Five years on

It's been five years since I wrote my first article in this column. A lot has happened in that time, and I had time to reflect on it at the BSDCon in San Mateo at the beginning of September. This month I'd like to take a look back over the last five years and try to guess where the next five years will lead us.

1998: The beginnings

When Daemon News started in September 1998, the BSDs were no longer new. My subjective impression was that most people involved in BSD were hobbyists, though we could point to a number of successful business implementations. We didn't meet in person much: in February 1999 I pointed to the fact that just about all communication was by mail (that was before I discovered IRC, which for me, at any rate, didn't change much).

Things changed in the second year of Daemon News with the first FreeBSD Con, about which I reported in December 1999. In the edition before I had reported about that year's AUUG Conference. Both topics are still with us, and I'll talk about them below.

Somehow the FreeBSD Con was a turning point: in addition to communicating by mail, people met in person in large groups. This was the height of the “dot com” boom, of course, and money was available on every street corner. XXXspam That changed soon after. One of the changes was the purchase of BSDi by Wind River Systems. This was supposed to be a good sign for the future, and the immediate result was the availability of BSD/OS's SMP code for FreeBSD. I'll look at how it worked out below.

Hobbyists or projects?

The BSDs continue to grow, and the burden of running a project is growing. It's not surprising that it hit FreeBSD first, since they had the largest number of developers. In October 2000, just before I took up a position on the FreeBSD core team, I wrote an article on the FreeBSD project management and the core team in particular. It's interesting to look back and see how things have changed since then. We still have a core team, but it's changed, and we can expect more changes in the future.

BSD and Linux

As we grew and met in person more often, we also met people in other projects. The FreeBSD Con in 1999 was the only FreeBSD Con; the following year we called it BSDCon, and we had a significant participation from the NetBSD project, and also some members of the OpenBSD project. Before that, however, as I wrote in December 2000, Justin Gibbs and I were at the 2nd Annual Linux Storage Management Workshop in Miami. Justin talked about his SCSI code for FreeBSD, which has since been adopted, at least in part, into Linux.

Change of focus

In the following year, things moved away from the USA, and I was at conference in Europe, Singapore and Malaysia. At the time it didn't seem significant. Yes, the terrorist attacks had happened in the USA, but that wasn't the reason for the conferences, which had long been planned.

We had another BSDCon in San Francisco in February 2002, this time organized by USENIX, and I reported on it in the April article. It wasn't as much a roaring success as its predecessors, for the reasons I mention.

After that, for various reasons, notably the world economy, I didn't travel overseas for another 18 months, until the next BSDCon, which brings us up to the present.

Conferences, then and now

In 1998, I complained about the poor attendance of the AUUG Conference: only 160, compared to 280 the year before. The article didn't go unnoticed, and to punish me the AUUG committee (now called “board of directors”) first made me a committee member, and then all the officers resigned and I ended up being the president of AUUG. As such, I have even more concern about the conference than I did four years ago.

The AUUG conference was a success. Well, we all enjoyed ourselves. But there were only 135 attendees, less than the 160 I was complaining about four years ago and also less than the 160 we had last year–with which we had been pleased. As president, I had to explain in my report why the numbers were so bad.

The week after was the BSDCon in San Mateo. Coincidentally, we had about 135 attendees, strongly down on previous years' attendances. As at the AUUG conference, we had a great time, though people were complaining more about the cost than in previous years.

There's no secret about the cost of attending a conference: they're shown on the web sites (http://www.auug.org.au/events/2003/auug2003/general-information.html for AUUG, http://www.usenix.org/events/bsdcon03/registration/ for BSDCon). If you're not a member of the respective organization, you'll pay $830 for AUUG or $825 for BSDCon. Those prices aren't quite as similar as they look: the AUUG price is in Australian dollars, about a third cheaper. But it's still a lot of money. Why are the conferences so expensive? The location is one reason, of course. People wondered whether a cheaper venue would be a better option. There are reasons to believe it wouldn't make much difference. Yes, it's expensive, but the real question is not money, it's time. In today's economic climate, people don't have time to go to conferences.

So what's the answer? I don't have a good one either. Probably “wait until things get better”. There's a sign that that's happening, and it's certainly about time.

Goodbye, BSDi

In 2000, BSDi contributed their current SMP code, called SMPng, to the FreeBSD project. FreeBSD has spent three years working on this code, and the results were incorporated in release 5 of FreeBSD. What about BSDi?

Alas, BSDi is no more. During the BSDCon we were given the news that Wind River Systems have decided to stop work on BSD/OS. It's a casualty of a number of developments in the last few years, but to a certain extent it's also indicative of the fact that a commercial operating system is going to have a hard time against free alternatives. It's not as simple as that, though: BSDi offered things that the free BSDs don't offer, such as support from the same company that developed it, and tuition. They will be missed.