I'm looking at threads that are only a couple months old that disagree with your entire post. The official FreeBSD Java pages are still full of warnings like "run it in a production environment do so at their own risk" and "considered ALPHA quality".
Even if what you say is correct, it hasn't been enough time to make any sort of market impact.
GPl'd software is indeed a problem in corporate environments that don't feel like sharing their entire intellectual property & rights to code they have written because "it happens to link to GPL'd code".
I don't think this is a serious problem. Commercial software houses can and do work around the issue. Internal server-side development is mostly immune to it. Perhaps if Linux had more desktop deployment (where component integration is much more widely used), it would start to become a real problem.
Bzzzzzt! Listen! The haunting cry of an Internet dickhead.
I don't think GPL is corporate-friendly. Regardless of what you think, money talks, bullshit walks. And GPL has a lot of money behind it.
Re:I remember that benchmark too.
on
Why FreeBSD
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· Score: 1
I also remember that benchmark, and the long list of excuses produced about how the systems weren't tuned correctly, or such-n-such development code should have used. I never saw anybody produce favorable benchmarks with a "correct" system.
At the very least, it left the impression that the *BSDs required significantly more administration overhead for what seems to be a fairly common DB configuraiton.
Systems are scaling out now, not up. By next year, commodity server systems will be shipping with 4-8 cores, and that will jump to 8-16 cores soon after. Even laptops will be dual-core. I contend that either an OS has their SMP shit together, or they are irrelvant.
+ That they didn't get the injunction is hardly a "bitchslapping". Apple likely will end up paying TigerDirect something.
+ AppleCorps is suing Apple RIGHT NOW, for breaking that old agreement with iTunes/iPod. Trial is set for next year.
Re:Goes both ways
on
Why FreeBSD
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You're citing popularity instead of reason. By your logic, Windows is the right choice for both server and desktop.
Look, there's a lot of good reasons that Windows got where it is, both historical and current, and that have nothing to do with anti-trust or market manipulation. Likewise, there's many many substantial reasons that Linux is deployed and FreeBSD isn't.
The tendancy of various communities to refuse to understand why their competitors become popular, and simply throw up their hands explains quite a bit why they are unpopular. You see this with Linux in the desktop market, and with FreeBSD in the the non-ISP server market.
I see this all over this discussion -- The BSDers are saying "Anything Linux can run, FreeBSD can run too". This is simply false. And until they figure it out, and make an effort to fix it, *BSD will be far behind in popularity.
Considering that pretty much any (every?) piece of software compiled for Linux can be run under FreeBSD with little hassle, I'd like to know how you can claim this with a straight face.
Quite easy -- Java. Last I checked, FreeBSD's only had a unsupported, old version of Java that didn't have proper thread support and was a "hassle" to install. And J2EE application servers are probably the single biggest reason companies deploy *nix systems, so this is hardly a little problem.
Most Mac fans seem to be making the exact same assumption -- nothing changes about Apple except the CPU. If and when Apple alters their pricing, model line-up, or business model, then we can discuss whether their marketshare will remain at 3% (not 5).
Regardless, even if Apple creates a miracle and doubles their marketshare to 5 or 6%, it will still take a couple years before Intel Macs make up a majority of the installed base.
In the financial market, companies spend big money for Linux support -- usually more than Windows' licensing costs. In either case, they're running software that costs $10K+ per server, so the OS cost is immaterial.
The move to Linux is finance was driven by cheaper hardware, not freebie versions of Linux. Despite your little fairytale about "Joe Geek", Linux is doing phenomonal in the cost-insensitive Enterprise market, but Windows still rules the tight-wallet SMB space.
Well, quad systems have been commodity hardware for about a decade now (PPro). Really nothing that special about them. My impression is that Linux developers have been targetting such systems for many more years than BSD developers.
Frankly, who *cares* what proprietary vendors are able to twist Linux into doing on their specific hardware?
