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Tag: commercial environment

• Warner Losh - Tracking FreeBSD in a commercial Environment
  Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
  Added: 25 May 2009
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, freebsd, commercial environment, waner losh
  Paper (624 Kb, 45 pages), Slides (104 Kb, 10 pages)
  

  Tracking FreeBSD in a commercial Environment
  How to stay current while staying sane

  The FreeBSD project publishes two lines of source code: current and stable. All changes must first be committed to current and then are merged into stable. Commercial organizations wishing to use FreeBSD in their products must be aware of this policy. Four different strategies have developed for tracking FreeBSD over time. A company can choose to run only unmodified release versions of FreeBSD. A company may choose to import FreeBSD's sources once and then never merge newer versions. A company can choose to import each new stable branch as it is created, adding its own changes to that branch, as well as integrating new versions from FreeBSD from time to time. A company can track FreeBSD's current branch, adding to it their changes as well as newer FreeBSD changes. Which method a company chooses depends on the needs of the company. These methods are explored in detail, and their advantages and disadvantages are discussed. Tracking FreeBSD's ports and packages is not discussed.

  Companies building products based upon FreeBSD have many choices in how to use the projects sources and binaries. The choices range from using unmodified binaries from FreeBSD's releases, to tracking modify FreeBSD heavily and tracking FreeBSD's evolution in a merged tree. Some companies may only need to maintain a stable version of FreeBSD with more bug fixes or customizations than the FreeBSD project wishes to place in that branch. Some companies also wish to contribute some subset of their changes back to the FreeBSD project.

  FreeBSD provides an excellent base technology with which to base products. It is a proven leader in performance, reliability and scalability. The technology also offers a very business friendly license that allows companies to pick and choose which changes they wish to contribute to the community rather than forcing all changes to be contributed back, or attaching other undesirable license conditions to the code.

  However, the FreeBSD project does not focus on integration of its technology into customized commercial products. Instead, the project focuses on producing a good, reliable, fast and scalable operating system and associated packages. The project maintains two lines of development. A current branch, where the main development of the project takes place, and a stable branch which is managed for stability and reliability. While the project maintains documentation on the system, including its development model, relatively little guidance has been given to companies in how to integrate FreeBSD into their products with a minimum of trouble.

  Developing a sensible strategy to deal with both these portions of FreeBSD requires careful planning and analysis. FreeBSD's lack of guidelines to companies leaves it up to them to develop a strategy. FreeBSD's development model differs from some of the other Free and Open Source projects. People familiar with those systems often discover that methods that were well suited to them may not work as well with FreeBSD's development model. These two issues cause many companies to make poor decisions without understanding the problems that lie in their future.

  Very little formal guidance exists for companies wishing to integrate FreeBSD into their products. Some email threads can be located via a Google search that could help companies, but many of them are full of contradictory information, and it is very disorganized. While the information about the FreeBSD development process is in the FreeBSD handbook, the implications of that process for companies integrating FreeBSD into their products are not discussed.