Date: Sun, 9 May 1999 09:21:20 +0530 (IST) From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: osopinion article Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.05.9905090911060.390-100000@theory6.physics.iisc.ernet.in>
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http://www.osopinion.com/Opinions/GaneshCPrasad/GaneshCPrasad2.html An article titled "The practical manager's guide to linux". Exactly the kind of advocacy someone should write for FreeBSD. I sent the author, Ganesh Prasad, the mail appended below, and received the reply quoted below that. Then I got thinking: Why the heck am I doing this? Why, in particular, would I want to be part of a mailing list of people whose only purpose in life seems to be to badmouth another operating system? People who want to say ``linux users are dorks'' ten times for every time they say a single good thing about their *own* OS? I had no answers. So, I unsubscribe. But for those few who may be interested, here is my correspondence with Ganesh Prasad. -------------------------------------------------------------- My mail to Ganesh: Dear Ganesh, I read with interest your article "The Practical Manager's Guide to Linux", and being a heavy linux user, liked it very much even though it's not likely to be very useful to me, being from the academic world. But I was intrigued by this sentence which concludes the review of competing systems in the "performance" section: "With the new kernel (version 2.2), it has reportedly even drawn level with the ultrafast FreeBSD." Given that you conclude with this sentence, you evidently have a high opinion of FreeBSD, as I do too, having given it a spin for the last two or three months. The only other mention I find, again favourable, is in the "security" section. My feeling is that FreeBSD deserved a little more space. Apart from its being a very good OS, and very likely to appeal to anyone who is fond of unix, it also supports your argument that free software can be reliable: its customer list contains some real heavyweights, including hotmail whom you mention in connection with Apache. It also has many of the other advantages of linux, and some of its own. The difficult thing is to persuade people that free software is reliable, and FreeBSD can be a big help here: after that step is made, selling linux would be much easier. It is true that the FreeBSD community should do its own advocacy, but the linux world should also stop pretending that linux is the only reliable free OS. Linux people seem reluctant to say anything, good or bad, about FreeBSD. It may be because some of them feel insecure that FreeBSD is really the better system, but if you feel that linux 2.2 may have "drawn level", you shouldn't have that problem :-) As Red Hat's Bob Young says when people ask him whether he's worried about competing linux distributions, the competition is really with the mainstream OS's, and the pie is big enough for everyone. Linux's installed base is getting large, but the base of other OS's is many times larger still. I think there's plenty of room in the world for both linux and FreeBSD... Regards Rahul Siddharthan. Extract from reply from Ganesh: Thank you for your letter. I have never used FreeBSD, and have met only one person who has. Most of what I know about FreeBSD is what I read on the Internet, since it rarely appears in the print media. That is a real pity. I'm sure it is a very good OS, too. So the reason for my not giving FreeBSD more space in my article was plain ignorance. I'm sure that's why most Linux people are ambivalent towards it. I don't think it's insecurity. The feeling I get is that Linux advocates look on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and even Macintosh with sympathy rather than disdain, because we're all in a sense victims of Windows' popularity. I, for one, would not mind a world equally divided among all these operating systems (including Windows), provided they interoperated transparently. I object to a world with one dominant, non-free OS. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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