I get the distinct impression you do. Are you saying the NetBSD project wouldn't welcome corporate support for better scalability?
Re:The real difference...
on
Why FreeBSD
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· Score: 2, Insightful
BSD communities have a reputation of being condescending and elitist. This is mostly undeservedt
Through most of the 90s, the BSDers prided themselves with their elitism and their old school Unix cliquishness. I read the lists -- "If you aren't smart enough to figure it out, maybe you should go run Linux, haha." was a common sentiment.
Then, in about 1998, they realized that Linux was being deployed 100:1 over BSD and they had a collective "Oh shit!" moment. They then started a positive effort to be more open and helpful to new and less clueful users, but at that point it may have been too late.
I still read comments like "Well, if you aren't reading such-n-such mailing lists, you shouldn't be running FreeBSD 5", which implies that BSDers still see their world as being pretty small. Consider how many support outlets there are for Linux, and that only a miniscule portion of users read the development lists or come anywhere close to flamethrower-range of the main developers.
What the BSDers conviently ignore when they tell this story is that 386BSD forked four times in about 2 years while all of this AT&T stuff was going on. This of course delayed releases and so on -- hell, the original lead guy Bill Jolitz basically got so fed up that he took his ball and went home.
From an outsider's perspective the *BSD world must have looked one humungous nasty flamewar, while the Linux world was happily and quickly making progress. The Linux world gave themselves momentum, while BSDers were eating their own.
Re:Linux And The BSDs
on
Why FreeBSD
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I see no need to pit them against each other, as they both provide freedom and excellence to the user.
FreeBSD has a bit of an identity crisis, they sorta see themselves as "Linux Junior", with a chip on their shoulders. Which is why every single pro-BSD article is basically a comparison to Linux.
If you look at how Linux has been positioned and marketed, they've never felt the need to "eat their own" and convert FreeBSD users. At least not in the last 10 years.
Linux has always been positioned for "world domination" -- first they convinced UNIX/RISC systems to convert, then scientific systems, then embedded systems, and now they are working on Windows systems. Whether it's Java/J2EE, or Oracle, or ERP, or StarOffice, Linux finds a way into a market. These are all new customers.
Meanwhile FreeBSDers sit back and look at the load-average on their sendmail servers and then wonder why the world isn't knocking on their door . Rather than define themselves somehow, they respond by nipping at Linux's heels.
Re:Linux And The BSDs
on
Why FreeBSD
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes but there is the licenses issue. BSD style licenses vs the GPL. At least for companies to use the OS with there products.
Just as a factual matter, Linux and GPL software have recieved about 10^6 more corporate support than BSD-licenced software in recent years. The GPL has proven to be a very corporate-friendly license because it allows copyright holders to share their code without giving away the 'exploitation rights'.
Plus, I think you could argue that the big exception (Apple), was driven more by technical reasons than licensing ones. They started with an 1980s BSD-based OS, so FreeBSD code was a better fit. If OS X was a clean slate, who knows?
Ah, I'd forgotten about the Personal System/2 and AS/400 and S/390 and all those other brandnames. So there was a logic to it, but it still seems rather Gosplan-ish.
The brandname is actually MacOS X. Transitioning to a new OS can be very risky (and there's numerous failed attempts in computing history), so Apple obviously wanted to emphisize you were still using MacOS (even though you weren't:). That way the installed base would see it as a "natural upgrade" rather than "a change to something different".
So, no, it's not like Apple doesn't care about branding (are you fuckng kidding?!?) -- "OS X" was a fairly boring name by design.
In Microsoft's case, it is not a new OS, so it's better to have a different sounding name to get people's attention. Using a real word makes a distinction from the old 98/ME/NT/XP mumble-jumble.
Now, if you want terrible branding with no particular logic, try "OS/2" (one of those failed new OSes I alluded to.)
with (as I understand) an entirely different product in a non-competing market.
Yes, but I don't think that matters that much because both companies produce software products.
