Date: Wed, 01 Sep 1999 17:33:59 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Sorry, I just couldn't let this go by... Message-ID: <12874.936232439@localhost> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 01 Sep 1999 16:43:10 MDT." <4.2.0.58.19990901152642.047b0250@localhost>
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> > Is the notoriously well clued-in > > Gartner Group's (NOT) claim that Linux is the only non-Microsoft OS > > to gain marketshare any more credible? > > Yes. They're paid big bucks and are in a fiercely competitive market > where customers demand accuracy. Haha. You have a lot more trust in people who are paid big bucks than I do, clearly, and also are assuming that their results aren't simply OLD at this point. When was that report generated? What figures were the person or persons generating the report using at the time? It's quite possible for highly skilled, well-paid people to make mistakes even with the best of intentions or we wouldn't have lost a shuttle and the U.S. government would operate like a swiss watch (one could correctly deem international politics to be "fiercely competetive" and the US government is certainly paid some of the biggest bucks of all). And no, this isn't simply a straw-man argument, this is a direct refutation of your claim that being in a competetive market and being paid big bucks is some sort of instant ticket to Objective Truth(tm). > No. The installed base appears to be growing, slowly. But an increase > in numbers does not necessarily indicate an increase in market share. Slowly? I don't see where you get that impression and, again, I don't think you're even bothering to try and look for data beyond what's already been chewed up and regurgitated by the likes of the Gartner Group. David asked for numbers and so far all you've given us is somebody's canned report and a single URL from the notoriously inaccurate "queso" stats (and for more info on why I think it's inaccurate, do a slashdot search for "queso" and read up on the flames). That's not citing stats, that's looking for one or two numbers which fit your agenda and then stopping there. It's poor science and it's a poor argument. > Even David G., whose projections of FreeBSD's growth seem to me to be > overly optimistic, admits that the gap between Linux and FreeBSD > is growing. On April 15th of this year, he wrote: Now here's an issue we can actually agree on. OF COURSE there's a growing "gap" between the Linux and FreeBSD camps - I've pointed out many times that it's definitely the Linux people who are currently enjoying their 15 minutes of fame and given that they're in the spotlight, only a fool would suggest that they're going to get the most hit points right now. That "gap", however, is not the issue. The issue is whether or not we are growing TOO and growing fast enough to satisfy any reasonable requirements for forward momentum. We are doing all of that and more, and I don't see what purpose would be served by trying to do a "Michael Jackson", only to become rapidly overwhelmed by an influx of screaming fans (though ours scream for different and less pleasant reasons) and resulting in us seeing core and all our principal developers retiring to various fenced retreats with only monkeys and small children for company. Sometimes it's possible to grow TOO fast, and let me just remind you that where "Linux" gets to spread the load across a whole bunch of different distributions and literally thousands of developers, many of whom are paid for their full-time work by the likes of Red Hat, Caldera, SUSE and TurboLinux, we have only one FreeBSD and one group of people to hold the line. The NetBSD and OpenBSD groups, as competent as they are, don't have the numbers to share that load to any significant degree and so it's just us. That's the "downside" to having only one distribution and I think it's a reasonable price to pay for not having our development and our user base splintered across the same number of distributions that Linux is seeing today. They might get a lot more load-sharing out of it, but at a very high price. You can't always have your cake and eat it too, Brett, that's just the facts of life. If we can continue to grow at a *reasonable* pace and continue to attract good developers, we can have the best of both worlds in that we'll be creating the kind of product we WANT to create and getting considerable user buy-in for it. Will we achieve world domination and push Linux out of the position it's in? Quite likely not, and I'm not even sure that market dominance is even all it's cracked up to be. Let me turn the question around: Since you're clearly so fired up by numbers and nose-counting, why aren't you part of the Linux community now? They're clearly where it's at by every metric you hold dear in the arguments you've been making, so why stick around here? Just for the purposes of argument, let's also say that it WAS my intention to take on Linux in a head-on fight, along with Microsoft and Solaris since a competitor is a competitor, after all, and we can't afford to ignore Russia while we're attacking England. What do you seriously think that would take? I'll tell you what it would take, it would take an entire BATALLION of Brett Glasses and (one hopes) a few armies worth of developers in the background to produce something even worth evangelising about. You can't really be so egotistical as to asssume that you, single-handedly (or even you and 50 other guys with a few million dollars worth of capital), can compete with Red Hat and its 2 billion dollar war market cap? And that's just ONE of groups you'd have to defeat to push Linux from its perch. The folks at SUSE and TurboLinux might not be Red Hat but they have their own millions, and I can assure you that they wouldn't take any serious attempt to unseat them lying down. Yet still you come here with your little war plans and your pointy stick and tell us that we can all charge the enemy's line of assembled M1 tanks if we're all just pure of heart and make sure to smear the magic chicken blood on our chests which wards off bullets. Uh huh. Go for it, Brett, and we'll all be behind you in the follow-up attack, I promise. :-) I think we're doing very well right now and I would personally HATE to see us attempt to grow so fast that we leave all of our traditional goals behind and instead start doing what marketing tells us we should be doing, the first thing probably being to drop all of our ideas about being a robust solution and instead do 14 releases a year, each one with a big PR blitz behind it and some fancy packaging to make up for the fact that the bits are actually rushed-out crapola. And oh yeah, we should also name it to "FreeLinux" and drop that whole BSD kernel thing since OBVIOUSLY it's Linux which has the mindshare and we should all tap into that immediately. Hell, they'd probably even be RIGHT to suggest such things on a purely objective basis, but then we wouldn't be FreeBSD anymore either and what would honestly be the point? I'm still waiting for some concrete proposals from you which explain just how exactly we're going to compete with Linux where it's currently strongest without compromising our own principles for being the technically sound, well thought-out solution. I imagine that BMW went through a similar soul-searching crisis in the 60's, when a little automotive upstart called Volkswagon started stamping out beetle-shaped cars in huge quantities. I'm even sure that some marketing execs probably came to them with the best of intentions at some point and said "stop focusing on producing a really nice luxury automobile, get some sheet metal in here and stamp out something to compete with VW! There's no clearly future in producing an expensive, high-quality car - just look at their sales figures!" You claim that you're here to identify and solve problems but, like those hypothetical execs, I think you're also far too myopically focused on the Brett Glass Method of marketing and have lost your own ability to see the forest for the trees. Of course, every time someone refuses to toe the Brett Glass party line, you cannot tolerate the faintest rumblings of dissent and do your best to shoot the messenger. Does that sound familar, by any chance? :-) - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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