Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 08:55:54 -0700 From: Rich Morin <rdm@cfcl.com> To: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Where's BSD in this picture? Message-ID: <p05001911b7400604dc8c@[192.168.168.205]> In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010602105353.04a1bd00@localhost> References: <200106011856.MAA22566@lariat.org> <200106011856.MAA22566@lariat.org> <4.3.2.7.2.20010602105353.04a1bd00@localhost>
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At 10:54 AM -0600 6/2/01, Brett Glass wrote: >And, alas, most often not activated. An interesting, if ill-defined conjecture. Do you meant that the Mac OS X software on most received machines is never activated or that it isn't activated as often as the Mac OS 9 software? I am pretty sure that the latter is correct; I'm not as sure about the former. I suspect that many users will at least "try out" Mac OS X, as long as it's on the hard drive. OTOH, if you're talking about explicit use of BSD, I suspect that most Mac OS users will leave the command line alone (as Apple quite clearly intends), but that any Linux or Unix aficionado is both able and quite likely to pull up a Terminal window and try things out a bit. Apple started out by being extremely reluctant to mention Unix in any of its public messages; they appeared to be afraid that its presence, however hidden, might scare away their mainstream users. In recent months, however, they have started talking about it on their web site, etc. They also decided to ship a Developer Tools CD with every boxed set of Mac OS X. This is pretty radical stuff. Meanwhile, they have been getting strong feedback from the early adopters, indicating that there is a contingent of "SciTech" users who are VERY interested in playing with the Unix side of Mac OS X. For this reason, Apple has been quite supportive of the efforts to make the FreeBSD Ports Collection run on Darwin and Mac OS X (see http://www.ptf.com/tdc for more information). >OS X has a ways to go yet before the average user >will want to run it. We have it running on a couple of machines. It seems to be stable, capable, and well-thought-out. It isn't perfect, of course (some things are slow; some UI features are not to my taste), but it's easily as good as any other new OS introduction I have seen in my 30 years in the field. Given that Apple isn't forcing anyone to use Mac OS X (yet :-), I see no real harm in their allowing folks to try it out while they work out these issues, get third-party packages on board, etc. By putting it on shipping systems, they make their direction clear to developers, possibly motivating some to move a little faster. >Note that Linux was mentioned explicitly but not the BSDs. Linux has more mindshare than the BSDs. This is not news. BSD is starting to get more mindshare, partly as a result of its inclusion in Mac OS X. This is news. Whether this will translate to any adoptions of FreeBSD is, of course, an open question. -r -- http://www.cfcl.com/rdm - home page, resume, etc. http://www.cfcl.com/Meta/md_fb.html - The FreeBSD Browser email: rdm@cfcl.com; phone: +1 650-873-7841 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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