreased software costs, increased security against malware , stability, privacy , opportunities for educational usage, and giving users more control over their own hardware. Free and open-source operating systems such as Linux distributions and descendants of BSD are widely used today, powering millions of servers , desktops , smartphones , and other devices. Free-software licenses and open-source licenses are used by many software packages today. The free software movement and

4032-521: The source code themselves and can put trust on a community of volunteers and users. As proprietary code is typically hidden from public view, only the vendors themselves and hackers may be aware of any vulnerabilities in them while FOSS involves as many people as possible for exposing bugs quickly. FOSS is often free of charge although donations are often encouraged. This also allows users to better test and compare software. FOSS allows for better collaboration among various parties and individuals with

4104-539: The system the ability to use its own cache to store different things to work on. The LWKT subsystem is being employed to partition work among multiple kernel threads (for example in the networking code there is one thread per protocol per processor), reducing competition by removing the need to share certain resources among various kernel tasks. In order to run safely on multiprocessor machines, access to shared resources (like files, data structures) must be serialized so that threads or processes do not attempt to modify

4176-462: The system without installing it. Daily snapshots are available from the master site for those who want to install the most recent versions of DragonFly without building from source. Like the other free and open-source BSDs, DragonFly is distributed under the terms of the modern version of the BSD license . Free and open-source software Free and open-source software ( FOSS ) is software that

4248-656: The system's core, including the LWKT subsystem, the IPI messaging subsystem and the new kernel memory allocator, are lockless, meaning that they work without using mutexes, with each process operating on a single CPU. Critical sections are used to protect against local interrupts, individually for each CPU, guaranteeing that a thread currently being executed will not be preempted. Serializing tokens are used to prevent concurrent accesses from other CPUs and may be held simultaneously by multiple threads, ensuring that only one of those threads

4320-518: The trademarked name MySQL. In August 2010, Oracle sued Google , claiming that its use of Java in Android infringed on Oracle's copyrights and patents. In May 2012, the trial judge determined that Google did not infringe on Oracle's patents and ruled that the structure of the Java APIs used by Google was not copyrightable. The jury found that Google infringed a small number of copied files, but

4392-837: The vulnerabilities, that no code leaks or exfiltrations occur and that reverse engineering of proprietary code is a hindrance of significance for malicious hackers. Sometimes, FOSS is not compatible with proprietary hardware or specific software. This is often due to manufacturers obstructing FOSS such as by not disclosing the interfaces or other specifications needed for members of the FOSS movement to write drivers for their hardware - for instance as they wish customers to run only their own proprietary software or as they might benefit from partnerships. While FOSS can be superior to proprietary equivalents in terms of software features and stability, in many cases it has more unfixed bugs and missing features when compared to similar commercial software. This varies per case, and usually depends on

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4464-485: The web. Perens subsequently stated that he felt Eric Raymond 's promotion of open-source unfairly overshadowed the Free Software Foundation's efforts and reaffirmed his support for free software. In the following 2000s, he spoke about open source again. From the 1950s and on through the 1980s, it was common for computer users to have the source code for all programs they used, and the permission and ability to modify it for their own use. Software , including source code,

4536-590: Was "Open-source", and quickly Bruce Perens , publisher Tim O'Reilly , Linus Torvalds, and others signed on to the rebranding. The Open Source Initiative was founded in February 1998 to encourage the use of the new term and evangelize open-source principles. While the Open Source Initiative sought to encourage the use of the new term and evangelize the principles it adhered to, commercial software vendors found themselves increasingly threatened by

4608-447: Was commonly shared by individuals who used computers, often as public-domain software (FOSS is not the same as public domain software, as public domain software does not contain copyrights ). Most companies had a business model based on hardware sales, and provided or bundled software with hardware, free of charge. By the late 1960s, the prevailing business model around software was changing. A growing and evolving software industry

4680-462: Was competing with the hardware manufacturer's bundled software products; rather than funding software development from hardware revenue, these new companies were selling software directly. Leased machines required software support while providing no revenue for software, and some customers who were able to better meet their own needs did not want the costs of software bundled with hardware product costs. In United States vs. IBM , filed January 17, 1969,

4752-565: Was developed specifically for DragonFly BSD to provide a feature-rich yet better designed analogue of the increasingly popular ZFS . HAMMER supports configurable file system history, snapshots , checksumming , data deduplication and other features typical for file systems of its kind. HAMMER2, the successor of the HAMMER file system, is now considered stable, used by default, and the focus of further development. Plans for its development were initially shared in 2012. In 2017, Dillon announced that

4824-495: Was eventually ported into standard C library in the userland, where it replaced FreeBSD's malloc implementation. Since release 1.8 DragonFly has a virtualization mechanism similar to User-mode Linux , allowing a user to run another kernel in the userland. The virtual kernel ( vkernel ) is run in completely isolated environment with emulated network and storage interfaces, thus simplifying testing kernel subsystems and clustering features. The vkernel has two important differences from

4896-534: Was in the February 1986 edition of the FSF's now-discontinued GNU's Bulletin publication. The canonical source for the document is in the philosophy section of the GNU Project website. As of August 2017 , it is published in 40 languages. To meet the definition of "free software", the FSF requires the software's licensing respect the civil liberties / human rights of what the FSF calls the software user's " Four Essential Freedoms ". The Open Source Definition

4968-572: Was motivated partly by a desire to avoid GPLv3. The Samba project also switched to GPLv3, so Apple replaced Samba in their software suite by a closed-source, proprietary software alternative. Leemhuis criticizes the prioritization of skilled developers who − instead of fixing issues in already popular open-source applications and desktop environments − create new, mostly redundant software to gain fame and fortune. He also criticizes notebook manufacturers for optimizing their own products only privately or creating workarounds instead of helping fix

5040-476: Was published in March 1985 titled the GNU Manifesto . The manifesto included significant explanation of the GNU philosophy, Free Software Definition and " copyleft " ideas. The FSF takes the position that the fundamental issue Free software addresses is an ethical one—to ensure software users can exercise what it calls " The Four Essential Freedoms ". The Linux kernel , created by Linus Torvalds ,

5112-657: Was released as freely modifiable source code in 1991. Initially, Linux was not released under either a Free software or an Open-source software license. However, with version 0.12 in February 1992, he relicensed the project under the GNU General Public License . FreeBSD and NetBSD (both derived from 386BSD ) were released as Free software when the USL v. BSDi lawsuit was settled out of court in 1993. OpenBSD forked from NetBSD in 1995. Also in 1995, The Apache HTTP Server , commonly referred to as Apache,

5184-527: Was released under the Apache License 1.0 . In 1997, Eric Raymond published The Cathedral and the Bazaar , a reflective analysis of the hacker community and Free software principles. The paper received significant attention in early 1998, and was one factor in motivating Netscape Communications Corporation to release their popular Netscape Communicator Internet suite as Free software . This code

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