Date: Sat, 20 Nov 1999 10:34:52 -0700 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: FreeBSD at COMDEX Message-ID: <4.2.0.58.19991120090553.0463a200@localhost>
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Just got back from COMDEX, where the response to FreeBSD was very, very
different compared to previous years. Here are some random observations:
With few exceptions, all of the open source UNIX products and companies
were relegated to a separate, "co-located" show: Linux Business Expo, in
the Hilton. This had both good and bad effects. On the plus side, it gave
open source a separate forum in which to strut its stuff (albeit with the
Linux name hung on it). On the minus side, it segregated virtually all of
the open source activity away from the mainstream. (Except for Linus, all
of the keynote speakers for the Linux show were on a separate track and in
smaller venues.) Companies which exhibited only in the Hilton didn't get as
much attention as they would have on the main floor -- even if they had
been crammed into one of the tiny "sheep stalls" which Microsoft uses to
make ISVs seem small and insignificant. And those which had the financial
wherewithal to exhibit in both places seemed unwilling to mention their
open source activities on the main floor, where it was "Windows, Windows,
Windows" all the way.
FreeBSD got a small, but not insignificant, amount of attention. Red Hat
CEO Robert Young even mentioned it in his keynote -- a pleasant surprise.
Walnut Creek had a daemon "hostess" in the booth for the first time. ("You
mean they haven't ALWAYS had one?" asked my wife, who was surprised that it
hadn't been done before -- especially in Vegas. I suggested that a chorus
line of female daemons -- remember the "Devil Girls" in Schmidt and Jones'
classic musical "Celebration?" -- might be even more Vegas-like.)
Two fellows from the NetBSD project, including Charles Hannum, were at a
booth elsewhere on the floor selling CDs. They didn't seem to be getting as
much interest or recognition as they deserved, alas. The timing of the show
was bad for the OpenBSD project, which is currently struggling like crazy
to close a bunch of open issues so that it can ship Version 2.6. Perhaps
this is why I saw no mention of OpenBSD on the show floor.
I noted that Digi was displaying some new serial hardware in the Red Hat
booth, and asked them about BSD drivers. They said that they didn't have
them, but "why don't you just port them from Linux?" (I tried to explain to
them that the GPL, which is designed to monkey-wrench exactly such
activities, precluded this; alas, they seemed not to understand the
licensing issues. I plan to be in touch with them about getting "raw"
technical specs, as I need a driver for a Digi 56K modem/channelized T1 board.)
The reps from Borland/Inprise -- whose booth was directly across from
Walnut Creek's -- told me that they now had a Linux command-line compiler
for Borland Pascal/Delphi. (This is a fantastic Pascal dialect which I'd
love to use for UNIX projects. The GPLed "Free Pascal" simply can't compete
in terms of code quality.) Unfortunately, despite the fact that recompiling
and relinking a command-line compiler for BSD is nearly trivial, their PR
people claimed that they weren't considering an implementation for FreeBSD.
(This sounds like a company that's ripe for a bit of advocacy; there is NO
reason why there should not be Delphi compilers for ALL of the BSDs.)
Hardware and software vendors on the main floors of COMDEX were, alas,
focusing on Windows and NT. Few had driver support for any non-Microsoft
operating system, and they seemed to be annoyed by the question -- as if
they'd been asked quite a few times and didn't have a good answer. (Others
denied ever having been asked for drivers for ANY other OS -- even Linux --
even though it's highly unlikely that this would be true.) I noted that the
inkjet printer manufacturers were especially adamant about calling their
printers "Windows printers," and claiming that it was impossible to run
them from any other OS. Laptop vendors, when asked if their modems were
"WinModems" (which I often call "lobotomodems" because they lack sufficient
intelligence to work without MAJOR help from the host CPU), often couldn't
provide an answer.
In general, the hardware vendors -- even more than the software vendors --
seemed to wish that all of this UNIX stuff would just disappear and leave
them happily dependent upon Microsoft in a one-OS world.
The most extreme case of this of this phenomenon occurred when we wandered
into the booth of a robotics vendor called Robix. We are working on a
project for a client which will involve some robotics, and thought at first
that this vendor's toolkit -- which contained a computer interface and
enough servos and parts to build a complex manipulator -- might be just the
thing. But when we inquired, we discovered that the included software,
which ran the interface, was specific to -- you guessed it! -- Windows.
Since "rolling your own" is the essence of robotics, we politely asked if
we could obtain some sample code so we could adapt it to run under UNIX --
or, if not, the specifications for the interface so we could write
something ourselves. We even offered to share the code we developed.
But instead of welcoming our interest, the owner of the company snapped in
response: "We had enough trouble developing this for Windows, and we're not
going to go through the sweat and tears to rewrite it for something else!
Go away!" He scowled, turned his back and refused to talk to us further.
Our remark must have touched a nerve that had already been frayed by
previous encounters at the show, and it was rather sad. We literally had
our checkbook ready, but this one fellow was willing to throw away $500 of
on-the-spot business (and that would just have been the initial order!) to
avoid so much as thinking about supporting an alternative OS.
Another disturbing trend was that many of the embedded systems vendors
seemed to be going with NT and failing to acknowledge its continued lack of
fitness for mission critical applications. One vendor which had built a PBX
around NT admitted, under duress, that to keep their system even
semi-reliable they had to threaten to void the warranty if ANY other
application was installed on the system. (I asked them whether they were
concerned about the system blue-screening due to network activity, and told
them so. The vendor seemed not to fathom the notion that NT could be
crashed via a network. Duh.) Other companies had tape libraries and similar
systems -- many of them likely to be mission-critical -- attached to NT
boxes. Scary.
About the only exception I could find to this trend (at least on the main
floor) was Maxtor. The company's MaxAttach dedicated file servers (a
product line which they acquired when they bought Creative Design
Solutions) have FreeBSD inside, and they're very proud of that. (They don't
use Samba for SMB support; instead, they've written their own SMB server
which seems fairly impressive. I didn't get all of the technical details,
but their rep suggested that they may be doing some things in kernel space
to increase performance.) Maxtor believes that FreeBSD will make their
servers far more stable and reliable under load than Linux-based solutions
such as the Cobalt RAQ.
All in all, it seems to me that FreeBSD, and BSD UNIX in general, need a
LOT more promoting and a lot more vendor support -- on the main floor, not
just in the Linux "ghetto." My personal approach, were I Walnut Creek,
would have been to go for a booth on the main floor at the Sands and share
a smaller booth with the NetBSD folks in the Linux pavilion. It's important
that FreeBSD not preach only to the converted. It should not be seen as a
"niche within a niche," but rather as moving toward the mainstream.
--Brett Glass
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