On Thu, 18 Aug 2011, Vadim Goncharov wrote:

I'd point out that the key thing here is to produce, distribute, and as you rightly point out *make easy*, new technologies that are transformative in a way that makes FreeBSD compelling. So compelling that you'd rather switch OS than not have it.

It's worth observing that the success of Linux (and FreeBSD) to date comes out of a few very basic but fundamental improvements in OS design:

- Tightly integrated networking - Much cheaper than any competition - Extremely stable compared to the competition

It's clear that Windows has long since caught up in the server world with respect to these in every practical sense (not an invitation for discussion -- we could talk for days) in that it is now a viable server solution in all of the above senses. Which isn't to say that my multi-year uptimes for FreeBSD don't beat the competition, but it's clear FreeBSD/Linux no longer give you orders of magnitude more uptime between crashes. I think people are also now much more aware of the TCO issue with operating systems, and understand that although open source is often better, and therefore cheaper, the lack of a license fee isn't the biggest issue in cost. However, I think the lesson is clear: compelling features required (including things like cost and stability).

My own interests are largely in security, and this is what we're trying to do with Capsicum: make it possible to sandbox applications in a way that simply has never been done before, giving security that has never been had before. This required a new solution (although if you read our USENIX Security or forthcoming CACM paper, it is grounded in some quite old but promising ideas) that you can't find anywhere else.

It will take several years for Capsicum to meet this promise, but the first parts arrive in FreeBSD 9.0. FreeBSD 9.1 is where it should get really exciting -- even (and especially) tools like tcpdump will run automatically and easily in sandboxes, something that just isn't plausibe with other existing sandboxing technologies. Obviously, we hope that the rest of the world will adopt our APIs (and have spotted the OpenBSD folk working on this already, and there's a Linux port out of Google), but I hope for a bit of a run where you have to come to us to get this! And being the place APIs and ideas like this come from is important.

There are lots of other exciting things in 9.x, and we need to make sure we promote them well. I'd point out that this is an area where we also need to do a lot of work. There was a lot of buzz around the release of FreeBSD 8 when Kris was running regular competitive SMP benchmarks and showing us walking all over the competition. Buzz is a critical part of selling ideas in open source (for better or worse), and there's no reason we can't play in that game a bit while maintaining our boring and staid personalities :-).

Robert