FreeBSD 5.0 Developer Preview #2

noackjr writes "'The FreeBSD Project is proud to announce the availability of the second Developer Preview snapshot of FreeBSD 5.0 (5.0-DP2). This snapshot, intended for widespread testing purposes, is the latest milestone towards the eventual release of FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE, currently scheduled for mid-December 2002.' See the announcement, early adopter's guide, and the release notes."

Comments

Re:Someone explain this about BSD/Linux to me.

[crucini]

Linux has a lot of corporate backing and is very "loud" and attention grabbing. In the meanwhile, the server room is running bsd ;)

Maybe at some ISPs. From of what I've seen at corporate environments, BSD is only used unwittingly in appliances. Linux is making some inroads against commercial Unix and Windows.

The servers apps most people run has nothing to do with the OS. Samba, Bind, Netatalk, Squid, Apache, IP NAT+firewall etc, ssh, ftp, sendmail and variants of these programs...

That's certainly the kind of view that would validate BSD. If you asked an IT director what important apps are running on his servers, he wouldn't mention any of those. He might mention PeopleSoft, SAP, Oracle, Oracle Financials, Microsoft Exchange, ClearCase, Siebel CRM. The programs you mentioned are more like minor supporting utilities - you choose a platform for SAP, and just assume that ftp is available for it.

A lot of this key software is becoming available for Linux. You might be able to get it to run on FreeBSD. But would you want to? Would you seriously put Oracle on a platform Oracle doesn't support? In fact, most companies are scared to move these key apps to Linux, even when the vendor supports it 100%.

So it's not accurate to say the server room is running bsd. Maybe at a few pure-internet companies, or running a little utility DNS/cache/whatever box, but not running the key apps in the corporate world.