Re: Story Time

In article <cEB9i.116367$NK5.61178@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@xxxxxxx> writes:
On 06/06/07 10:30, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
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.

I think that it *is* relevant because it was the "business friendly"
BSD license (which allows each company to keep it's own changes)
that caused the Unix Wars in the first place.

What you call the Unix Wars is nothing different than the battling
between all proprietary OSes. It's called business and yes, it is
war. And while many of those Unixes are still around and kicking
today they don't enter into the debate because we were comparing
Free Unixes. A CIO who is going to buy AIX is going to buy AIX and
the superiority of BSD over Linux doesn't enter into it. But when
one is going to base their strategy on a Free Unix then one has to
ask why one over the other and more importantly, why did the inferior
product win the market? The only good thing that Linux has over BSD
is hype and that is totally the result of strong marketing.


The (smart) big vendors remember these things.

Counterintuitively, the "viral" GPL (which says, in essence, "freely
you get other people's work, freely you must share your own work")

Is that like forced volunteerism that is all the rage today? I can't
be coerced into giving something "freely".

ensures that the Unix Wars can not happen again.

Not hardly. There is at least one distro that has two versions. One
they give away for free and the other you have pay for. And they openly
admit the two are different. And the one you pay for has additional
features not in the free one. And there are other GNU Programs that
while living up to the letter of the agreement do not live up to the
spirit in that they have made the source code they provide useless
without paying them for the tools to work with it.


Thus, it's sort of a neutral platform where binary compatibility is
almost guaranteed.

Your joking, right? Debian won't run RedHat. RedHat won't run Slackware,
etc.


And now both IBM & HPaq are selling boat-loads of Linux-installed
servers & blades, making both very happy. IBM is probably also
selling lots of Linux-running POWER systems in compute farms where
AIX isn't needed.

Yeah, I know and that is even more confusing (and I fear does not bode
well for the industry). Why would IBM push Linux? I admit to being
baffled by that one.


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?"

See the previous paragraphs regarding the BSD & GPL licenses.

I doubt the license has anything to do with it. The BSD is much more
business friendly and the GPL is extremely dangerous (in the business
sense). The only real difference I can see is they all know what Linux
is, afterall it's in all the trade journals everyday. When have you
ever seen more than a casual mention of a current BSD in one? Sound
like VMS again?


And the answer
remains the same as the answer to. "Why not VMS?"

Up-front costs and COTS hardware.

While that may contribute, I think the lack of knowledge caused by
the current stealth marketing is much more to blame. Even back in
my days selling systems it was always pointed out to me that the
cost of the hardware was in most cases a rather insignificant portion
of the overall cost of establishing and operating a system. And, it's
write-off money anyway.


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.

I'd *REALLY* like to hear what the problem with Linux was.

Are you really serious? Broken LPD. Badly broken NFS. Extremely
inefficient IP stack because of NIH Syndrom.


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.

And if you chose the losing platform...

The industry has chosen x86. Why would I want to run a version of an
OS that had to do or not do something in order to maintain support for
Sparc or PARisc? That was my point. Of course, I assume Linux falls
into the same catagory as Open|Net BSD as it also claims support for
all these other oddball systems. Hmmmm... Maybe that explains some
of the inefficiency.


(Not that x86 will lose any time soon, but you get my point.)

[snip]

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?

He leads a BSD.

And not the one I would recommend to anyone planning on using x86 COTS
boxes. So, irrelevant to the discussion at hand. When someone says,
"It's my ball and we play by my rules." I usually just go find another
game.


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.

If techies (not sheeple) really thought that Linux was a steaming
pile of dung, it wouldn't have lasted this long.

What techies? All those prepubescent teens without girlfriends who
put up a website in their parents basement during the dot.com boom
who now skew the unemployment numbers by claiming to be "un-employed
IT professionals" today?

As for the success of a "steaming pile of dung", just look at Windows XP.

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>
.

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