[trasz]

Docker is practically dead, no wonder if disappeared :-)

Many things are hellishly complicated in Linux, due to politics and technical difficulties. Case in point: when I’ve started to work on NFSv4 ACLs, support in Linux was “worked on”, there was a prototype. It was 12 years ago. In FreeBSD, full supper for NFSv4 ACLs, from file systems to userspace tools, shipped decade ago. In Linux it’s still not there.

[shatteredgate]

Docker wasn't dead 5 or 6 years ago when I heard about this. In my experience some things are easier to implement in Linux and some are easier to implement in BSD. I don't particularly care for BSD's internal politics either, such as the licensing issues mentioned elsewhere here.

[trasz]

It might be because it would require reimplementing all the system-specific Docker parts from scratch. Not sure though.

BSD doesn't really have any licensing issues, thanks to BSD license, but politics is directly related to project size. In FreeBSD it's pretty much unnoticeable, but in Linux it can be a huge deal.

[shatteredgate]

That has not been my experience. The issues are with licenses other than BSD but that's the same in Linux; Linux can also use BSD code, a lot of Linux code is actually dual licensed as BSD already.

[trasz]

It’s not - Linux does have problems with licenses which are incompatible with GPL, such as MPL/CDDL. BSD doesn’t, because you can’t have license incompatibility without throwing GPL in the mix - it’s the only Open Source license that can be incompatible with others.

FreeBSD does avoid pulling restrictively licensed (closed source or GPL) code into the base system itself, but a Docker port would be third party (ports/packages), not the base system.

[shatteredgate]

Not really, with Linux it's the same as it would be in BSD if they wanted to avoid conflicts with GPL. You put that code in an optional module and have the user compile it. I am unsure as to why BSD people seem to think that using BSD means you can avoid problems with the GPL, if you use any GPL code for any reason (and there's a lot of it) then you have to pay attention to these things. If you insist on only running BSD and CDDL code then you can avoid it, but that's going back to putting politics over software again, the kind of thing that you were saying you were trying to avoid.

[trasz]

Nope - FreeBSD is almost free of GPL, and will probably become entirely GPL-free in 2022: https://wiki.freebsd.org/GPLinBase.

Also, it’s not politics - it’s mostly just that the old GNU cruft is being replaced, and newer, better solutions prefer more liberal licensing, see GCC vs LLVM.

[nix23]

> It was 12 years ago. In FreeBSD, full supper for NFSv4 ACLs

You are right, but ironically we have to thank Microsoft for that ;)

[trasz]

Why, apart from inventing them (in Windows NT) in the first place?

[nix23]

Well the posix conglomerate had such big problems implementing a ACL (mostly because of blabla)... Then Microsoft did one for NT which was then took over to NFS, later the posix peoples decided on a ACL but no one wanted it anymore. However FreeBSD supports both, but the NFS/Microsoft one is the standard.