Comments on: FreeBSD 6.0 to target wireless devices

Developers hope to make FreeBSD the operating system of choice for wireless device manufacturers.

[Scott W]

installer

could someone tell me what the freeBSD installer is like? i've never had experience with BSD but if i hear good things about it i may be convinced to try it. i'd like a friendly installer ;)

[Maelstorm]

It's old, but it works

Speaking from experience, the FreeBSD installer, /stand/sysinstall, is old but it works. It works quite well too. You pretty much only use it to install the system, or to install additional disk devices and that's it. It's text only menu driven and there is online help through a text-mode web browser (links I beleive).

[Joe Votour]

Big boon to wireless router manufacturers

If the FreeBSD camp can pull this off, this would be a big boon to companies like Linksys/Cisco, Netgear and others who make wireless routers (as well as chip makers like Broadcom, who make the reference designs).

"Wireless-device manufacturers may prefer to use FreeBSD rather than the rival open-source operating system, Linux, because of features such as its support for fine-grained access controls and security policies, according to Long." While this does sound interesting, I do suspect that they'd migrate to FreeBSD not because of those features, but for the main feature - the BSD license. Building their routers on BSD licensed software means that they don't have to hand out any source code to anybody. There would be no repeat of the Linksys open-source firmware for their routers.

Not that I'm necessarily saying that this is a bad thing. I figure that if companies want to use GPL licensed code in their products, then they must obey the terms of the license. The BSD license is much more liberal in terms of what you can do with the code (basically, you can do anything you want with it, except say that you wrote it).

Only time will tell if FreeBSD could take over the marketshare that Linux has.

-- Joe