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BSD Usage Survey

hubertf writes "The BSD Certification Group announced the BSD Usage Survey today (non-English version also available). 'This survey aims to collect detailed statistics on how and where BSD systems are used around the world. The survey is short- only 19 questions- and should only take a few minutes to complete. The survey covers usage of the four main BSD projects - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and DragonFly BSD.'"

6 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not really by Nimrangul · · Score: 4, Informative
    There have been plenty of forks that didn't do that though, almost all the forks have been so completely out of the 3 main BSD's league that they've been ignored. This is different for DragonFly BSD because it s run by Matt Dillon, the guy's got skill and determination - and I suppose enough money that he doesn't need to work too much to eke out a living.

    DragonFly BSD's not been around as long as MirOS or many other projects, but it's got someone that knows what they're doing in charge, someone that would be doing it even without anyone else working with him.

    Because of who started it and why DragonFly BSD has had an easy edge over the others, that is why it has become the fourth over time - but it did not start out as a full-blown contender, this took time.

    --
    I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
  2. Re:Personal use? by KwKSilver · · Score: 3, Informative

    Good point. I had no trouble installing and using the 4.8, 4.9 and 4.10 Free BSD O/S. It was for personal use & just to see ... Never could get a functioning system out of the 5.x series. It is silly for FreeBSD to be getting harder to istall while Debian has gotten trivially easy.

    However, PC-BSD works quite well, but with limited software installation, unless one goes to the ports. The base is OK for someone who just wants to surf and e-mail. Getting OO installed is trickier. It got a good review from Dru Lavigne also here. There's a fresh beta, 0.8 just released.

    There's also Desktop BSD over here, which I have not tried as there seem to be problems with installation on boxes with an Athlon CPU. When they get that fixed ... we'll see.

    --
    If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
  3. Re:Dragonfly BSD by molnarcs · · Score: 4, Informative
    Oh please, don't spread misinformation:

    "It's no wonder that DragonFlyBSD is now becoming the premiere production BSD.." Dragonfly is nowhere near production quality yet. It may or may not be better than FreeBSD in the future, but your fanatism (earning you +5 insightful apparently) blinds has blinded you to the fact that not even its developers recommended for production use.

    "Like it or not, DragonFlyBSD is bound to take the role FreeBSD has.." Seeing how Dragonfly has a different set of goals than FreeBSD, I cannot see how it would take FreeBSD's role ... provided it becomes better, which is not proven yet! This is like saying that Open~ or Net~ will take FreeBSD's role in the future! It is stupid.: "Meanwhile, systems like FreeBSD which have failed to make the transition to a far more threaded kernel design will lose the performance race." Just as silly as the rest - FreeBSD 5/6 now shows very good performance on MP systems. Last time a more or less objective comparison was made, FreeBSD 5.x proved to be more scalable than 4.x - and the difference by which linux won was quite negligible, if you read the whole article. So, what you wrote is one of the silliest rants I have recently read.

  4. A quick peek... by Foozy · · Score: 5, Informative
    All data below is preliminary:

    Survey is less than a week old and there are at this moment over 2200 responses in several languages!

    • Usage: FreeBSD 74%,OpenBSD 32%,NetBSD 20%,DragonFly 3%
    • Number of companies with less than 10 systems- 1515; more than 1000 systems- 18
    • Where used: North America 44%; Europe 46%; Austrailia/New Zealand 6%; Asia 6%
    • Company size: Less than $500K- 1199; Greater than $100M- 117
    Coolest 'Uses' comments:
    • Running large computational fluid dynamic model
    • Building access control
    • impress chicks on saturday night
    • Specialized image processing, touchscreen office appliance
    The survey will run through at least the end of September, so these numbers will obviously change.

    We can use your help. Join the mailing list and contribute ideas and expertise. We're in need of business as well as technical expertise. Let us know what you can contribute with the 'Contact Us' form on the website www.bsdcertification.org.

    Thanks to everyone who filled out the survey!

  5. Re:4 Main? by drmerope · · Score: 3, Informative

    It would be more precise to say that it is based on Mach code and BSD code--especially the FreeBSD userland.

    However, substantial work went in during the NeXT era and subsequently from Apple directly.

    This is a minor quibble with the meaning of "based" as you use it.

    OSX is decidedly not a BSD variant though--most notably it is not developed under a BSD license.

    As a point of fact, Windows is BSD based because microsoft forked their tcp stack off an early BSD one...

    But we can still distinguish it as being in another class entirely.

  6. Re:Of course (i.e., common sense) by eneville · · Score: 2, Informative

    > I am surprised by how high OpenBSD and NetBSD is.
    > I would have initially thought it would be lower.

    OpenBSD is very good for firewalls, the pkgs are vetted carefully and the team do a great job in keeping it as secure as possible. FreeBSD is more desktop orientated these days from what I can tell, and this makes it a little less appealing to those who just want a firewall and nothing else.