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Is BSD Dying?
Every BSD article posted, trolls come out and post about BSD dying. Naysayers at every turn, mostly pro-Linux, say that BSD doesn't have the marketing and advocacy to succeed. Greg Lehey, author of The Complete FreeBSD and FreeBSD core team member, takes a look at naysayer's claims, the history of BSD, the root of the "quiet" BSD advocates, and the relationship of Linux to it all, in this month's Daemon's Advocate at Daemon News
BSD is not dying. I am both a Linux and a FreeBSD user, and I can assure you that its not dying. Those anti-BSD "trolls" are nothing more than ignorant Windows lusers that have carried over their misinformed ideas from anti-apple/mac to anti-BSD. As Linux gets easier to use, there will be an ever growing stream of these morons.
Just go to netcraft.net and take a look at the top 50 uptimes. Only 3 times does any non-BSD OS appear there (BTW, Linux does not appear once). BSD is not dying, Linux has just stolen the spotlight for a few moments. Sure Linux has the spotlight, but BSD remains running on all of the mission critical servers. It doesnt matter how popular Linux gets, there will always be a place for BSD; this marketshare is not really being stolen from BSD, its being stolen from Windoze and others.
It doesnt matter how many millions of dollars some useless company is worth, the OS will still be pretty much the same. You cant just pump money into an OS and expect it to be better. BSD is a good product because of its age, and the truley devoted programmers. 1 free programmer doing what they truley love is the equivelant of 10 hired/commerical programmers. Quality, not quantity.
There are some things that Linux is good at, and some that BSD is good at. No amount of advocacy will change it. Advocacy is not the answer in most cases, it just turns into a flame fest. Once people see the statistics they will know in their heart.
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
You're assuming that FreeBSD will stand still while Linux 2.6 is in development.
And you also make the ridiculous assertion that there is some sort of absolute performance metric, that linux 2.4 has narrowed. There is no such thing as "better performance" there is only better performance for your workload. For some workloads, even Linux 2.2 is better. For others, FreeBSD is wildly superior.
There is no magic "go fast" register that FreeBSD pokes. Its optimized quite well for some tasks, and Linux makes slightly different choices.
For example, Linux's poll and select implementations are signfigantly faster than FreeBSD's for small numbers of FDs, while FreeBSD's is faster for large numbers. FreeBSD pays the constant up front overhead to lower the per FD overhead. This means that wrt to poll, Linux is better turned for running X clients, which are just loops around poll() with 1-5 FDs. FreeBSD on the other hand is more optimal for the case of a huge number of FDs, as found in large fileservers.
There is no magic algorithm that will make both cases run optimally. You have to choose one or the other. Another tradeoff is latency vs. throughput. Memory usage vs performance (usually caching or precalculation).
OS design is an exercise in tradeoffs. There is no one perfect OS, nor can there be. If people are advocating one OS the best (be it linux, solaris or freebsd), question their motives. Perhaps preserving job security and unwillingness to learn new things is the real root of these flamewars. I know I've seen that in DBAs who know only Oracle, and try to tell me its the best for multidimensional OLAP workloads.
threads?
You have 'linux companies' that have lost large parts of their market valuations, Linux distros merging, IPO's cancelled, etc.
In short, if one wishes to portray the 'worst' of the present state of the linux market, it would look like linux is the market that is dying. And, the total money gone in the linux market is far less than the BSD market. I'm betting you could get a link or 2 to the Brett Glass rants about how the GPL works to un-employ programmers. Given all the money that is gone in the Linux market never to be seen again....why not blame the GPL?
Go one better than the 'BSD is dying' person...provide actual links rather than their handwaving about BSD is dying.
Remember also that the BSD is dying troll had blown it in the past....declaring BSD dead due to Applixware not having a 5.X version for BSD.
It seems silly to propose the death of BSD as March 24 (the release date of Mac OS X) approaches. With one swell foop the installed base of BSD will grow by millions of machines.
The BSD license will always be attractive to companies who want a free code base unencumbered by a viral license - so as they say, I'm not dead yet.
MOVE 'ZIG'.