From owner-freebsd-advocacy Sat May 29 15:21:26 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from zippy.cdrom.com (zippy.cdrom.com [204.216.27.228]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 696FE14E89 for ; Sat, 29 May 1999 15:21:23 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jkh@zippy.cdrom.com) Received: from zippy.cdrom.com (jkh@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by zippy.cdrom.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id PAA33163; Sat, 29 May 1999 15:22:05 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jkh@zippy.cdrom.com) To: Andreas Klemm Cc: Stefan Bethke , advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG, de-bsd-chat@DE.FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: German Advocacy on BSD In-reply-to: Your message of "Sat, 29 May 1999 23:19:41 +0200." <19990529231941.A18101@titan.klemm.gtn.com> Date: Sat, 29 May 1999 15:22:05 -0700 Message-ID: <33159.928016525@zippy.cdrom.com> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > It would be great, if you could try to contact Juergen Kuri from > C't magazine if they would be interested in publishing your nice > article about the 'history' of the different BSD's. > > Additionally it would be fine, if you could add perhaps some > features of the latest Release 3.2. Maybe you could make this more > a FreeBSD 3.2 article, am not sure, if they are interested in a > history article. I also found the article to be interesting but thought it missed one of the key points in comparing *BSDs: The sizes of our respective user bases. This may seem a pure marketing point, but it's really not and it's one of the reasons we still occasionally recommend Linux to people who really need a fair amount of hand-holding and "peer support". If you can find other people to talk to and exchange tips somewhere reasonably local to you, it can make all the difference for some folks and hence why the size and composition of the user base is a very important factor in selecting an OS. It's not the *most* important, by any means, but it's still somewhere in the top ten. :-) The size of a user base, along with a rough count of all the USENET/WEB/EMAIL articles it generates, is also a reasonable indicator of how approachable an OS is and "approachability" is another important factor in our favor, something which Stefan's article sort of touches on but doesn't really illustrate in depth. Yet another thing Stefan doesn't touch upon but should be noted somewhere is FreeBSD's reputation for stability under high load. I'm not saying that the other *BSDs are incapable of similar feats, but until they've powered a Yahoo, a Hotmail or an ftp.freebsd.org, it's an academic rather than proven fact. :-) Tuning an OS for maximum performance takes more than just a will to do so (and I think we've done pretty well there too), it takes test beds which actually subject it to serious stress so that you can measure the results and know empirically, rather than subjectively, where it needs improvement. FreeBSD has had quite a few of these "trials by fire" and I think it only fair to note that somewhere since that's very definitely what businessfolk want to hear - not whether it's capable of doing XYZ but whether it's actually DONE XYZ somewhere. All that said, good article! Good practice at reading German! :) - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message