EvansData can't tell BSD from Linux

mr writes "The boys and girls at Evans Data want to sell you a 178 page report about Linux. Now, they had a page that put FreeBSD between Caldara and Debian as far as how often it is used as a web server. They have pulled FreeBSD from the list. Seems Evans Data just figured out that FreeBSD isn't Linux. Did Evens Data use pages from TigerSoftware or perhaps the crack staff of Tucows?" There's also a Daily DaemonNews story with some figures.

Comments

Guess they changed the name on the report...

[Tord]

My gut feeling when something like this happens is that they really made a report on OSS software and its developers, programs and deployments.

Then somebody thought they should rename the paper to "Linux Developer Survey" since that would sell it better than "OSS Developer Survey" and thus they needed to change some things, but forgot to remove FreeBSD from the list.

(RANT_MODE_ON)Personally I don't understand why this is news. Things like this happens all the time and it's not really a big deal. Personally I would like to see how FreeBSD relates to some of the Linux distributions. To me, as a (non-kernel/non-system level) developer and everyday user I do put Free/Open/NetBSD into the same category as all the Linux distributions, A package with OS, programs, manuals and services containing everything I need and to at least 95% based on free software (wish I could say 100% but I still need Netscape and StarOffice although I hopefully can replace them soon with their free sucessors). That the kernel and system tools are xBSD instead of Linux I don't care a shit about. I still run the same XFree, the same desktop environment and the same programs. For what it's worth, the system still works the same for nearly everything I do and for me as a user there might be much bigger differences between various Linux distributions than a certain distribution and FreeBSD since they package different desktop environments and programs and configure them differently.

I can't understand why this upsets people so much. It's one thing to politely write them and ask them to correct their report and another to go balistic over these details. Is it the Linux and BSD elitists that doesn't want to be associated with each other?

Just face it, FreeBSD, Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera etc are "Distributions of Free Implementations of UNIX bundled with associated programs, manuals, services and stuff". That some of them are based on different kernels and have differences in design policies doesn't make them THAT different! My and one of my friends computers differs a lot more from the choice of installed window managers and programs from a users perspective than the fact that he runs FreeBSD and I run Linux.

I don't say we shouldn't teach and correct them, but everytime something like this happens it is totally blown out of proportions.(RANT_MODE_OFF)

I wonder...

[cperciva]

20% of respondants stated that, given their choice of Linux distributions, they would use FreeBSD.

I wonder how many would use FreeBSD if they weren't told to restrict their choice to Linux distributions?

ha ha ha

[tacpprm]

We are so clever and they are so stupid! Let's all point & laugh now kids!

So what, apart from about 4 seconds of potential amusement, makes this story news worthy?

Not everyone understands the free software landscape, so what? I don't know anything about the ways of pollsters & statistics gathering companies. Does that give them the right to take the piss out of me?

Why can't people just grow up and accept that not everyone can be an expert in everything. Smugly pointing out that they "just realised" and pulled BSD from their list isn't helping anyone. Neither are the hundreds of flames from illiterate wannabe techies that almost certainly contributed to the amendment.

These days slashdot seems to exist to prove that most free software users are wankers.

Re:ha ha ha

[Omnifarious]

Umm, perhaps the fact that they are SELLING information about Linux to middle and upper managers? One would sort of vaguely expect that if you were going to sell something you wrote as 'valuable strategic information' you'd take the time to learn just a little about the subject before you wrote.

These places just make money off of IT managers who are frightened by the mercurial nature of technology and want the comfort of paying people as ignorant as they are for the privelege of reading something dressed up in authoritative colors. Their frank stupidity would be laughable if they weren't taken so seriously by their audience.

Re:What exactly is the difference?

[f5426]

> What exactly is the differences between BSD and Linux?

Let's hope that I don't reply to a troll.

I'd talk about FreeBSD vs Linux.

The most important difference between linux and FreeBSD is that linux is a kernel while FreeBSD is a server operating system.

This is a serious difference. Linus torvald, or alan cox have zero power on deciding what initialisation scripts should looks like, or what the cron program should be. This is decided by 'distributors'. In general, people use a set of GNU tools on top of the linux kernel, and the resulting is called GNU/linux. But a linux distribution contains much more than only GNU tools. No one really knows what is and what is not linux-the-operating-system.

On the opposite, FreeBSD is a kernel plus a user-land. The kernel is designed to run with this userland, and is distributing it separately would make no sense. The linux concept of updating the kernel is alien to FreeBSD, in which you would upgrade the whole system (You should take into account that upgrading the whole FreeBSD system is probably easier than updating the linux kernel).

The result is that there are many flavors of linux, while there is only one FreeBSD. It is a good, and a bad point. The good side, is that a FreeBSD system is orders of magnitude more coherent than a linux system. It is much more easy to learn and tweak, because sources to the whole system are in /usr/src, not only the sources of the kernel. The bad side is that it is probably more boring. The other bad side is that there is a distinction between say Mozilla and top under FreeBSD (Mozilla is not part of freebsd, while top is). Under linux there is no hard disctinctions.

