The costs of open sourcing a project are explored, we discover why PS4 downloads are so slow, delve into the history of UNIX man pages, and more.

Accusing a company of “dumping” their project as open source is probably misplaced – it’s an expensive business no-one would do frivolously.

Some case study cameos may help. From 2004 onwards, Sun Microsystems had a policy of all its software moving to open source. The company migrated almost all products to open source licenses, and had varying degrees of success engaging communities around the various projects, largely related to the outlooks of the product management and Sun developers for the project.

Having the right to use the software is not the same as giving everyone in the world an unrestricted right to use it and create derivatives. Checking every line of code to make sure you have the rights necessary to release under an OSI-approved license is a big task requiring high-value employees on the “liberation team”. That includes both developers and lawyers; neither come cheap.

To pass it to others, a self-contained package containing all necessary source code, build scripts and non-public source and tool dependencies has to be created since it is quite unlikely to exist internally. Again, the liberation team will need your best developers.

Just because you have confidence that you have the rights to the code, that doesn’t mean anyone else will. The version control system probably contains much of the information that gives confidence about who wrote which code, so the repackaging needs to also include a way to migrate the commit information.

The file headers will hopefully include origin information but the liberation team had better check. They also need to check the comments for libel and profanities, not to mention trade secrets (especially those from third parties) and other IP issues.

It is a fantastic idea to move your project to a host like Apache, Conservancy, Public Software and so on. But doing so requires preparatory work. As a minimum you will need to negotiate with the new host organisation, and they may well need you to satisfy their process requirements. Paperwork obviously, but also the code may need conforming copyright statements and more. That’s more work for your liberation team.

Your code has an existing community who will need to migrate to your new host. That includes your staff – they are community too! They will need commit rights, governance rights, social media rights and more. Your liberation team will need your community manager, obviously, but may also need HR input.

Keeping your project alive will take money. It’s all been coming from you up to this point, but if you simply walk away before the financial burden has been accepted by the new community and hosts there may be a problem. You should consider making an endowment to your new host to pay for their migration costs plus the cost of hosting the community for at least a year.

Explaining the move you are making, the reasons why you are making it and the benefits for you and the community is important. If you don’t do it, there are plenty of trolls around who will do it for you. Creating a news blog post and an FAQ — the minimum effort necessary — really does take someone experienced and you’ll want to add such a person to your liberation team.

An increasing number of companies are choosing to create substantial, openly-governed open source communities around software that contributes to their business. An open multi-stakeholder co-developer community is an excellent vehicle for innovation at the lowest cost to all involved. As long as your market strategy doesn’t require creating artificial scarcity.

While the owner of the code may no longer be interested, there may be one or more parties to which they owe a contractual responsibility. Rather than breaching that contract, or buying it out, a move to open source may be better. Some sources suggest a contractual obligation to IBM was the reason Oracle abandoned OpenOffice.org by moving it over to the Apache Software Foundation for example.

You may have no further use for the code itself, but you may well have other parts of your business which depend on it. If they are willing to collectively fund development you might consider an “inner source” strategy which will save you many of the costs above. But the best way to proceed may well be to open the code so your teams and those in other companies can fund the code.

From the outside, corporations look monolithic, but from the inside it becomes clear they are a microcosm of the market in which they exist. As a result, they have political machinations that may be addressed by open source. One of Oracle’s motivations for moving NetBeans to Apache seems to have been political. Despite multiple internal groups needing it to exist, the code was not generating enough direct revenue to satisfy successive executive owners, who allegedly tried to abandon it on more than one occasion. Donating it to Apache meant that couldn’t happen again.

None of this is to say a move to open source guarantees the success of a project. A “Field of Dreams” strategy only works in the movies, after all. But while it may be tempting to look at a failed corporate liberation and describe it as “abandonware”, chances are it was intended as nothing of the kind.

Game downloads on PS4 have a reputation of being very slow, with many people reporting downloads being an order of magnitude faster on Steam or Xbox. This had long been on my list of things to look into, but at a pretty low priority. After all, the PS4 operating system is based on a reasonably modern FreeBSD (9.0), so there should not be any crippling issues in the TCP stack.

With a local proxy the client-proxy RTT will be very low; that connection is almost guaranteed to be the faster one. The improvement will have to be from the server-proxy connection being somehow better than the direct client-server one. The RTT will not change, so there are just two options: either the client has a much smaller receive window than the proxy, or the client is somehow causing the server's congestion window to decrease. (E.g. the client is randomly dropping received packets, while the proxy isn't).

The differences in receive windows at different times are striking. And more important, the changes in the receive windows correspond very well to specific things I did on the PS4

This release includes a number of changes that may affect existing

Security: sftp-server(8): in read-only mode, sftp-server was incorrectly permitting creation of zero-length files. Reported by Michal Zalewski.

ssh(1): add RemoteCommand option to specify a command in the ssh config file instead of giving it on the client's command line. This allows the configuration file to specify the command that will be executed on the remote host.

FiFo 0.9.3 has been in the works for a while, and it comes with quite a few new features. With our last release, we started experimenting with FreeBSD support. Since then much work has gone into improving this. We also did something rather exciting with the mystery box! However, more on that in a later post.

Where do UNIX manpages come from? Who introduced the section-based layout of NAME, SYNOPSIS, and so on? And for manpage source writers and readers: where were those economical two- and three-letter instructions developed? The many accounts available on the Internet lack citations and are at times inconsistent.

Please see the Copyright section if you plan on reproducing parts of this work.

It seems that every time I try to go to England using the Eurostar, it gets delayed between 30 minutes and 2 hours. This year, it got my 45 minute layover down to 10 minutes. Luckily, King’s Cross is literally across the street from Saint Pancras, and I managed to get into my second train just in time.

The weather is lovely, and it is a good thing as there is a 25-30 minute walk from the College to the Computer Laboratory where the devsummit happens. The first morning is for deciding what we are going to talk about for the rest of the week, so we all go in turn introducing ourselves and voicing about what we would like to talk about. There are a few subjects that are of interest to me, so I listen to the toolchain discussions while writing new bits for the Porter’s Handbook.

I spent most of the day writing documentation, and talked a bit with a couple of DocEng members about joining the team as I would like to give some love to the build framework that has not been touched in a long time. At the end of the afternoon is a packaging session, we talked about the status of package in base, which is not really going anywhere right now. On the ports side, three aspects that are making good progress include, package flavors, sub packages, and migrating some base libraries to private libraries, which is a nightmare because of openssl, and kerberos, and pam. That evening, we had the formal diner at St John’s College, I love those old buildings that reminds me of Hogwarts. (I am sure there is a quidditch pitch somewhere nearby.)

Last day. I continued to write documentation, while listening to a provisioning session. It would be great to have bhyve support in existing orchestration tools like vagrant, openstack, or maybe ganeti. We end the day, and the devsummit with short talks, some very interesting, some going way over my head.