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PC-BSD: The Most Beginner Friendly OS
soniyea writes "OSWeekly.com reviews PC-BSD and considers it the most beginner friendly OS in the market. 'From PC-BSD's roadmap to their default installation, I honestly feel good about where these guys are headed with their take on FreeBSD. This operating system has it all: support both from the professional level as well as that of the community, the ability to install Linux software, thanks to the binary compatibility layer, and of course — speed. Understand for most people, the speed factor is more or less a matter of opinion. But I have found that in some areas, it felt faster at the core level. Maybe I just had too much coffee that day? Either way, I totally recommend PC-BSD for anyone wanting to take a step into the wild side. FreeBSD, it's not just for geeks anymore.'"
If Linux was licenced under the BSD, we would have as many versions of the kernel as we have distributions. If the BSD licence is so great, then why the (multiple forks) of BSD haven't killed proprietary software by now? What killed commercial versions of Unix was the fragmentation, what makes Linux so strong is the union forced by the GPL.
Forking a project with the GPL usually doesn't cause a lasting division, eventually everyone will come back together under the branch that the majority considers "best". Ironically, the BSD licence, despite allowing more freedom for commercial companies, hasn't produced the best results commercially. Where is the commercial Unix based on the BSD? Other than specialized embedded OSes, general purpose commercial Unix based on BSD is the closest thing to dead that exists in the market today.
commercial usage ... proprietary usage. Big difference.
Not as big as you imagine. In most cases, commercial products for public release must be proprietary, either through naïve stockholder beliefs about security or business positioning, or due to NDA with related parties. Remember the Matrox and NVidia driver gap? Those companies weren't refusing to vend to Linux to be obstinant, and both companies were willing to address even smaller markets, like the Macintosh (before the mac users get up in arms, please remember that very few Mac users upgrade their video cards; in terms of sales, video card upgrades to the Linux market are a far larger market.) They just weren't able to satisfy the Linux market, because the Linux market has completely hedged itself into its dogma, and refuses to play well with anyone who works differently.
Did you ever wonder why, if there are two products, one BSD or MIT licensed and one GPL licensed, and when the BSD or MIT licensed product is inferior, the BSD or MIT product has invariably won within two years? It's because corporations aren't these mysterious dark villains you imagine them to be, and they're not stupid. Corporations understand collaboration; it reduces costs dramatically. Corporations donate more source than individuals do, and if you're going to argue that, please remember that you're not running Hurd yet. I run a corporation which makes Nintendo DS games. There are a ton of libraries I'd love to use, but because of my NDAs with Nintendo and some appallingly bad choices of wording in the LGPL, I'm simply not able to. I've had to skip dozens of awesome interface toolkits because they're simply unavailable to me. There are nineteen web browsers I've been able to find which will compile on the Nintendo DS. Exactly one of them is commercially available: KHTML. It's nothing short of a miracle that it happens to be the best choice; that's rarely true.
Wish you had PicoGUI games? So do I. Nano-X's codebase is a mess, and wxUniversal has performance and feature problems. PicoGUI is faster, prettier and compiles without problems. It skins, it scales, and the default skin is just gorgeous.
It's also a dead project, because the author lost interest and it never gained enough momentum. If it wasn't LGPL, I would personally resurrect and dramatically extend it; it would be far less work than starting over. Unfortunately, it's LGPL. Nobody's touched it since mid-2003. It's a beautiful project. And, because of its choice of license, it's dead, probably forever, while the dramatically inferior Nano-X project continues happily along, because companies can put their weight behind it.
I stand by my opinion, which I continue to repeat openly: GPL/LGPL are the paired most destructive forces in open source software today. The unix way is interoperability and cross-usability. The specific purpose of the GPL is to destroy that, and the LGPL, though it wants to be different, fails to be different. Unix has always been a genuinely free product, available to anyone who wanted it. It was originally a commercial product, and was released by corporations to the public freely.
GPL is an abomination. It's a bunch of programmers who think that just because they have the ethical right to tell companies to screw off, that it's suddenly a good idea. What they fail to understand is that they're taking from the mouths of the people who gave it to them in the first place, and from the mouths of the people who do the vast bulk of software development today. Yes, it's your right to constrain your work however you want to, and I will honor that. I will not respect it, however, and I will call you small-minded to your face. I will leave your software in your hands because you refuse to share, all the while banging the open source drum. But you know what? Real open source is open to everyone, and has been for decades before GNU reared its ugly head.
GPL is a major lose, and i
StoneCypher is Full of BS
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
True Fact: *BSD is dying
BSD - a litany of failure
So why now? Why did *BSD fail? Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personae?
The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.
Because the moment you read this little gem,
Should I Really Care About Linux?
from their editor it's pretty blatant that OSWeekly is the kind of Windows-fanboy fluffer-site that would feature something like PC_BSD as "Easy" to crush the Linux-curious back into line.
Such things are intented to play out like,
"I read that it was easy but then it completely pwned me (waaaaaaah!), screw Linux!"
(yeah, I know it's not Linux but most Windows users assume anything like PC_BSD==LINUX)
I've added the OSWEEKLY site to my hosts file, that most wonderful of resources.
Mmmmmm...schweet schweet 0.0.0.0 ness, because they're insignificant and if I didn't already have all their add-servers in there I'd have probably seen through them immediately.
And before people start pointing out that Slashdot runs M$ ads, Slashdot is about much more than Operating Systems, right?
Excellent.
Cheers.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento