Re: Story Time

In article <c5A9i.13333$6z4.9755@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@xxxxxxx> writes:
On 06/06/07 07:58, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
In article <cpl9i.116255$NK5.63744@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@xxxxxxx> writes:
On 06/05/07 13:52, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
[snip]
All of which applies to BSD equally except that BSD had several years
headstart (including the development that continued despite the AT&T
lawsuit which everyone involved in the technical side of the game knew
was never going to go anywhere). The only thing Linux has that BSD
does not is marketing. And look at the difference in awareness and
interest. BSD's license is much more business friendly than the GPV.

Two words: Unix Wars.

People keep mentioning that but unless your a techie it really means
nothing.

I *am* a techie, and I *do* remember when all the various vendors
took BSD or licensed SVRx and "compatible" C & Unix became a
mismash, and then there was the OSF, Unix International, etc, none
of which really unified Unix.

Ancient history. And irrelevant to the discussion of current BSD vs.
Linux. Considering how unlikely it is that any CIO today has ever heard
of BSD it is even more unlikely that they know what the "Unix Wars" were.



And while the Unix vendors were fighting, VMS slid and MSFT became
unstoppably dominant.

And yet, Linux is rapidly moving into the datacenter. And the whole
point of what I said was, "Why Linux? Why not BSD?" And the answer
remains the same as the answer to. "Why not VMS?"


There are currently three popular BSD distributions. How
many Linux distros are out there today? And anyone running commodity
COTS boxes is going to learn with very little research that FreeBSD
is the one that concentrated on and optimized for that platform.

I remember when ftp.cdrom.com ran off a modestly powered FreeBSD box.

I have been running this department off of modeswtly powered FreeBSD
boxes for years. I ran a news server that actually made it into the
top 100 (I don't remember how high it actually got but it was impressive
considering my total lack of a budget to support it!) running FreeBSD
on comodity boxes.


Anyway, Linux has commercial products like Oracle and engineering
CAD apps, important free packages like Sun Java (although
compatibility modules might let it run on FreeBSD) and the drivers
to get full usage of my NVIDIA video card.

Which comes back to the same issue. Why not FreeBSD? It is empirically
provable that it is better, technically, than Linux. And the answer is,
once agsain the same as why ISV's are leaving the VMS camp in favor of
Linux.


Overall, though, you won't hear me complaining because you run FreeBSD.

Well, you certainly won't hear me complain. We once tried to use Linux
to do the job because people wanted the more popular option. It took
less than one semester to have all of them learn what a mistake Linux
really was. We have never looked back and Linux will never have a
place in our server farm as long as I am the Admin here.


Now,
if your running 15 year old Sparc boxes......

NetBSD, anyone? :)

Linux (Debian, specifically) will also run on most of those boxes.

Of course it will, But if you are trying to set up an efficient operation
running on commodity COTS x86 boxes why would you want to use something
that has code in it targeted at other architectures. Give me the one
optimized for my platform every time.


BSD is stabler, more secure, more efficient and has more stuff that
was actually implemented correctly than Linux. And still businesses
are flocking to Linux and ignoring BSD. And the answer is, marketing.
Ask any CIO you know who is involved in one of these Linux migrations
why Linux and not BSD. The most likely answer will be, "What's BSD?"
Sure sounds like the same boat VMS is in to me. :-)
And "all those eyes" are constantly looking at various pieces,
saying, "hey, I can make that part 'better' (for some definition of
'better') or 'I've found a bug, here's a patch'".

Huh?? I run FreeBSD here. I upgrade the OS pretty much every
summer cause that's free time in a school. I don't make major
changes during the school year. Some boxes, doing specific tasks,
haven't been upgraded, patched or otherwise changed in years.
If it doesn't affect us, I don't patch it!! Basicly, it is no
different than what is done with commercial stuff, except that
I tend to know sooner with BSD if there is a potential problem
than I would with Solaris, IRIX, HPUX or even VMS. This notion
that anyone not running VMS has to apply patches every day is,
was and always will be hogwash. I can't speak for Linux, but
BSD today is not all that different in that respect from any
commercial OS. All OSes need periodic fixes. And, contrary
to what some VMS bigots like to think, all software has bugs.
Some may lay unfound for years, or even decades, but they are
there. I only recently applied new patches to BSD 2.11 on my
PDP-11. :-)

You'd be stunned by the disagreements between major kernel
developers on the linux-kernel mailing list (lkml).

Actually, no I wouldn't. Children squabble all the time.

Oh, you mean Theo de Raadt?? :0

Yeah, but then he doesn't control FreeBSD, does he?


But when
someone brings a well-written (meaning: it follows Linus' coding
standards) chunk of code to the table that implements a new feature
(usually a driver) or replaces old code (and is demonstrably better
(faster, simpler, uses less memory) it is accepted.

And this is different from FreeBSD in what manner?

We're superior, just.... because.

But seriously: this quote is specifically about NetBSD, but also
makes a similar comment regarding FreeBSD.

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2006/08/30/0016.html
Partly due to lack of people, and partly due to a more
corporate mentality, projects were often "locked". One
person would say they were working on a project, and
everyone else would be told to refer to them. Often these
projects stagnated, or never progressed at all. If they
did, the motivators were often very slow. As a result,
many important projects have moved at a glacial pace, or
never materialized at all.
[snip]
FreeBSD and XFree86, for example, have both forked successor
projects (Dragonfly and X.org) for very similar reasons.

I sure don't see any stagnation in FreeBSD. I only upgrade once or
at most twice a year (summer is primary, between Fall and Spring is
an option if we really need to change for some reason) and it still
usually leaves me behind a version or two. How often do commercial
vendors release new versions of their OSes? Now, if you meant all
those stupid little games and less useful (I will avoid calling them
totally useless, but in the sense of running a server farm for a
production environment, they are) programs, anything goes as they
are not controlled by any central "authority".

But, to reiterate the original theme, if marketing can make such a
success out of a piece of crap like Linux, just think what it could,
no would do for a gem like VMS.

bill

--
Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves
bill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton |
Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include <std.disclaimer.h>
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Story Time
    ... The only thing Linux has that BSD ... mismash, and then there was the OSF, Unix International, etc, none ... I remember when ftp.cdrom.com ran off a modestly powered FreeBSD box. ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: Story Time
    ... The only thing Linux has that BSD ... And while the Unix vendors were fighting, VMS slid and MSFT became unstoppably dominant. ... Anyway, Linux has commercial products like Oracle and engineering CAD apps, important free packages like Sun Java (although compatibility modules might let it run on FreeBSD) and the drivers to get full usage of my NVIDIA video card. ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: BSD derivatives
    ... What is your association with Open BSD? ... on the work of the FreeBSD Project, with an eye to being, maybe, more "user ... If you are familiar with Linux, search at Google with the string "BSD Linux ... Both are computer operating systems with several similarities, enough that if you can "drive" one, you can probably ...
    (freebsd-questions)
  • Re: FreeBSD weakness.
    ... BSD cant do multipath routing behind NAT, just like iprouteLinux, ... > actually pointed in the FreeBSD direction by a magazine writer whom I ... > Understand that learning UNIX is not my end goal. ...
    (freebsd-questions)
  • Re: eee pc -- quite usable...
    ... Because BSD is a minority pursuit and VMS is dead, ... got is basically a Linux distro with a different kernel under the hood. ... And your problem with convenience is ...? ...
    (rec.arts.sf.composition)