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Date:      Tue, 19 Jul 2011 08:18:41 +0200 (CEST)
From:      Konrad Heuer <kheuer2@gwdg.de>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   2020: Will BSD and Linux be relevant anymore?
Message-ID:  <alpine.BSF.2.00.1107190736560.27391@gwdu60.gwdg.de>

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I found it very interesting to look at the thread "Lennart Poettering: BSD 
Isn't Relevant Anymore" and the original interview.

Just to make clear: I started using FreeBSD approximately in 1994 with 
2.0-RELEASE and still use FreeBSD and hope to do so a lot of years to 
come.

But: Neither BSD nor Linux will ever have chance to conquere the desktop, 
despite of KDE, Gnome or anything else. In business environments there is 
no alternative to Windows. Microsoft successfully created Active Directory 
from DNS, LDAP and Kerberos with an easy-to-manage interface and - 
meanwhile - a seasonable server operating system like Windows Server 
2008R2. It was long way for them from horrible Windows NT, but they did 
it. I don't see any chance to manage a large client-server-cloud with BSD 
or Linux as you can do with Active Directory.

Additionally, and especially in the personal environment, the market will 
more and more move away from the traditional PC or notebook -- except for 
games, but that's again not an area where Linux or BSD are strong -- to 
tablet PCs and other mobile devices. To my mind we'll have to face a rapid 
change within the next years, and operating systems of the future might be 
Android or IOS or Windows Mobile or something similar which my base on 
Linux or BSD but are something different.

Let's forget about BSD or Linux on the desktop and about KDE and Gnome 
etc. Nice to see them, but useful only for few.

BSD will have to keep in and find new niches on the server market. The 
number of installations is not the most important figure. Functionality is 
important -- ZFS, HAST, CARP, jails, as already mentioned -- would be nice 
to see a distributed file system.

So, let's continue as we did for years ..

Best regards

Konrad Heuer
GWDG, Am Fassberg, 37077 Goettingen, Germany, kheuer2@gwdg.de



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