Daemon's Advocate article

[Konrad Heuer]

On Sun, 29 Feb 2004, Jonathon McKitrick wrote:

> http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200402/dadvocate.html
>
> I found the article very interesting.
>
> What do you all think?  What is being done to keep BSD from ending up where
> Greg says it might be going - suitable only for developers?
>
> I would think that with more people and ports being added every day, we
> won't find ourselves in that situation.  However, I can see what he is
> talking about.
>
> NOTE: Please CC me, as I am not currently subscribed.  Thanks.

I see the problem too. For example, I run a couple of FreeBSD driven
servers in our computer center. They do their job very well, but the
number of (SuSE and RedHat) Linux boxes is substantially higher.

Why? I think there are some reasons at least:

* Linux is more popular. I try to tell people that FreeBSD is great
  whenever there is a chance to do so, but they do hesitate since they all
  know (at less) a handful of people using Linux happily.

* Installation and maintenance of SuSE or RedHat Linux is more convenient
  or is assumed to be so. People hardly believe the patching and updating
  an operating system by source code is easy and painless. Nevertheless,
  it is, I know, but how to get other people to try it?

* People are lazy. For example, SuSE offers low-charge maintenance
  contracts. As long as this fits people's needs, noone wants to fix
  security holes by him/-herself.

I'm talking about people who work in a computer center. I don't talk of
newbies. I'm talking of people who once said "hey, open source is great",
but now they use commercial Linux systems being lightyears away from Linux
as it was some years ago.

Only the very very few ones regretting that Linux has gone this way and
really liking open source will give FreeBSD a chance.

I think most people don't run operating systems because they like them so
much (I do with FreeBSD) but because they need a task to be done. So we
should ask what we can do here?

Best regards

Konrad Heuer (kheuer2 at gwdg.de)  ____            ___  _______
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