Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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.