Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1998 18:26:31 -0600 From: Wes Peters <wpeters@xylan.com> To: esr@thyrsus.com Cc: "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@narnia.plutotech.com>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Open Source Products Message-ID: <3532AD36.2968F8B6@xylan.com> References: <199804131719.LAA21122@narnia.plutotech.com> <35326353.4E30451B@xylan.com> <19980413201541.65522@snark.thyrsus.com>
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Eric S. Raymond wrote: > A 4 mil run rate is enough to at least keep VCs from laughing at us. > So I'll happily carry whatever product this is, despite my personal > belief that all of the the BSD variants are basically doomed to be eaten > by the giant expanding blob that is Linux. > > (Can anyone convince me I'm wrong? Don't bother getting indignant at > me because I'm not at all happy about believing it. And don't bother > trying to convince me that BSD is in many ways technically superior to > Linux, because (a) I believe you, and (b) it doesn't matter. I think I > saw "Mene, mene, tekel, uparshin" on your wall when you guys failed to > outgrow Linux 0.99 back in 1994. But if anyone can spin a plausible > scenario under which the BSDs survive the next three years, I'd really > love to hear it.) I've had this discussion recently with my brother, who is now a Linux convert because they support PowerPC architecture, and he has boxes full of these machines lying around at work -- he works in the AIX support group at Moto. I can think of a couple of scenarios that may contribute to the ongoing success of *BSD. One is the number of "embedded" wins it is getting. This is an area that Linux doesn't seem to be flourishing much, probably because (IMHO) embedded programmers are more educated and less likely to have grown up on PCs. Another scenario has to do with the success of FreeBSD in network intensive applications, such as ISPs and web servers. It is now generally acknowleged that Linux does pretty well in this arena, but in the headspace of a number of these companies, FreeBSD in particular is still better. When W. Richard Stevens writes a chapter in a book about a feature you have and Linux doesn't, it's not going to hurt your standing with educated network software engineers. ;^) A third scenario that is less likely but would still help would be convergence of the disparate groups back into one organization. It's really too bad we have to have three web sites, three ftp server organizations, three differing (and more or less successful) CD-ROM programs, etc., for what are very similar products. I know all about the differences in the FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD organizations, and the differences in their research thrusts, but it still doesn't matter. If you slapped a common name on all three, they'd still be much more similar than any two Linux distributions. Which leads me into my last point: At some time, once Linux starts getting really entrenched in a couple of highly visible businesses, somebody's going to hit a snag running a TurboLinux application on a RedHat server or some such silly bunch of rot, and they're going to tell some hare-brained "journalist" about it, and the PC rags are going to have a heyday. "See, we told you this Linux stuff was for the birds, trust Microsoft. Their products are perfect, and their dedicated support staff will take care of you." Let's face it, Walnut Creek's FTP server and Yahoo's server banks, both run on FreeBSD, comprise two of the largest server installations on the Internet. As long as we have an educated market of administrators and programmers who don't like downtime, FreeBSD (and NetBSD and OpenBSD) will have a home. If you don't believe me, just ask Justin. ;^) -- Wes Peters Who's going to save you Principal Engineer When you're a slave to Xylan Corporation A diamond as big as the Ritz wpeters@xylan.com -- Jimmy Buffett To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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