Date: Fri, 02 Oct 1998 20:29:21 -0600 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: dmorrisn <dmorrisn@u.washington.edu> Cc: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com>, "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>, James Love <love@cptech.org>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Device Drivers for Linux and Intel's annoucement Message-ID: <4.1.19981002202119.040f7c30@mail.lariat.org> In-Reply-To: <36158AD6.811BD16E@u.washington.edu> References: <23307.907176696@time.cdrom.com> <4.1.19981002190913.040f3b60@mail.lariat.org>
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At 07:24 PM 10/2/98 -0700, dmorrisn wrote: >> History has proven exactly the opposite. The introduction of Windows >> application support in OS/2 actually accelerated its demise. If FreeBSD >> starts billing itself as "a better Linux than Linux" it will fall into >> precisely the same trap and will never catch up. > >That is a rhetorical fallacy. (Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc -- "After >this therefore because of this") No fallacy at all. It's been proven again and again that emulating another OS that's more popular provides the ultimate disincentive to developers. OS/2 is only one recent case in point. Look at it from the developer's point of view. Why EVER develop a native FreeBSD version of any product if one can just do a Linux version? So, FreeBSD's name never appears on the box. Tech support for commercial products is unavailable when they run under FreeBSD, while they're well supported under Linux. Linux gets the mindshare and FreeBSD becomes known as an unsupported also-ran. I watched this happen with OS/2. I couldn't even get support for WINDOWS apps running under OS/2, much less get native versions that were any good. >The reason OS/2 died was because IBM and Microsoft couldn't get along. >That's why Microsoft cut them off. The Linux camp doesn't exactly get along with FreeBSD either. They trash it constantly. --Brett To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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