Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 00:46:33 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "David Xu" <bsddiy@21cn.com>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: BSDi Acquired by Embedded Computing Firm Wind River Message-ID: <002901c0bda4$88ae89c0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <101731842.20010405084557@21cn.com>
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I think that the acquisition will both help and also do a certain amount of damage to the BSD movement. It will help in that the embedded systems market has turned into one of these markets that is a cash cow in the high tech industry. Further, embedded systems are nowhere near as political, because most of the time the end users cannot determine what operating system is being used to power their device just by looking at it. Thus, you don't have people like Microsoft spending millions of dollars to try to pressure manufacturers of radios, TV's microwaves and such to use their shoddy operating system. Certainly, it's very important to have a rich commercial sugar daddy using your product, because as PC hardware continues to increase in complexity, someone has to fund development of device drivers and things such as that which can sometimes require a lot of business muscle to convince manufacturers to hand over programming specs. But, I think that there's going to be some perceptual damage. BSDi was the flagship commercial BSD company, and the fact that the flagship BSD company was backed into a financial corner and forced to sell itself, is deeply embarassing. Note that the press release explicitly states that financial details won't be disclosed. There's a reason for this - and until those details are published (if ever) most people are going to conclude that it's because the sale price was very low. Thus, the valuation of BSD as a commercial OS is very low too. Note that BSDi has had no qualms about publishing investor dollar amounts in the past, and you can't have it both ways. Either your company has a policy of never, ever, disclosing (in which case you won't even be publically traded) or you disclose everything, you can't have it both ways and retain credibility. There are going to be a lot of observers that are going to conclude that BSD failed in a bid to become a commercial general purpose OS, and that the future is Linux on the desktop. It's not surprising that slapped all over the face of the BSDi website is the statement that the new iXsystems will be concentrating on server development. They are playing the same card I played when I wrote my book - we all know that from a marketing perspective the idea that FreeBSD is going to be a significant desktop presence is a joke, Linux took that away. So, the only other avenue to stay in the game is to go the other direction and focus on server development. Espically since really good servers sacrifice a lot of stuff you need on a desktop, and vis-versa, a strong case can be made that since Linux is concentrating on the desktop, they are by default abrogating the server market. Microsoft has shown the world the folly of attempting to make a one-size-fits-all operating system that can work as both a server and a desktop, you end up sacrificing so much that the resultant product cannot do either job well. The big danger of doing the server focus thing, though, is that you can end up being marginalized. Look at what's going on with the commercial UNIX's like Solaris and others. Every year those OS's get higher, and higher, and higher end. It's getting very difficult to buy a Sun product these days that will work out-of-the-box as a small to medium business server, and still be cost-effective. As a result, Sun is rapidly turning into a company that sells 20 servers a year that each cost 100 million dollars. While this makes some impressive sales figures, one day you wake up and find that the 20 customers that were buying 100 million dollar servers have all stopped doing it, and you end up like Cray did, you go out of business. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com >-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of David Xu >Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2001 5:46 PM >To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: BSDi Acquired by Embedded Computing Firm Wind River > > >Hello All, > >I know BSDi and FreeBSD have some very important relation. >according news letter, Wind River has interest in making >proprietary closed software. >just want to know, will the acquisition hurt FreeBSD? > >-- >Best regards, >David Xu > > > >To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org >with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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