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.'"

Comments

Personal use?

[theapodan]

The survey doesn't address personal use, which I would assume is a larger, more important part of the various BSD projects because with larger consumer market share, there is more of a push to develop drivers to support devices, and more reason for appliation developers to port apps.

I think that developing an operating system intended for business is a fine thing, but developing an operating system that can handle different markets in the event of a collapse of a market is better.

Re:Personal use?

[Shanep]

If this is the case, then honestly, what is the purpose of a BSD Certification? Obviously the goal of such a certification (in fact all "professional" certifications) is acceptence of BSD (or whatever the product) in the business sector. Think about it.

As a very happy OpenBSD user, in my private and business life, since 2.5, I say... think about this... I view the fact that OpenBSD does not wish to impress any business clients as a priority, to be a HUGE benefit to OpenBSD quality.

They're not out to form a bullshit glossy image to sell product in a competitive marketplace full of other bullshit companies with bullshit glossy brochures, paid-for reviews and advertisements. OpenBSD sells itself on the merits of its code quality. People who care and know better enjoy and appreciate this.

And beleive it or not, OpenBSD (and the other BSD's), do actually get used in big business. I know of two major banks which use OpenBSD for firewall and VPN machines just as one example. I also use OpenBSD in various roles at certain firms where I provide support and consulting.

Re:Not really

[Nimrangul]

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.

Re:4 Main?

[Anonymous Coward]

OS X is not a BSD distribution, nor is OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD or FlyingWang BSD. Each BSD is it's own operating system, not that mangled mess that is used to refer to a Linux-based operating system.

Also, OS X contains BSD code, it is not based on BSD - it is based on OpenStep, which contained BSD code as well. Google's your friend.

Re:Dragonfly BSD

[molnarcs]

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.

A quick peek...

[Foozy]

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!

Re:The loss of Matt Dillon hurt FreeBSD 5.

[Ecalos]

I'm a *BIG* huge fan of DragonFly BSD and from everything I've seen and read, Matt Dillon and co. are fantastic coders. However, the reason why 5.x has for a long time sucked has far more to do with the fact that the FreeBSD Project bit off more than it could chew; they were adding far too many features all at one time for them to be able to do it all in a managable, and timely fashion, and not due to the loss of Matt Dillon.

SMPng (fine grained kernel locking), KSE (multi-threading the kernel, and providing both M:N and 1:1 threading for userland programs), TrustedBSD MAC Framework and POSIX ACLs, Itanium, AMD64, PowerPC and UltraSparc processor ports, GEOM and GBDE, full kernel preemption, new drivers (including a mass migration to NetBSD's BUSDMA APIs), inclusion of OpenBSD cryptographic code, a new SMP aware process scheduler (Shed_ULE), devfs, a few thousand new ports/packages and a ton of other things that I can't even remember right now were all begun around the same time, all requiring the others to be aware of the various changes that were being made all over the kernel and userland. Matt Dillon was around for at least half of that work, and even then, it was far too big a project for the FreeBSD developers to have undertaken all at one time.

Quite frankly, it was madness. Let's not forget that they also had to support the 4.x branch because it would have required one to be absolutely insane to employ 5.x in *any* mission critical tasks during most of it's lifetime. (OT: I remember when 5.0-RELEASE came out, I attempted to switch to another virtual terminal, only to be greeted with what I called the "Lava Lamp of Death," because that's what I saw on screen, and I was unable to get out of it without rebooting.)

I hold Matt Dillon in high regard, but his departure from the project was not the reason for it's woes over the last few years. Poor planning and a monsterous set of goals were the biggest reasons why it's taken so long for FreeBSD 5.x to get to where it is today.

DragonFly is not currently without it's problems either. The serializing token code will probably have to be completely replaced at least one more time (making it Matt's third attempt IIRC) because although he believes the current API to be both nice and correct, the implementation is bug-prone, having caused a number of issues that seriously impacted the stability of DragonFly in multiprocessor systems:

http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/bugs/2005 -09/msg00018.html

DragonFly also suffers from the lack of a proper package management system. FreeBSD 4.x ports with the dfports overrides is neither up to date, nor especially fun to make work when something breaks, and although pkgsrc is an option, not all of the most important ports (like X.org) currently build on DragonFly without a number of patches from Jörg Sonnenberger (which sadly have not yet been integrated into pkgsrc itself by the NetBSD folks), and even then (at least for me) it seems to be hit or miss.

I am not the most knowledgable person in regards to these issues; I'm not a programmer, but I read alot of documentation as well as the mailing lists for both projects, and I have used both systems over the past three years (and FreeBSD since 4.5), and I can safely say that it was not Matt Dillon's loss that was the cause of the nightmare that was 5.x until the most recent releases, but was rather due to people trying to do more in one go than was probably a good idea to have tried.

All that said, I am looking forward to both DragonFly 1.4 (which I hope will become my primary platform as overall it's bugged me far less than any other OS I've used), and FreeBSD 6.0 (despite the fact that it no longer feels "right" to me for day to day stuff anymore).

--Jeremy Almey