Date: Sun, 20 May 2007 16:24:59 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Kevin Kinsey" <kdk@daleco.biz>, "Anton Galitch" <anton.galitch@gmail.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: RE: just general questions about fbsd Message-ID: <BMEDLGAENEKCJFGODFOCCEBHCAAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20070520221917.GA91736@ezekiel.daleco.biz>
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> -----Original Message----- > From: owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org > [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Kevin Kinsey > Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2007 3:19 PM > To: Anton Galitch > Cc: questions@freebsd.org > Subject: Re: just general questions about fbsd > > > Anton Galitch wrote: > > Hi > > Im writing an article about FreeBSD and want to ask some few question: > > > > - Do the FBSD developers work for free? > > Heh, you mean, at what job? Most of them work somewhere for > money, I'm pretty sure. ;-) Occasionally companies will "grant" money > to a certain developer to remain "unemployed" by others and spend more > time on FreeBSD. IIRC, Poul Henning-Kamp got a good portion of a year's > salary in a fund-raising campaign last year, mostly from some of > the larger companies listed below. > > Some companies pay an employee a regular salary, but allow or > even encourage them to work on FreeBSD as part of their job. > > However, the majority of developers work on FreeBSD in their free time, > for the love of the system, without much more compensation than the > satisfaction of a job well done. > I think the majority of developers have FreeBSD involved in some manner in their jobs, and a lot of times they need something put into it, or they need a tool to run on it. Not that their job description specifically lists "working on the FreeBSD system" but that they are given a lot of leeway as to how they come up with solutions to their employers problems. If I was, for example, an employer paying a developer a salary to write code to keep my business running, I would expect that whatever OS he preferred to use to run the programs he's writing for me, he would have source for it. Microsoft in fact has a specific program for developers to be able to access Windows source. Furthermore, I would also expect that if my developer ran into a problem that was due to a bug in the OS source, that he would have a channel to get this corrected. If it was a Windows platform, I would certainly inform my MS sales rep that continued payment and purchase of MS os licenses was absolutely contingent on them taking bug corrections from my employee that needed fixing in their code, bugs that were preventing my developer from building software that I needed. > At least, that is what I think/hope/sincerely want to believe.... :-) > > > - What advanced features it has that for example Windows, or MacOS > dont > > have? > Windows, even the server versions of Windows, are fundamentally desktop software operating systems that are at times pressed into being servers. FreeBSD and the other UNIXES are fundamentally server operating systems that are at times pressed into being desktops. Remember, UNIX came out of the multiuser environment, where you had a lot of people connected via dumb ASCII terminals to a single mainframe. >From the beginning, concepts like reentrant code, and separation of user authority, have been ingrained in it. Consider for example the extreme difficulty that Microsoft has had with the simple concept of a "superuser". A superuser is, as you may know, a userID on the system that has authority to do anything, change anything, and that the normal security mechanisms do not apply to. Under UNIX this is the "root" user ID. Well, with Windows, in the Win 3.1/win95/win98/winME series, anyone who booted the Windows system was automatically the superuser. This causes a lot of problems as you might imagine with programs, as if a program has a bug or goes out of control somehow, since the user it is running under has no security, the program can destroy anything on the system. With UNIX, normally, programs are not run under the superuser ID, they are run under a normal user ID. Thus programs cannot normally damage the system. Microsoft observed the value of this paradigm and so put it into Windows NT - although, under NT, they called the superuser "the administrative user" most likely, because they didn't want anyone to realize they were just copying how UNIX does things. But, "administrator" under Windows, and "root" under UNIX are essentially the same thing. The problem, though, is that because the concept of the superuser ID was grafted onto Windows, if you setup Windows so that when it boots, a person logs into it as a regular user, they have a lot of problems. They cannot install software, they cannot run a lot of different network software, they cannot make changes in simple things like the screen resolution, and so on. Both Windows NT and Windows 2K were setup by Microsoft out of the box like this - when you installed them, you had to tell them a regular userID and an administrator userID. But, due to the problems, Microsoft went to a model in both Windows XP and Windows Vista, where when you install and set it up, BY DEFAULT, you are put in as a superuser (administrator) This saves Microsoft a lot of support calls from people calling in demanding to know why the Windows OS won't let them do simple things like change screen resolution - but, it completely defeats the security in Windows, and makes even the most modern Windows no better than Windows 3.1 in terms of security. This I think is one of the best illustrations of the different approaches of Windows and UNIX. With a server, since a lot of people are affected if an errant program crashes it, the security is never disabled by default, and the installer must deliberately choose to do it. With a desktop, nobody is really affected if it crashes except for 1 person, so since usability is more important than security, by default this is why security in Windows Vista is subverted this way, out of the box. There are a very great many people out there walking around who have setup Windows systems as servers, and not understood this, and as a result, caused their company to lose hundreds if not thousands of dollars of time and labor due to the Windows server crashing as a result of a virus knocking it down. A virus, I will say, that IF the Windows security had been properly enabled, would NOT have been able to take the Windows server down. Ted
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