Hi it's Mike with UGtastic again. I'm here today at day two of SCNA 2013. Right now I'm sitting down with Amitai Schleyer who sits on the TNF. As you might know, the TNF is the net BSD. The board of the I can't even say myself, but it's a board of the net BSD organization or a foundation. TNF I said that beautifully so. Anyway, hi hi Amitai. Thank you very much for taking the time to sit down with me. Appreciate it.

The net BSD that that's that's like the Berkeley San Diego Unix that's the foundation for the I-386 in that BSD's case. It turns out to be a lot more than that. Okay, BSD stands for Berkeley software distribution or Berkeley software development depending on when in the 90s you're looking at the expansion of the acronym. net BSD was one of the two projects that kind of forked out of the the death of the original Berkeley. The Regents of the University of California sometime in the early 90s stopped being able to fund the development that was happening in Berkeley which had been to begin with a set of patches on top of AT&T's units but eventually became its own distribution. One of the hallmarks of BSD Unix, other than actually being able to be used by humans to some extent, was that it deliberately targeted portability. It was deliberately built and distributed from multiple hardware architectures and that thereby forced to be designed to be able to work on multiple hardware architectures. NetBSD and FreeBSD are the two major projects that forked around that time out of the remains of BSD. FreeBSD chose what seems like a prescient direction at the time that they should focus on commodity hardware because mostly that's what people have. If you eke out every last bit of performance on a 90 megahertz Pentium, you'll be glad you did. Yeah, and NetBSD chose that aspect of tradition from Berkeley that let's let's turn up the knobs to 11 on portability. Let's stick with that tradition. Let's make sure we're even more portable. Let's find more ways to share driver code abstractions that let the drivers be shared abstract the way Andean-ness and other differences between platforms and just make let that drive the design which is actually why I'm here talking to you today because when I Have you heard about craftsmanship and this conference the Unix that I think goes best with that is NetBSD? I think craftsmen who use Unix and appreciate Unix and appreciate craftsmanship should be very interested in that business. Well, I think there's a lot of people here that don't realize that they're very interested in NetBSD. Didn't we we kind of tease each other about that Apple logo? But if I'm not mistaken, NetBSD is the kernel the Darwin kernel is based off of NetBSD or it's a complicated story. Naturally, the kernel in OS 10 is kind of a hybrid. A lot of its history comes from Mock, which was developed at Carnegie Mellon. Mark as the MACH, MACH, good kind of like the word Mac, but totally coincidental. It also turns out that one of the primary developers of Mock wound up being an executive at Apple later for business merger-related reasons. But the kernel is Mocked, and there is some more to it than that. That's actually not my primary area of work, but where NetBSD got involved with OS 10 is that in an early version of OS 10, I think up through 10.2 or 10.3, most of the user land utilities were from NetBSD. Early so if you for instance, if you're running user bin FTP, it's the one that that was developed in FBSD and enhanced by Luke Mewburn and distributed as an autoconf buildable piece of source. And a lot of the utilities in OS 10 were like that. Somewhere after 10.2 or 10.3, it became more of a FreeBSD influence because one of the developers from one of the founders of FreeBSD, Jordan Hubbard, was the director of Unix technologies or something like that at Apple, and so they kind of moved in a FreeBSD direction for user land, but the the kernel is actually a different story and I don't know it very well. Okay, so you know how did you come to be involved with the? You said that the kernel really isn't where you're spending your time. Where does Amitai or Schmanz, his nickname, the where Schmanz spent his time? What is your focus and what do you do with the the foundation as part of the board? I'm relatively new. I was elected some months ago and just began serving the roles that I had before that were two basically. One that I kind of self-nominated myself for like you do in a volunteer project. Whoever does the work becomes in charge, and another that I was selected for a while ago. The other one the one that I selected for is there's a project management committee for package source which is closely related to NetBSD in terms of history and organization, but isn't an operating system project. NetBSD is an operating system project. Package source is a package manager and it's distinguishing characteristics that are very compelling. What are the key features of the system you're describing?

Can you explain how it works in more detail?

Does it also resolve dependencies and things like that?

Are you familiar with an equivalent problem with Pearl where you want to have different versions of Pearl with different gems in the Pro world installed, and be able to switch between them and know which one you're currently working with?

How did you come to own the work and volunteer for it? How did you end up even getting into position to volunteer for that one?

