AerieBSD — a fork of OpenBSD (nothing to see yet ...)

I plucked this from the noise on Twitter:

A new project dubbed AerieBSD is starting, some say as a fork of OpenBSD (and from the looks of the planned architectures, I'd say they're right).

I'm not as enmeshed in the politics of the various BSD projects and their licenses as you might think, and the site isn't giving all that many clues as to WHY it's forking. Look at this (misspellings as they appear on the project Web site):

The ÆrieBSD project strives to produce a free, multi-platform UNIX-like operating system including the best possible free development environment. This includes (in adition to traditional BSD environment) free compilers, assemblers, linkers and other tools for various architectures as well cross-building capabilities.

The only name I can find on the site is that of a German guy named Michael Shalayeff, who's not hiding the fact that there's nothing to see yet ("we're working on our first release"). He is a (former?) developer of OpenBSD. I saw this reference to his work on the hppa port of OpenBSD and CARP.

I guess what Shalayeff is trying to say is that he doesn't want to use tools such as the GCC compiler or the GNU utilities that are not totally free in a BSD-licensing sense ... but I could be wrong. (And OpenBSD has this same goal, I believe.) So it's aiming to be BSD without the GNU (or the GPL).

To get somewhat of a picture of Shalayeff's involvement with OpenBSD and PCC, look at the mailing lists. (To be honest, I'm getting no clues there ...)

Look at the "about" page (emphasis mine, with my comments in footnotes, spelling theirs):

We are a group of individuals who like to hack operating systems. We are not driven by any kind of corporate agenda or market sales and thus can produce the best software ever, properly written. There is not any business or corporate backing (or even sponsourship) for the project. We even pay for it with our ice cream change! Since our time and resources are limited we use lots of software developed by other peoples and projects. Here is what our goals are (not necessarily in the order of priority):

* First of all hacking shall be fun and thus we resent any sort of political gaming and ego worshipping inside the project¹. If you want to be famous and naked -- here be a wrong place for you.

* Henceforth developers are the only real value that we have and this is who the project is for².

* Be open to the community and provide transparency of how the project works³.

* Provide free and functional best possible development environment. This includes free access to all source code, free development tools (compilers, assemblers, linkers, debuggers, text formatting tools, etc), various libraries and documentation.

* Support various hardware platforms (see Hardware page).

* Implement common standards.

* Pay attention to security and correctness⁴.

* Provide a stable release cycle⁵, although right now we are working on our first release (;

To keep the code free we prefer code licensed with ISC or 2- or 3-clause Berkeley style licenses. GPL is not really acceptable in the tree as through the years it has proven to be alot of trouble and counter-progressive.

OK, here are the footnotes (this is turning out to be easier to explain than I thought):

¹ I assume they're referring to what I call the "benevolent dictatorship" of OpenBSD, which was founded and now run by Theo de Raadt. The wording suggests "Theo doesn't like me/hates me/hates my code," or "my asbestos undies are wearing out."

² The "developers, developers, developers" mantra isn't just a Steve Ballmer thing. Everyone in the OpenBSD project is very open about that fact that the OS is coded by the developers, for the developers, and anybody else is free to use it as they wish, but if they want a certain feature or other, they best get to coding it themselves. And while everybody involved in OpenBSD thinks (and rightly so) that the OS is important to vast numbers of people, they as developers are pretty much scratching their own itch when it comes to their work. So ... I take this to mean, "We're just like OpenBSD, except we're in charge, and not Theo."

³ The whole thing about openness and transparency ... OpenBSD seems as open as they come. The whole tree can be seen by anybody at any time, everything is battled over in the mailing lists ... so it's more "we're just like OpenBSD minus Theo."

⁴ "Security and correctness (of code)" — again, right out of the OpenBSD playbook.

⁵ "Stable Release Cycle" means that, just like OpenBSD, we want it to be released like clockwork, every time ... so again, "just like OpenBSD minus Theo."

So what is AerieBSD and what will it become? I have no idea. If anybody out there knows anything, please post a comment on this entry.

Historical perspective: OpenBSD is a fork of NetBSD. Matthew Dillon's DragonFlyBSD is a fork of FreeBSD. I guess you could say that all the current BSDs are forks of the earlier BSD projects, principally 4.4BSD-Lite and 386BSD.

And you might not say that Linux is forked from Minix, it was certainly inspired by it.

Related:

• AerieBSD mentioned in the DragonFlyBSD blog
  
• AerieBSD mentioned in the Trivium blog