Daemon's Advocate article

[Johnson David]

On Sunday 29 February 2004 02:21 pm, 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?

What is being done? Nothing. I get the impression that no one "in 
charge" is the slightest bit concerned about the FreeBSD user. This is 
most notable on the desktop side, but it extends to any user. There's 
this attitude that if you want something in FreeBSD, you must do it 
yourself.

But why should it be any other way? FreeBSD developers are all 
volunteers. They work on what they do because that's what they want to 
do. And since they're all primarily kernel and system software people, 
we end up with a great OS, but a rather lackluster environment.

The lack of commercialization doesn't help either. I think this is the 
only long term advantage Linux has over the BSDs. Who pays people to 
work on the boring and dreary stuff? Who pays for that new piece of 
hardware so a driver can be written sometime before it becomes 
obsolete? (I think this situation will turn around as FreeBSD gains 
users and becomes noticed by hardware vendors, just like what happened 
to Linux about four years ago).

I'm a desktop user. I have noticed more than once some active disdain 
towards the desktop by FreeBSD developers. Why is this? Did I miss the 
sign out front saying "servers only"? You don't have to be a 
dumb-downed system like Lindows to be suitable for the desktop.

David