Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1998 15:03:31 -0400 From: Mark Mayo <mark@vmunix.com> To: kris@airnet.net, David Shanes <dshanes@personalogic.com> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Fw: Your Article "Freeware: The Heart & Soul of the Internet" Message-ID: <19980410150331.16376@vmunix.com> In-Reply-To: <352E61A7.570D84C@ninbox.ml.org>; from Kris Kirby on Fri, Apr 10, 1998 at 01:15:03PM -0500 References: <007501bd64a4$85095f40$1d43a8c0@shanes.personalogic.com> <352E61A7.570D84C@ninbox.ml.org>
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On Fri, Apr 10, 1998 at 01:15:03PM -0500, Kris Kirby wrote: > Redirected to -chat: > > David Shanes wrote: > > > > 3. At school (SDSU), the professor that runs the CS networks just > > switched most of the department's teaching computers from Solaris to > > FreeBSD. Solaris said that they would release the source code to the school > > for classes like "Advanced Operating Systems" and "Writing Device Drivers", > > but they didn't - so they lost out. If we have CS majors using it in > > college - how can we get them to carry FreeBSD out in to the "real world" > > after graduation? > > > > My two cents.... > > Give them FreeBSD CDs when they graduate. (Here's my diploma and my > CD...) <---WARNING: Long winded email follows, but there's a good "Kill Linux" argument presented at the end for those of you who's perfer to skip right to the good stuff. ;-) ---> I'd say just getting them to use it is good enough. :-) Here at the University of Guelph, thanks to the generosity of Walnut Creek, we've slowly replaced Linux with FreeBSD on about 65% of the CS department's PCs. In between semesters in a couple weeks, a good portion of the remaining PCs will get an upgrade to FreeBSD. Just yesterday, a friend of mine came up to me and said "Wow, I can't believe how much nicer FreeBSD is to program with! The man pages are better, and things work like they're supposed to. You were right, Linux *is* the DOS of the UNIX world.". :-) Ahh, makes me all warm and tingly inside. :-) Just getting FreeBSD into CS departments world-wide is enough - FreeBSD will wow them all by itself once students play with it. What was needed to make the switch? Evangelism. Plain and simple. It took literally years of me prodding and poking and continuously singing the virtues of FreeBSD before enough faculty were impressed to "overthrow" the 2 Linux die-hards.. That and the fact that the Linux NIS/NFS lab for 3rd years degraded into a piece of crap and was nearly non-usable. :-) For those interested, the arguments that worked best for me (note that this is for getting CS departments to embrace FreeBSD) : 1. Pedigree. History. FreeBSD is the product of the CSRG at Berkeley. Its roots are in academia, and we should be continuing that tradition. 2. Documentation. The Design and Implementation of 4.4BSD book. The ORA BSD document set (PSD, USD, etc.). The literally hundreds of USENIX and IEEE research papers presented on BSD related design, etc.. Superior man pages for system calls. It's hard for a pedagogically oriented prof to argue when you slap about 5000 pages of BSD docs on his desk and demand that he produce the same for Linux. The 2 arguemnts above all come down to "FreeBSD is a better environment for students since they can learn more about Computer Science. The background books are there, the papers are there, the history is there. FreeBSD came out of academia, and it's simply a more appropriate environment for the academic setting. If a student wants to know "why", chances are good that he can find out. Compare this environment with the willy-nilly hacker sytle of Linux. 3. Technical issues. NFS was written on BSD. The Athena project. Departments all over the world have used BSD in the past because is was designed with their labs, classrooms, and so on in mind. NFS in Linux sucks the willy. You're going to have problems with NFS and Linux in a large environment like a typical CS department. Fill in the blank here, we all know umpteen reasons why FreeBSD outperforms, outshines, or outwhatvers Linux. Wait for Linux labs to break, and rub it in their face. As mentioned previously, nice guys finish last in marketig - without exception. <-- Here's the Linux=Enemey arguement you're been waiting for ---> An aside on the Linux attack. Personaly, I don't have a vendetta against Linux. I think it's a decent little workstation OS. The reality, however, of nearly every CS department I see, is that they are under HUGE pressure to start providing Microsoft environments alongside their UNIX environments. At the University of Waterloo, University of Toronto, and the wee little University of Guelph here in Soutern Ontario, this means NT. The side effect of this is, due purely to economic and time issues, CS departments are picking *ONE* Unix environment. PCs are perfect. Dual boot them with NT and Linux, and you've got the best of both worlds. 2 simple systems for you admins to maintain, and you can market your program as providing students qualified in Windows and UNIX. So, we're competing to be the UNIX environemnt. Linux is winning the war. We're not competing with NT on this front - NT is becoming a given. We're competing directly with Linux, almost without exception. For this reason, like it or not, I see Linux as just as much of an enemy as Microsoft when it comes to promoting FreeBSD. On the global scale, hell yeah, I'll take Linux over NT any day, but this isn't the important battle on the academic front. My $.02 (sure to be controversial), -Mark > -- > > Kris Kirby <kris@airnet.net> > ------------------------------------------- > TGIFreeBSD... 'Nuff said. > -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Mayo mark@vmunix.com RingZero Comp. http://www.vmunix.com/mark finger mark@vmunix.com for my PGP key and GCS code ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The problem is how do you build tools that understand your programs at a deeper semantic level." - James Gosling To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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