Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Fri, 10 Apr 1998 15:03:31 -0400
From:      Mark Mayo <mark@vmunix.com>
To:        kris@airnet.net, David Shanes <dshanes@personalogic.com>
Cc:        chat@FreeBSD.ORG, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Fw: Your Article "Freeware: The Heart & Soul of the Internet"
Message-ID:  <19980410150331.16376@vmunix.com>
In-Reply-To: <352E61A7.570D84C@ninbox.ml.org>; from Kris Kirby on Fri, Apr 10, 1998 at 01:15:03PM -0500
References:  <007501bd64a4$85095f40$1d43a8c0@shanes.personalogic.com> <352E61A7.570D84C@ninbox.ml.org>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Fri, Apr 10, 1998 at 01:15:03PM -0500, Kris Kirby wrote:
> Redirected to -chat:
> 
> David Shanes wrote:
> > 
> >         3. At school (SDSU), the professor that runs the CS networks just
> > switched most of the department's teaching computers from Solaris to
> > FreeBSD. Solaris said that they would release the source code to the school
> > for classes like "Advanced Operating Systems" and "Writing Device Drivers",
> > but they didn't - so they lost out. If we have CS majors using it in
> > college - how can we get them to carry FreeBSD out in to the "real world"
> > after graduation?
> > 
> > My two cents....
> 
> Give them FreeBSD CDs when they graduate. (Here's my diploma and my
> CD...)

<---WARNING: Long winded email follows, but there's a good "Kill Linux"
argument presented at the end for those of you who's perfer to skip
right to the good stuff. ;-) --->

I'd say just getting them to use it is good enough. :-)

Here at the University of Guelph, thanks to the generosity of Walnut
Creek, we've slowly replaced Linux with FreeBSD on about 65% of the CS
department's PCs. In between semesters in a couple weeks, a good portion
of the remaining PCs will get an upgrade to FreeBSD. Just yesterday, a
friend of mine came up to me and said "Wow, I can't believe how much
nicer FreeBSD is to program with! The man pages are better, and things work
like they're supposed to. You were right, Linux *is* the DOS of the UNIX
world.".  :-)  Ahh, makes me all warm and tingly inside. :-)

Just getting FreeBSD into CS departments world-wide is enough - FreeBSD
will wow them all by itself once students play with it.

What was needed to make the switch? Evangelism. Plain and simple. It took
literally years of me prodding and poking and continuously singing the
virtues of FreeBSD before enough faculty were impressed to "overthrow"
the 2 Linux die-hards.. That and the fact that the Linux NIS/NFS lab for
3rd years degraded into a piece of crap and was nearly non-usable. :-)


For those interested, the arguments that worked best for me (note that
this is for getting CS departments to embrace FreeBSD) :

1. Pedigree. History. FreeBSD is the product of the CSRG at Berkeley.
   Its roots are in academia, and we should be continuing that tradition.

2. Documentation. The Design and Implementation of 4.4BSD book. The ORA
   BSD document set (PSD, USD, etc.). The literally hundreds of USENIX
   and IEEE research papers presented on BSD related design, etc..
   Superior man pages for system calls. It's hard for a pedagogically
   oriented prof to argue when you slap about 5000 pages of BSD docs
   on his desk and demand that he produce the same for Linux.

   The 2 arguemnts above all come down to "FreeBSD is a better environment
   for students since they can learn more about Computer Science.
   The background books are there, the papers are there, the history is
   there. FreeBSD came out of academia, and it's simply a more appropriate
   environment for the academic setting. If a student wants to know "why",
   chances are good that he can find out. Compare this environment with
   the willy-nilly hacker sytle of Linux.

3. Technical issues. NFS was written on BSD. The Athena project. Departments
   all over the world have used BSD in the past because is was designed
   with their labs, classrooms, and so on in mind. NFS in Linux sucks the
   willy. You're going to have problems with NFS and Linux in a large
   environment like a typical CS department.  Fill in the blank here, we all
   know umpteen reasons why FreeBSD outperforms, outshines, or outwhatvers
   Linux. Wait for Linux labs to break, and rub it in their face. As
   mentioned previously, nice guys finish last in marketig - without
   exception.

<-- Here's the Linux=Enemey arguement you're been waiting for --->

An aside on the Linux attack. Personaly, I don't have a vendetta against
Linux. I think it's a decent little workstation OS. The reality, however,
of nearly every CS department I see, is that they are under HUGE pressure
to start providing Microsoft environments alongside their UNIX environments.
At the University of Waterloo, University of Toronto, and the wee little
University of Guelph here in Soutern Ontario, this means NT. The side
effect of this is, due purely to economic and time issues, CS departments
are picking *ONE* Unix environment. PCs are perfect. Dual boot them with
NT and Linux, and you've got the best of both worlds.  2 simple systems
for you admins to maintain, and you can market your program as providing
students qualified in Windows and UNIX.

So, we're competing to be the UNIX environemnt. Linux is winning the war.
We're not competing with NT on this front - NT is becoming a given. We're
competing directly with Linux, almost without exception.
For this reason, like it or not, I see Linux as just as much of an enemy
as Microsoft when it comes to promoting FreeBSD. On the global scale,
hell yeah, I'll take Linux over NT any day, but this isn't the important
battle on the academic front.

My $.02 (sure to be controversial),

-Mark



> -- 
> 
> Kris Kirby <kris@airnet.net>
> -------------------------------------------
> TGIFreeBSD... 'Nuff said.
> 

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Mark Mayo		  				mark@vmunix.com       
 RingZero Comp.  	  		    http://www.vmunix.com/mark 

	 finger mark@vmunix.com for my PGP key and GCS code
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 "The problem is how do you build tools that understand your programs
  at a deeper semantic level." - James Gosling

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19980410150331.16376>