Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 12:31:49 -0700 From: Danny MacMillan <flowers@users.sourceforge.net> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> Cc: Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com> Subject: Re: GPL vs BSD Licence Message-ID: <20041102193149.GA1134@procyon.nekulturny.org> In-Reply-To: <1099388317.4187559d1d4fe@imp2-q.free.fr> References: <LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNKEJJEPAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com> <1099388317.4187559d1d4fe@imp2-q.free.fr>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Tue, Nov 02, 2004 at 02:38:37AM -0700, Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > Quoting Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com>: > > > It's like saying most people who listen to Schoenberg come from the > > > rock world rather than the classical music world, because there are so > > > many more rock music listeners than classical music listeners. > > > > Well, perhaps it is, but as a matter of fact, most classical music > > listeners DO come from rock music listeners, didn't you know that? > > I doubt anyone jumps from Metallica to Schoenberg. They may go to other, > more accessible forms of classical music and gravitate from there. > Similarly I doubt many people jump from Windows to FreeBSD, without > some exposure to other forms of Unix (not necessarily Linux but these days > that's the most likely candidate, and I'm not ignoring Mac OS X: most > Mac OS X users I've met were either already familiar with Unix or hadn't > bothered to learn anything about its Unix roots.) > > (That's an analogy, not exact. I don't like Schoenberg and twelve-tone > music > myself, though I do like a lot of other "modern" 20th-century composers.) > > I think there's absolutely no question, except among hardened FreeBSD > oldtimers who haven't seen the real world in years, that Linux offers a > much lower entry barrier to users who've forgotten what a command line is, > even in its crude MSDOS form. You are making a characterization that does not apply to all Windows users. It probably applies to most Windows users, but the pool of Windows users is so large that the remaining population, that set of Windows users who haven't forgotten what a command line is, can also be (and in my experience is) quite large. Submitted for your approval: myself. I started with C-64, TRS-80, Apple II, MS-DOS, Novell DOS, OS/2, and Windows roots (guess my age :) I installed Linux before I installed FreeBSD -- in fact, I installed every distro I could get my hands on, as well as OpenBSD and FreeBSD, in a period of intensive experimentation about 3 years ago. At the time I didn't understand anything about the difference between Linux and *BSD. In fact, I understood very little about Unix, my sole experience being a brief and superficial exposure to some flavour at school. Everything was confusing to me. The amount of reading and research I had to do to figure out how to do =anything= was staggering. But in this period where everything was difficult and confusing, FreeBSD was slightly less difficult and slightly less confusing. As I became able to see the forest instead of just trees, I found FreeBSD has much to recommend it from a technical merit point of view and the design decisions to fall nicely in line with my own intuitive preferences. Linux is certainly more well known than FreeBSD. I didn't know FreeBSD existed when I started; I set out to learn Linux. To a Windows user, though, Linux is no easier to learn than FreeBSD (and is harder to learn in my opinion). I'm not a typical Windows user -- but typical Windows users 1) don't care what their operating sytstem is 2) don't know what an operating system is, and 3) will use any operating system you want, so long as it's Windows. When testing operating systems, I installed Linux before I installed FreeBSD -- but I could hardly be said to have "come from Linux". I know less about Linux than FreeBSD, and in fact of all the operating systems I've ever used, Linux is the one I've used the least. I actually have no idea which is more common, for users to come to FreeBSD from Windows or from Linux. I don't think there's any way to know without doing a survey. Just consider this one entry in the "from Windows" box. -- Danny
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20041102193149.GA1134>