I said that freebsd is more coherent. Let's give you a couple of random examples:

bash-2.03$ which ls
/bin/ls

This means that ls is a FreeBSD command. It is not your everyday linux ls is, it is the freebsd one. Its sources are located in /usr/src/bin/ls:

bash-2.03$ cd /usr/src/bin/ls
bash-2.03$ ls -l
total 61
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 274 Jun 17 2000 Makefile
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 3066 Aug 28 1999 cmp.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 2798 Jul 5 2000 extern.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 13984 Feb 13 10:50 ls.1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 18557 Aug 13 2000 ls.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 3172 Jul 5 2000 ls.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 11618 Jul 5 2000 print.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 4579 Jul 22 2000 util.c
bash-2.03$

No configure/autoconf, no README, no LICENSE. Just the meat, plain and simple. The makefile is trivial. Change. make. run. make install. FreeBSD is a joy to hack.

Okay. another example.

bash-2.03$ man -k ATAPI
ata(4), acd(4), ad(4), afd(4), ast(4) - Generic ATA/ATAPI disk controller driver
burncd(8) - control the ATAPI CD-R/RW driver
wfd(4) - ATAPI floppy driver (LS-120 floppy driver)
wst(4) - ATAPI Tape drive

Yep. Every (okay, mosts) device driver have its own man page.

Yet another example:

bash-2.03$ man 9 intro | head
INTRO(9) FreeBSD Kernel Developer's Manual INTRO(9)

NAME
intro - introduction to system kernel interfaces

DESCRIPTION
This section contains information about the interfaces and subroutines in
the kernel.
[...]

Most important kernel routines have their man pages, with usage and example.

bash-2.03$ man 9 uio
Formatting page, please wait...Done.
UIO(9) FreeBSD Kernel Developer's Manual UIO(9)

NAME
uio, uiomove - device driver IO routines
[...]

This coherence is visible in the configuration of freebsd. Configuration is made in flat-files, in a pure unix way, but those are coherent. For instance:

cat /etc/rc.conf
[...]
nfs_server_enable="YES"
sendmail_enable="NO"
check_quotas="NO"
portmap_enable="YES"
inetd_enable="NO"
allscreens_flags="-m on -g 100x37 VESA_800x600"
moused_port="/dev/cuaa0"
moused_flags=""
moused_type="mouseman"
moused_enable="YES"
ntpdate_enable="YES"
ntpdate_flags="ntp.apple.com"
sshd_enable="YES"
[...]

I think you get the idea.

Last thing, to update the whole system to latest version, you use 'cvsup -L 2 stable-supfile' and your sources are up-to-date. Then you do a single 'make installworld' and your system is up to date. From source. Every single bit (that is considered in the system, of course).

OpenBSD and NetBSD are different operating systems, but share the same spirit as FreeBSD. OpenBSD is target at security, while NetBSD is targeted at portability.

At the bottom line:

* Linux is great if you want a binary cutting-edge unix-like OS.
* BSD is great when you want a cleanly designed server system.
* BSD is great if you like to hack/understand your system

And, well, the obvious: linux is more popular, and BSD zealots are superior assholes.

Ooops, forgot to talk about the port tree... :-)

Cheers,

--fred

Haven't you been interviewed by these guys?

[revbob]

Oh, not Evans data, necessarily, but some of these companies that produce "exclusive executive reports"?

They've got a terrific little racket going there. Would you like to find out how you too can MAKE MONEY FAST in the challenging, high tech world of executive reports?

While thousands have paid big bucks to find out, because you readers of /. are special, I'll tell you for free.

What you do is find a technology, find a newsgroup or list around the technology, get the names of the folks on the list who post a lot, and start making phone calls.

You tell your interviewees that if they give you an interview, they'll get a free copy of the report.

Now here's the sweet part: make sure some of the people on your list work for a "prestige" company. Then, because you've given the person at that company a free copy of the report, just as you've promised, that company goes on your list of clients which you present to people you're trying to sell these reports to. "Oh", say your victims, "if XYZ is interested in this technology, I'd better pay the couple of hundred bucks and read the report myself."

I work for, uh, a company that makes a lot of airplanes, and my research interests require me to be involved in some open forums. So I turn away about one of these interviews a month.

I did give a couple of interviews, and did in fact get my reports, and the reports were pitiful: 50 pages with lots of white space, revealing an unclear grasp of both the technology and the marketplace. For instance, one guy who calls me regularly seems to be obsessed with Windows CE and its threat to the established players in the embedded RTOS market. Yeah, that's going to happen.

What I suspect is, he's no more clueless than his customers, and he's found some customers who are willing to pay for reports on that subject.

Which reveals the other sweet part of this racket: you can issue another report 6 months later on "Changing Trends in the X Market". Just interview the same people (if you're moderately ethical) all over again.

Frankly, I don't know why anybody bothers to learn how to be a spammer. This is where the money is.

I'm a little bit hazy on the details of how you sell these reports and who you sell them to, but evidently somebody knows, and it must not be that hard. As Barnum noted, a potential customer for your executive reports is born approximately every sixty seconds.