What piece of software did you find that was close to what you needed?

liked that we now have wiki.netbsd.org and someday when I have time that will be how our website is made okay so I just kind of volunteered for that and now I'm on the web committee even though I didn't really mean for that to happen yeah but it's an okay way yeah that it sounds like it's a lot of fun and but you know even going back further why NetBSD what was what attracted you to NetBSD to begin with great question so I went to high school about 20-25 miles north of the road from here and in high school the available nerd tooling that I could get at was Texas Instruments Graphic Calculators at the time that's all the programmability that I could get to it so I got to it I had one of everything I had 81 82 85 and 92 which was two megahertz faster than the CPU in the Mac plus we had at home oh wow so it's just like today when you have that that little iPhone and a three-year-old computer it's like no they're shameful yeah but so that's what I had and and I got into the community around it and was invited to participate in a community project that we were we were building called ti calc. org ti themselves wasn't real forthcoming supporting all the third-party things that were happening so we wanted to be for ourselves and I was invited to be part of that and they were running on some weird system called Linux one point something I don't know the first thing about it right so I said how can I even be useful to you guys if what I have is you know an old Macintosh Mac 2ci at the time how can I even learn how this stuff works so that eventually I can be useful to you guys and one of the people on the project said oh if the Mac 2ci is what you have then you should run that BSD so the 2ci that's that's pretty that's pretty ancient that's so you dated yourself there I didn't even realize that I mean pre i386 that you know pre Intel processors sure that you could run unix on an old Apple that far so I mean that the support goes back that far it does net BSD runs on old 68k Macintoshes Amiga's with the similar chipset weird old machines I don't even know what they are a limited run set of machines called the shark that had I think an arm based processor but not like the ones we have in our phone yeah yeah and that was famous for being silent and having no fan it's also famous for having almost no performance but that BSD runs on it pretty much anything with an MMU is enough and somebody will report to it if they have an interest and by the same token that BSD NetBSD has a reputation for prioritizing compatibility with old machines even when it's impractical and gets in the way. Is this true?

If someone is looking to run NetBSD on a Mac and wants to explore its heritage, is it possible to run it in a virtual machine?

Do you recommend people who are interested in learning about NetBSD's heritage and running it on a Mac to take a look at package source?

using homebrew and maybe reconsider homebrew or? Well I'm speaking from ignorance because I haven't used homebrew more than a time. I have a good clone of it just so I can see if they have a recipe that I want to borrow something from because you know they they're focused on OS X so they may have something that package source doesn't have yet and wants to have but I've actually run it I have used Mac ports once or twice a long time ago I tried Fink I have checkouts of them as well for the same reason but I actually don't know enough about other systems because I've been so happy with package source for so long because I can do the same thing and all the machines that I have so I couldn't even make an informed opinion about that.

went to package source con in Berlin in March and one of the best talks I saw there was about Ansible which is one of those okay promote system and driving systems and this is a person who's been a package source developer I'm sure I know Ansible is a system of shell scripts so you can easily hook in a call to package add and God knows what else I imagine chef and puppet and those guys could do the same well it's very interesting because when you mentioned Ansible Ansible is one of those things that I've seen on the periphery but never was like oh that's just something that somebody's out there but then when you talk about this shared heritage now that it has this relationship with package source it's now much more compelling for me to go and spend time it's not an official relationship but it seems like it's a natural fit okay so Ansible is a thing to check out if you're also looking at package source um if if so now I just I just messed myself up now because I lost my flow because I took a took that aside to point at the camera um so you're here at SCNA and you're interested in in the craftsmanship uh conversation and you said that it seems like a natural fit for what the core of NetBSD is but if somebody's here at SCNA and they're they're they're looking at how I can contribute back to open source um is is is the NetBSD something you might point them at saying go go look at bugs or where would they go look to you I would absolutely recommend that BSD I think it represents uh if if what people here are interested in is operating system development NetBSD presents a unique value proposition compared to any other open source system they could volunteer for specifically first of all as a craftsman you want to have whatever you're building on to have been made in a craftsman-like manner which I think one of our speakers yesterday uh alluded to that you you want the tool that you were given to be made with quality and then you want to use it to pay it forward to build something else with color NetBSD for whatever you might want to build on top of it uh is a very simply designed coherent no funny surprises piece of software which for an operating system is a serious achievement right and then as a craftsman in the world of business you want to have the option to extend software without necessarily having to publish the changes that you make and that BSD license-wise like any of the BSDs is superior to Linux in that regard you have the option of making changes that you can keep private for as long as you want to um what's the BSD license the BSD license as long as you give

What sets NetBSD apart from other BSDs?

Can you explain how NetBSD's approach to testing is unique?

How does this approach to testing benefit NetBSD users?

all these options of how to exercise it yeah well uh thank you very much for taking the time to sit down here really appreciate it and uh thank you

[Music]