For example, I called my cool new Windows spreadsheet program "SuperLinux", I would not be surprised if Linus Torvolds' attorney served me some papers. Just the fact that the products are both software would be confusing to everyone. (And maybe when the shoe is on the other foot, the slashbots will understand what I'm talking about.)
Just imagine the sales calls: "Hi this is Fred from Vista Software" "Un, you mean like Windows Vista??" "That's only the 10th time I've heard that today."
The thing is that a good brandname is worth zillions of dollars. I'm sure MS was fully aware of these guys and just figured they were small-fries that could easily be bought off. (And , I'm sure that Apple though the same way about TigerDirect, The Open Group, Apple Records, etc.)
All true, but you dodged the question that you quoted.
What "Advanced Software" was this HP group producing while Sun etc was translating these innovative concepts into real world products? And why did a company who has been oriented towards printers and PCs for the last decade even have a "Advanced Software" group to begin with? I'm all for Alan Kay having a mealticket, but let's face it -- even if he created another "innovation" at the same level as Smalltalk, HP would have no ability to package or market it.
I suppose. Although my usual problem is that the OS provides a feature, but the COM interface is either missing or crippled (for example, with encryption stuff).
You are still talking about upgrading a system that's less than one year old. That has nothing to do with "investments" and everything to do with your hobbies. (Although, unlike most Intel stuff, Socket 939 was pretty much designed only for the "enthusiast" market.)
For system-administration scripting, Windows can be annoying. For anything application-level, it is either (A) the same as other OSes, or (B) better. I'd like to see someone argue otherwise without resorting to hand-waving about "baroque libraries". (COM is designed for scripting, nothing baroque about using it there.)
The biggest issue is that you don't get as many little tools as you would with a Unix OS, but for a single installation, that's not that big of a deal.
Well, ESR hardly seemed like a big OS/2 fan, considering the jargon file entry for it:
The anointed successor to MS-DOS for Intel 286- and 386-based micros; proof that IBM/Microsoft couldn't get it right the second time, either. Often called 'Half-an-OS'. Mentioning it is usually good for a cheap laugh among hackers -- the design was so baroque, and the implementation of 1.x so bad, that three years after introduction you could still count the major apps shipping for it on the fingers of two hands -- in unary. The 2.x versions were said to have improved somewhat, and informed hackers rated them superior to Microsoft Windows (an endorsement which, however, could easily be construed as damning with faint praise).
There was a design factor as well. If you had File Sharing enabled and created a dial-up TCP/IP connection, Windows 95 would actually warn you about the security issue. Later versions of Windows dropped this dialog. (And as memory became less of an issue, enabled more services even on desktop OSes.)
Slashdot Mirror
> You haven't checked recently then
I'm looking at threads that are only a couple months old that disagree with your entire post. The official FreeBSD Java pages are still full of warnings like "run it in a production environment do so at their own risk" and "considered ALPHA quality".
Even if what you say is correct, it hasn't been enough time to make any sort of market impact.
GPl'd software is indeed a problem in corporate environments that don't feel like sharing their entire intellectual property & rights to code they have written because "it happens to link to GPL'd code".
I don't think this is a serious problem. Commercial software houses can and do work around the issue. Internal server-side development is mostly immune to it. Perhaps if Linux had more desktop deployment (where component integration is much more widely used), it would start to become a real problem.
Bzzzzzt!
Listen! The haunting cry of an Internet dickhead.
I don't think GPL is corporate-friendly.
Regardless of what you think, money talks, bullshit walks. And GPL has a lot of money behind it.
I also remember that benchmark, and the long list of excuses produced about how the systems weren't tuned correctly, or such-n-such development code should have used. I never saw anybody produce favorable benchmarks with a "correct" system.
At the very least, it left the impression that the *BSDs required significantly more administration overhead for what seems to be a fairly common DB configuraiton.
