Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 00:22:50 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: <maggie_biggs@infoworld.com> Cc: "FreeBSD Advocacy" <freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org> Subject: Your Chasing Linux article dated August 9th Message-ID: <000601c24751$399e6480$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
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Hi Maggie, Thanks for the FreeBSD exposure on: http://www.infoworld.com/articles/fe/xml/02/08/12/020812fefreebsd.xml I would like to comment on some of your statements a bit, and as I've published a book on FreeBSD I think I know just a little about it: >inability to draw on the wealth of commercial and open-source >applications available for Linux FreeBSD is not a commercial operating system. Linux is a pseudo-commercial operating system regardless of what it's proponents may say. Understand, my use of the term "commercial" means a product that is sold for money, it does not mean the ability or inability to be used as a base for production systems in business. Because Linux is pseudo-commercial, sales figures are very important to many players. Thus, much attention is given to the number of installed seats, sales, preloads, commercial apps ported to it etc. This is no different than Solaris, MacOS X, Windows, etc. FreeBSD isn't like that, most people using it and developing it don't care that much about how many people use it, as long as a critical mass of people are using it, and FreeBSD installs have long ago gone past that point. (of course, all this ignores FreeBSD embedded systems sales, which there is not good figures for, as most embedded systems vendors don't advertise when they are using FreeBSD. Besides, embedded FreeBSD versions are modified and may not be following the current FreeBSD release tree anyway)) So, you are in effect making an apples-to-oranges comparison. It is like comparing how much money Microsoft makes every year to how much money the United Way makes every year. This kind of comparison really doesen't have a lot of validity. If a business would rather use Linux than FreeBSD because Linux has more seats installed, that is perfectly fine to most members of the FreeBSD project. They are not in a "race" with Linux, and your article title of "Chasing Linux" is rather inappropriate, I think. Most members of the FreeBSD project would probably say "as long as they aren't using Microsoft that's all we care about" if they even bothered to comment. In fact, if you ever go to a FreeBSD conference, you will most likely be astounded at the number of FreeBSD developers running MacOS X on Powerbooks, instead of FreeBSD on Intel laptops. MacOS X, incidentally, is built partly on FreeBSD 3.2, something that always seems to be forgotten in these sales figures arguments. >FreeBSD lacks the polish found in leading Linux distributions. This is because Linux is pseudo-commercial. A more accurate statement would be that FreeBSD lacks the polish found in leading commercial Linux distros, because that is exactly what RedHat is - it's a commercialized version of Linux. (and RedHat is the leading Linux distro) Whether this is a Bad Thing is I believe open to interpretation. Once again, if an individual would choose Linux over FreeBSD because of it's "polish" then more power to them. I might point out, though, that Microsoft Windows is infinitely more polished than the most commercialized version of Linux, and so if "polish" is that important to the user, why are they even using Linux at all? I think the kind of polish your referring to is something that will only be found in a commercial operating system simply because a commercial OS must attract more and more seats to make more and more money, and "polish" is the glitz that attracts attention so as to sell the product. > the aging character-based installer, though utilitarian, will likely > prove challenging to users who may be new to FreeBSD The character-based installer permits installation of FreeBSD on systems that don't have video cards that Xfree86 can run on. Granted there are not many systems where this is the case, but there are a few. I have run across a number of systems, particularly older ones, that many Linux distros can't install on because the Linux installer can't bring up X Windows on the hardware. There is also another benefit to the character-based installer that is not present in the Linux GUI installers. This is that, by their very nature, installers have to be extremely customized to what they are installing. That takes development time. It takes more development time to custom-modify a GUI installer than a simpler character-based one. So, you have precious developer hours being spent on the installer that would otherwise be available for what the installer is installing. > The second drawback is the need to manually configure many common tasks, > such as X Windows setup and basic networking. We did try to use the > built-in tools to set up these items in the installer, but our entries > did not seem to take. Thus, we had to manually set up many common tasks. This is probably due to the fact that Preview 5.0 is beta code. While existing FreeBSD shops may want to look into FreeBSD 5.0, anyone trying FreeBSD for the first time should install the current production version, 4.6, and get familiar with that. By the time they are ready for their first FreeBSD production deployment, 4.7 will be out and they should install that. FreeBSD 5.0 is the first release in the new 5.0 branch and it is most likely going to have some teething problems. Questions 1.6, 1.7, and 1.8 in the FreeBSD FAQ are a more specific explanation of the above. It's a shame that you didn't refer to the FAQ before writing your article, you shouldn't be steering first time FreeBSD users to 5.0 Other than that, thanks for the time spent looking at FreeBSD! Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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