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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.'"
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.
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.
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!
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.
5 -09/msg00018.html
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/200
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