Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1999 16:38:13 -0500 From: Greg Lehey <grog@mojave.sitaranetworks.com> To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD at COMDEX Message-ID: <19991122163813.39441@mojave.sitaranetworks.com> In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.19991120090553.0463a200@localhost>; from Brett Glass on Sat, Nov 20, 1999 at 10:34:52AM -0700 References: <4.2.0.58.19991120090553.0463a200@localhost>
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On Saturday, 20 November 1999 at 10:34:52 -0700, Brett Glass wrote: > FreeBSD got a small, but not insignificant, amount of attention. Red Hat > CEO Robert Young even mentioned it in his keynote -- a pleasant surprise. Interesting. I wonder why. What did he say? > Two fellows from the NetBSD project, including Charles Hannum, were at a > booth elsewhere on the floor selling CDs. They didn't seem to be getting as > much interest or recognition as they deserved, alas. The timing of the show > was bad for the OpenBSD project, which is currently struggling like crazy > to close a bunch of open issues so that it can ship Version 2.6. Perhaps > this is why I saw no mention of OpenBSD on the show floor. I'd guess that the cost of the stand might also have deterred them. > I noted that Digi was displaying some new serial hardware in the Red > Hat booth, and asked them about BSD drivers. They said that they > didn't have them, but "why don't you just port them from Linux?" (I > tried to explain to them that the GPL, which is designed to > monkey-wrench exactly such activities, precluded this; alas, they > seemed not to understand the licensing issues. I plan to be in touch > with them about getting "raw" technical specs, as I need a driver > for a Digi 56K modem/channelized T1 board.) You would have been better off telling them that it's non-trivial to port. > The reps from Borland/Inprise -- whose booth was directly across from > Walnut Creek's -- told me that they now had a Linux command-line compiler > for Borland Pascal/Delphi. (This is a fantastic Pascal dialect which I'd > love to use for UNIX projects. The GPLed "Free Pascal" simply can't compete > in terms of code quality.) Unfortunately, despite the fact that recompiling > and relinking a command-line compiler for BSD is nearly trivial, their PR > people claimed that they weren't considering an implementation for FreeBSD. > (This sounds like a company that's ripe for a bit of advocacy; there is NO > reason why there should not be Delphi compilers for ALL of the BSDs.) On the other hand, this should run out of the box. Why ask them to do unnecessary work? > In general, the hardware vendors -- even more than the software vendors -- > seemed to wish that all of this UNIX stuff would just disappear and leave > them happily dependent upon Microsoft in a one-OS world. Sure, they have more to gain from a single market. > Another disturbing trend was that many of the embedded systems > vendors seemed to be going with NT and failing to acknowledge its > continued lack of fitness for mission critical applications. Don't worry about them, they'll go away (broke) or they'll change to something more suitable. > One vendor which had built a PBX around NT admitted, under duress, > that to keep their system even semi-reliable they had to threaten to > void the warranty if ANY other application was installed on the > system. (I asked them whether they were concerned about the system > blue-screening due to network activity, and told them so. The vendor > seemed not to fathom the notion that NT could be crashed via a > network. Duh.) That wasn't the vendor, it was the poor guy who pulled the short straw when they were deciding who to send to the convention. Greg -- Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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