Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 00:25:35 -0700 (PDT) From: Alex Belits <abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us> To: "Kevin P. Neal" <kpneal@pobox.com> Cc: Stephen Roome <steve@visint.co.uk>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Price of FreeBSD (was On Holy Wars...) Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.95.970419230916.834D-100000@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us> In-Reply-To: <1.5.4.32.19970420042655.008d4610@mindspring.com>
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On Sun, 20 Apr 1997, Kevin P. Neal wrote: > At 04:34 AM 4/20/97 +0100, Stephen Roome wrote: > >On Sat, 19 Apr 1997, dennis wrote: > >> Ah, but the customer isnt always right...... > > > >This attitude is why I bought SDL, not etinc. > > I think it was L.L. Bean who said in a catalog: > "You will never win an argument with a customer." > > This was explained to me as being more correct than "The customer is always > right", because obviously they aren't allways right (but you still want > them as a customer). It's not always good to try to get everyone as a customer -- too many customers that can't use or don't know, how to use product may cause a lot of headache and bad publicity. Both extremes are bad -- MS succeeded to get every fool as a customer, but before doing that they made sure that every fool will be able to use thing (with obvious "side effect" of making system, only fool can use). Linux is an example where a lot of people who don't understand system use it, and distributions had to do a lot to accomodate that (and still Linux got bad name among elitists as "lamer's OS", see the beginning of this thread). FreeBSD however is now far at the "elitist" extreme, where not only OS distribution but the development and porting is based on the motto "we are good, we are smart, and if you can't use what we made, you are stupid, so go away". While it can be acceptable for kernel development (not always) and applications porting/approving (not in the case of FreeBSD ports collection), expecting to distribute widely system that requires rather large amount of effort to install and maintain will be strange. I believe that it's ok for developer to use installation disks, keep CVS, etc, but even average unix user has high chance to freak out after looking at sysinstall, "upgrade process", ports collection and other things that are supposed to be easy to use or (exclusive or) do The Right Thing, but in fact aren't easy (sysinstall init'ness and separate disk with shell) and don't do The Right Thing for user that wants to have clean upgrades and fixes but doesn't want to follow development continuously. When some newbie that just knows what unix looks like or even doesn't know that asks me, what system for x86 I can recommend, I just don't have better answer that Red Hat Linux. For knowledgeable programmer my answer will be will be "install Slackware Linux and then upgrade everything from Sunsite" (my Linux boxes are installed and maintained that way). The same answer for a complete marketdroid will be Solaris x86 because it's almost as good as both but cost and brand name are more attractive for that category of people. And only when I myself maintain the system or its user really likes to do things "FreeBSD way", Linux and FreeBSD have equal chances, and the decision depends on details of intended functionality. FreeBSD can't accept approach "customer is always right, whoever he is" (large degree of elitism is as much the base of it as BSD 4.4 is), at least at the MS' degree where customer is not only right, but even gets brainwashed into being right in the intended direction. Probably even Linux's degree will be too much for it (I believe that Linux never could be any close to its popularity if it didn't allow multiple distributions targeted to different kinds of users and applications), but currently FreeBSD definitely can do a lot to become more acceptable for other types of users than its own developers. -- Alex P.S. I intentionally placed MS, Sun and Linux close to each other to avoid being accused in demonstrating my likes and dislikes here instead of trying to make a point -- I don't think, anyone will dare to accuse me in liking MS.
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