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The Case for FreeBSD
essdodson writes "Scott Long of FreeBSD release engineering team describes some of the finer points where FreeBSD continues to innovate and display its mature development environment. Items such as netgraph, geom and incredible desktop support by way of Gnome and KDE." From the post: "While I strongly applaud the
accomplishments of the NetBSD team and happily agree that NetBSD 2.0 is
a strong step forward for them, I take a bit of exception to many of
their claims and much of their criticisms of FreeBSD."
As for linux websites being hacked, that's because they're not updated. If you fall behind on your FreeBSD updates, you'll get rooted too. Usually it's not a kernel hack, it's an application hack that would probably happen to FreeBSD too.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Gnome? KDE? Neither of those qualifies as "incredible", no matter how much crack you smoke...
prehistoric, Windows 3.1-level would be more accurate.
Why FreeBSD? Why go half-way? Why not switch to Mac OS X? It has everything that FreeBSD has, plus the best GUI there is or ever will be!
FreeBSD sounds great - until you realize you're dependent on X-Windows for graphics. X is garbage - Linux and the BSDs need to chuck that dinosaur in the rubbish bin and create something new and efficient from scratch.
You see, people are worried about advocacy because these create mindshare. Without advocacy, people won't understand what the advantages are with using/supporting whatever it is you are advocating.
Without advocacy, your product/whatever will seem inadequate, small, meaningless. This will make your whatever simply useless in the eyes of those who have not decided for themselves at the moment.
People who are not making money out of this have all to lose if they don't get the advocacy they need. They don't have marketing might, and advocacy is all they have. The moment they lose advocacy, they lose mindshare, they lose users. They will them either wither and cease to exist, or become mediocre and simply unimportant, a relic of the past, with the people unwilling to just move on.
You have already decided what you need/want. This makes advocacy useless for you. For the rest of those who have not finalized that decision, they need this stuff to understand the advantages as viewed by those who use the stuff.
Of course, you are also advocating Linux and NetBSD by stating you use those. You didn't give hard facts, but it's still advocacy in a simpler form.
the development is getting very political
It is?
Ok, I can't say that I'm the most politically savvy of people, so maybe there's a lot of politics which has whooshed over my head, but... jeez, I had no idea.
It's a sad day when a FreeBSD committer learns something about the internals of the FreeBSD project from slashdot.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Advocacy is to free software what marketing is to commercial software
Actually there's a key difference. Most marketing is carefully directed at potential new customers. Most "advocacy" takes place in forums specifically designed for advocacy (comp.*.advocacy, slashdot, ars technica battlefront, etc), where a tiny number of relatively knowlegable users quibble amongst themselves for kicks.
Let's take this very article as an example. Both FreeBSD and NetBSD have relatively small userbases which primarily consists of Unix and BSD-saavy users. Neither project has very much to gain by converting the other's users. (Unless there really is some threat of one or the other dying.) Either project would have much more to gain trying to convert the HUGE market of fleeing commercial UNIX users instead of arguing amongst themselves. You'll notice that's what RedHat is doing rather than trying to pick off Debian customers.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
"so of what consequence are NetBSD's criticisms?"
Just because NetBSD has fewer users doesn't mean its criticisms are without consequence. After all, by that logic FreeBSD's criticisms of Linux would also be without consequence.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
if BSD is dying /dead , then its one hell of a zombie. .
I use three OSs, debian GNU/linux , freeBSD and Mac OS X.. and i think all three are as healthy as ever
im not sure on the whole of apples market share I think about 5% , but considering that OS X has its roots firmly in BSD from its NeXT heritage not to mention the programs it has from the FreeBSD project, then its safe to say that BSD is more alive than ever
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Advocacy in open source is important because it indirectly affects the speed of development and ultimately the survival of the project.
If hardly anyone were using FreeBSD because they thought it "sucked", then there would be far fewer people willing to develop FreeBSD.
Those who are developing it would find their efforts less fruitful, because fewer people would exist to fix bugs and improve on their work... eventually FreeBSD would go the way of the Amiga... a few diehard users stll existing, but essentially dead.
Not to imply that that isn't already the case. (I'm kidding... I'm kidding!)
Gentoo uses more bleeding edge packages than FreeBSD. Even in using the stable branch, I've downloaded borked packaged more than once. While the ports in FreeBSD are order, they are tested MUCH more & the broken packages are actually labeled broken!
Portage does have some advantages over ports. Package stability is not one of them.
Everyone says apples hardware is overpriced. Prove it.
Maybe their hardware is actually worth more for longer.
Both chrysler and BMW make cars, but BMW's cost more generally...why?
It would be nice if people would be more rational about hardware and quit parroting lame statements that don't make sense.
I'm happy that the FreeBSD people like their OS. Call me when they fix SMP.
[o]_O
So why would anyone consider Linux over Windows?
Furthermore, 27 million AOL users can't be wrong.
When I was on an "advocacy kick", I spent a year (well, a few minutes every day for a year) answering Linux questions on Usenet. A year after that, I took a good part time job offer from someone who remembered seeing my name and college in those newsgroups. A year or two later, when I was hunting for finite element software to help with a class project, I downloaded the most appropriate program I could find and was surprised to find my name on the acknowledgements page, because apparantly I'd helped fix the author's first Linux installation.
Of course, this could be "random good luck" as much as "bread on the water", and it probably helped that my "advocacy" was helping others rather than just preaching to them, but I think the lesson was clear: free software users don't give you money, but some can give you respect and some can give you more software. That wouldn't be worth it if the respect and software were all you were interested in, of course; it's just a bit of added reward for doing something like rooting for a baseball team that some people find fun to begin with.
A specious argument. 4-RELEASE is the "latest release". 5-* is the next version up to bat, as it were.
"vi is vi, not vim, and you get sh, csh or tcsh instead of bloated bash"
I have bash on my FreeBSD installs. vim is in the ports collection. So it doesn't install everything by default. That's a good thing isn't it?
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Happy user of FreeBSD, Slackware, Solaris 10 and OSX. I still have Windows 2000 Server to remind me why I use the others.
Like all OSes -- including Microsoft Windows and Apple's OS X as well as the various Linux distributions and other BSDs-- FreeBSD has it's pros and cons. Choosing which to use boils down to prioritizing what you need the system to do and what's less hassle for you. If you're a Windows admin primarily, it's going to be immeasureably easier for you to set up LDAP on an AD box; if you're primarily a unix admin, you can just as easily do the same thing on a *nix.
FreeBSD for the impatient.