Date: Wed, 18 Jun 1997 10:53:54 +0100 From: Robin Melville <robmel@innotts.co.uk> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>, joelh@gnu.ai.mit.edu Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: To UNIX or not to UNIX ;-). Was: PPP problems. Message-ID: <l03010d00afcd55ee2175@[194.176.130.28]> In-Reply-To: <8841.866419524@time.cdrom.com> References: Your message of "Sun, 15 Jun 1997 19:21:13 EDT." <199706152321.TAA14966@ethanol.gnu.ai.mit.edu>
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At Sun, 15 Jun 1997 19:21:13 -0400 Joel wrote: >Let's look at a profile of J. Random Luser and his interface >requirements in the modern OS world, shall we? >... [* and so on *] At 1:05 am +0100 16/6/97, Jordan K. Hubbard replied: >...What stops FreeBSD from being the next NeXTStep is not a crisis of >ideas, it's a crisis of coders. Somebody needs to *build* the better >mousetrap before people will come... I'm a little puzzled by the whole thrust of this one. The thesis seems to be that FreeBSD should challenge Windows & the Mac as a desktop system for all. The fate of NeXT, for example, and the market position of Sun and SGI, should really concentrate minds on this issue more than it seems to be doing. These commercial systems have/had teams of *paid* developers maintaining their OS's. Software companies employ teams of *paid* programmers to develop commercial quality apps for them. Despite this, NeXT was never a serious challenger for even Apple; Sun & SGI occupy niche markets and don't compete head-to-head for J Random (L)user's ComputersRus bucks. Gates is busily out-investing everyone else on his horizon with the intention of getting the whole desktop market. FreeBSD and Linux are something else *entirely*. It may be a bit of a cheek to say this to you guys, but you'd have to be bonkers to try to compete with M$ in this way. What does FreeBSD consist of, and what do your many fans do with it? Who would seriously plan to use FreeBSD as an alternative to Win95/Office97 or MacOS for wordprocessing, spreadsheets, DTP/origination, and all the other tedious office-style work. These commercial products might be bloated, unstable, and crappy in all sorts of ways but in terms of their feature list and useability they're way ahead of anything available for FreeBSD or Unix. The very best stuff that's available for FreeBSD users are the back-end server things and the development tools, and these are excellent. Not only because it allows top-class IT for small, poor organisations like mine for example (and half of Eastern Europe by the looks of it), but because it's democratic and open in a way that would give Microsoft nightmares. For these reasons FreeBSD will carry the unix flag long after HP/UX, IRIX, SCO et al have been killed off by NT. I'm all in favour of easier configuration tools and everything else that people spend their hard-earned time doing. But let's not pretend that an X office suite is going to be the sofware of choice for the multitude. In fact, the whole idea that 2million people would be mailing questions@freebsd.org to ask how to plug in their modem, etc. should be good enough reason for pausing for thought. Best regards, Robin. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Robin Melville, Addiction Information Services Nottingham Alcohol & Drug Team Tel: +44 (0)115 952 9478 Fax: +44 (0)115 952 9421 work: robmel@nadt.org.uk home: robmel@innotts.co.uk Pages: http://www.innotts.co.uk/~robmel (home page) http://www.innotts.co.uk/nadt (substance misuse pages) ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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