May 13, 2021

402: Goodbye GPL

49 minutes

It's time to say goodbye to the GPL, a new OCI Runtime for FreeBSD Jails, A bit of Xenix history, On Updating QEMU's bsd-user fork, FreeBSD 13 on a 12 year old laptop, and more.

NOTES

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Headlines

It's time to say goodbye to the GPL

The trigger for this post is the reinstating of Richard Stallman, a very problematic character, to the board of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). I am appalled by this move, and join others in the call for his removal.

This occasion has caused me to reevaluate the position of the FSF in computing. It is the steward of the GNU project (a part of Linux distributions, loosely speaking), and of a family of software licenses centred around the GNU General Public License (GPL). These efforts are unfortunately tainted by Stallman’s behaviour. However, this is not what I actually want to talk about today.

runj: a new OCI Runtime for FreeBSD Jails

Today, I open-sourced runj, a new experimental, proof-of-concept OCI-compatible runtime for FreeBSD jails. For the past 6.5 years I’ve been working on Linux containers, but never really had much experience with FreeBSD jails. runj (pronounced “run jay”) is a vehicle for me to learn more about FreeBSD in general and jails in particular. With my position on the Technical Oversight Board of the Open Containers Initiative, I’m also interested in understanding how the OCI runtime specification can be adapted to other operating systems like FreeBSD.

News Roundup

A Bit of Xenix History

From 1986 to 1989, I worked in the Xenix1 group at Microsoft. It was my first job out of school, and I was the most junior person on the team. I was hopelessly naive, inexperienced, generally clueless, and borderline incompetent, but my coworkers were kind, supportive and enormously forgiving – just a lovely bunch of folks.

On Updating QEMU's bsd-user fork

FreeBSD 13 on a 12 year old laptop

My old (2009) HP laptop now runs FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE.

Beastie Bits

Registration is now open for the June 2021 #FreeBSD Developers Summit

6.0RC1 images available

Lexical File Names in Plan 9 or Getting Dot-Dot Right

The history of UTF-8 as told by Rob Pike

Initial Support for the riscv64 Architecture

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###Tarsnap

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Feedback/Questions

Hamza - Congrats on 400

Renato - DTS and ContainerD

Rob - Music

Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected]

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By JT Pennington

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