Systems are scaling out now, not up. By next year, commodity server systems will be shipping with 4-8 cores, and that will jump to 8-16 cores soon after. Even laptops will be dual-core. I contend that either an OS has their SMP shit together, or they are irrelvant.
+ That they didn't get the injunction is hardly a "bitchslapping". Apple likely will end up paying TigerDirect something.
+ AppleCorps is suing Apple RIGHT NOW, for breaking that old agreement with iTunes/iPod. Trial is set for next year.
You're citing popularity instead of reason. By your logic, Windows is the right choice for both server and desktop.
Look, there's a lot of good reasons that Windows got where it is, both historical and current, and that have nothing to do with anti-trust or market manipulation. Likewise, there's many many substantial reasons that Linux is deployed and FreeBSD isn't.
The tendancy of various communities to refuse to understand why their competitors become popular, and simply throw up their hands explains quite a bit why they are unpopular. You see this with Linux in the desktop market, and with FreeBSD in the the non-ISP server market.
I see this all over this discussion -- The BSDers are saying "Anything Linux can run, FreeBSD can run too". This is simply false. And until they figure it out, and make an effort to fix it, *BSD will be far behind in popularity.
Considering that pretty much any (every?) piece of software compiled for Linux can be run under FreeBSD with little hassle, I'd like to know how you can claim this with a straight face.
Quite easy -- Java. Last I checked, FreeBSD's only had a unsupported, old version of Java that didn't have proper thread support and was a "hassle" to install. And J2EE application servers are probably the single biggest reason companies deploy *nix systems, so this is hardly a little problem.
Most Mac fans seem to be making the exact same assumption -- nothing changes about Apple except the CPU. If and when Apple alters their pricing, model line-up, or business model, then we can discuss whether their marketshare will remain at 3% (not 5).
Regardless, even if Apple creates a miracle and doubles their marketshare to 5 or 6%, it will still take a couple years before Intel Macs make up a majority of the installed base.
In the financial market, companies spend big money for Linux support -- usually more than Windows' licensing costs. In either case, they're running software that costs $10K+ per server, so the OS cost is immaterial.
The move to Linux is finance was driven by cheaper hardware, not freebie versions of Linux. Despite your little fairytale about "Joe Geek", Linux is doing phenomonal in the cost-insensitive Enterprise market, but Windows still rules the tight-wallet SMB space.
My guess is that serious financial is not done on run-of-the-mill "commodity" hardware.
Well, it might be better stuff from HP, Dell, or IBM, but don't kid yourself, it's still commodity hardware.
Well, quad systems have been commodity hardware for about a decade now (PPro). Really nothing that special about them. My impression is that Linux developers have been targetting such systems for many more years than BSD developers.
Frankly, who *cares* what proprietary vendors are able to twist Linux into doing on their specific hardware?
I get the distinct impression you do. Are you saying the NetBSD project wouldn't welcome corporate support for better scalability?
BSD communities have a reputation of being condescending and elitist. This is mostly undeservedt
Through most of the 90s, the BSDers prided themselves with their elitism and their old school Unix cliquishness. I read the lists -- "If you aren't smart enough to figure it out, maybe you should go run Linux, haha." was a common sentiment.
Then, in about 1998, they realized that Linux was being deployed 100:1 over BSD and they had a collective "Oh shit!" moment. They then started a positive effort to be more open and helpful to new and less clueful users, but at that point it may have been too late.
I still read comments like "Well, if you aren't reading such-n-such mailing lists, you shouldn't be running FreeBSD 5", which implies that BSDers still see their world as being pretty small. Consider how many support outlets there are for Linux, and that only a miniscule portion of users read the development lists or come anywhere close to flamethrower-range of the main developers.
What the BSDers conviently ignore when they tell this story is that 386BSD forked four times in about 2 years while all of this AT&T stuff was going on. This of course delayed releases and so on -- hell, the original lead guy Bill Jolitz basically got so fed up that he took his ball and went home.
