Date: Thu, 6 May 1999 22:06:36 -0500 (CDT) From: "Kenneth P. Stox" <ken@stox.sa.enteract.com> To: advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: linus on BSD Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9905062033270.51713-100000@m4.stox.sa.enteract.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.10.9905061310270.735-100000@isis.visi.com>
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Well, I recently spend a fair amount of time with Linus while he was here in Chicago, for COMDEX. We had a rather long discussion, with only a few interruptions from Linux groupies, and he had some interesting comments. I will pass down what I think will be of interest to the FreeBSD community and maybe give some more context to the comments he made to ABC along with my spin on the situation. First of all, I should state that although I did not agree with everything he had to say, Linus was an extremely knowledgeable and well spoken fellow. He was not afraid to make his opinions in a clear and forthright fashion. He is a big fan of the DEC-Alpha architecture, and obviously thinks that it is the lineage to follow for the future. ( Well, I suspect until Transmeta has something better ;-) In the course of our discussion, I asked him what he thought of FreeBSD, He spoke very highly of FreeBSD and of our illustrious Jordan. He seemed to have a great deal of respect for the technical achievements of FreeBSD. He did not speak highly of the NetBSD and OpenBSD efforts, however. The one harsh criticism he had for the FreeBSD effort, is our apparent ceding of the desktop to focus on servers. I might add, this is a criticism Linus has of all the existing commercial vendors of UNIX. Linus seems to feel that this is the mistake that UNIX vendors have been making for years, thus losing focus upon many user related issues. I think I agree with Linus on this important point. The desktop is the entry into the user's mind. Let's face it, many, if not most, systems out there are chosen by people who are already familiar with the product. Benchmarks and awards are used to justify the decision they have already made, not to make the initial decision. If people actually followed the process that most of us would like, making rational decisions based on hard data, NT would be in the minority, and FreeBSD would be one of the most popular operating systems around. I suspect that Linus actually views FreeBSD as tough competition to Linux. He also views himself, rightfully so, as a representative for the community he helped to start, and thus has a responsibility to push that agenda as hard as he can. He is the leading Linux evangelist, well maybe second leading, Mad-Dog is a pretty tough act to beat. Given those standpoints, he is correct in the statements he made, although I do not think he is right. You will notice that he evades the actual point of the question ( Hmmm, someone has been getting some good P/R coaching, don't answer the questions you don't want to and focus on the issues you do. ) He completely avoids making any technical comparison of FreeBSD to Linux, but chooses to focus of the popularity and media attention that Linux has received vs. BSD's. He makes no statement regarding the technical merits. If pushed in this regard, he would probably focus on the weakest points of NetBSD and OpenBSD, and conveniently neglect direct comparison with FreeBSD. In response to this, I have come to the following conclusions: 1) We must not cede the desktop, but trumpet it. We're damn good on the desktop, we're even better on the server. Linux and NT are disappointments when moved from the desktop to a server roles, FreeBSD is a joy. 2) We must emphasize the advantages of mature code, as opposed to the "But it's new" attitude that dominates the Linux domain. This is the same attitude that dominates the NT cesspool. If it's new, it must be better. I think most of us have long come to the conclusion that new is not necessarily better. Evolution works far better. FreeBSD, evolved to be the best! 3) We must emphasize our commitment to quality over novelty. No we don't support the most hardware and applications. However, those we do are of high quality. Running FreeBSD is not a continuous experiment ( unless you're running current, of course. ) A user can count on FreeBSD to be stable, robust and secure. 4) We must define the field we are going to play the game on. As long as we allow others to define the playing field, we are at disadvantage. We need to convince the market of the merits of FreeBSD, and how they outweigh the apparent advantages of the competition. 5) We must not let ourselves be pulled into the field where we are labeled as "old-fashioned." We must turn that around to be the field of wisdom and experience. We must not allow ourselves to be defined as spoilsports to the Linux community, just another community that has a more mature viewpoint and a more thought out solution. I think that FreeBSD will have some enormous opportunities in the near future. I suspect that many will migrate to Linux to be stymied by its current limitations. We can offer effective answers to those problems. We support 4GB of physical memory. We support > 2GB files. Many people are coming to realize that these limitations are constraining them severely on their servers. Our window of ooportunity is now, it won't stay this open for that much longer. Well, I'll get off my soapbox now, -Ken Stox stox@imagescape.com On Thu, 6 May 1999, Tim T Seidl wrote: > > http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/Linuschat990505.html > > > Jon Lewis from atlantic.net at 2:46pm ET > What's your opinion on the various BSD's vs Linux? BSD > proponents still claim the BSD networking code is > cleaner/faster than the Linux code and that BSD in > general is more salable. In your opinion, is any > of this still true? > > Linus Torvalds at 2:47pm ET > No. > > What did you expect me to say, seriously? > > Actually, I think the major lack in BSD is the lack of > interest and the fact that they haven't really gotten > people worked up about their cause. A lot of them seem > to be fairly old-fashioned ("we cater to the /original/ > UNIX people") or just to have given up on the market. > They aren't hungry enough, I think. > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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