From an outsider's perspective the *BSD world must have looked one humungous nasty flamewar, while the Linux world was happily and quickly making progress. The Linux world gave themselves momentum, while BSDers were eating their own.
I see no need to pit them against each other, as they both provide freedom and excellence to the user.
FreeBSD has a bit of an identity crisis, they sorta see themselves as "Linux Junior", with a chip on their shoulders. Which is why every single pro-BSD article is basically a comparison to Linux.
If you look at how Linux has been positioned and marketed, they've never felt the need to "eat their own" and convert FreeBSD users. At least not in the last 10 years.
Linux has always been positioned for "world domination" -- first they convinced UNIX/RISC systems to convert, then scientific systems, then embedded systems, and now they are working on Windows systems. Whether it's Java/J2EE, or Oracle, or ERP, or StarOffice, Linux finds a way into a market. These are all new customers.
Meanwhile FreeBSDers sit back and look at the load-average on their sendmail servers and then wonder why the world isn't knocking on their door . Rather than define themselves somehow, they respond by nipping at Linux's heels.
Yes but there is the licenses issue. BSD style licenses vs the GPL. At least for companies to use the OS with there products.
Just as a factual matter, Linux and GPL software have recieved about 10^6 more corporate support than BSD-licenced software in recent years. The GPL has proven to be a very corporate-friendly license because it allows copyright holders to share their code without giving away the 'exploitation rights'.
Plus, I think you could argue that the big exception (Apple), was driven more by technical reasons than licensing ones. They started with an 1980s BSD-based OS, so FreeBSD code was a better fit. If OS X was a clean slate, who knows?
Ah, I'd forgotten about the Personal System/2 and AS/400 and S/390 and all those other brandnames. So there was a logic to it, but it still seems rather Gosplan-ish.
I post as "Nutscrape", and even I find that joke really, really lame.
how exciting of a name is OS X?
:). That way the installed base would see it as a "natural upgrade" rather than "a change to something different".
The brandname is actually MacOS X. Transitioning to a new OS can be very risky (and there's numerous failed attempts in computing history), so Apple obviously wanted to emphisize you were still using MacOS (even though you weren't
So, no, it's not like Apple doesn't care about branding (are you fuckng kidding?!?) -- "OS X" was a fairly boring name by design.
In Microsoft's case, it is not a new OS, so it's better to have a different sounding name to get people's attention. Using a real word makes a distinction from the old 98/ME/NT/XP mumble-jumble.
Now, if you want terrible branding with no particular logic, try "OS/2" (one of those failed new OSes I alluded to.)
I find no Internet evidence that either the TigerDirect or AppleCorps/iTunes lawsuits are anywhere close to being settled.
with (as I understand) an entirely different product in a non-competing market.
Yes, but I don't think that matters that much because both companies produce software products.
For example, I called my cool new Windows spreadsheet program "SuperLinux", I would not be surprised if Linus Torvolds' attorney served me some papers. Just the fact that the products are both software would be confusing to everyone. (And maybe when the shoe is on the other foot, the slashbots will understand what I'm talking about.)
Just imagine the sales calls:
"Hi this is Fred from Vista Software"
"Un, you mean like Windows Vista??"
"That's only the 10th time I've heard that today."
The thing is that a good brandname is worth zillions of dollars. I'm sure MS was fully aware of these guys and just figured they were small-fries that could easily be bought off. (And , I'm sure that Apple though the same way about TigerDirect, The Open Group, Apple Records, etc.)
All true, but you dodged the question that you quoted.
What "Advanced Software" was this HP group producing while Sun etc was translating these innovative concepts into real world products? And why did a company who has been oriented towards printers and PCs for the last decade even have a "Advanced Software" group to begin with? I'm all for Alan Kay having a mealticket, but let's face it -- even if he created another "innovation" at the same level as Smalltalk, HP would have no ability to package or market it.
I suppose. Although my usual problem is that the OS provides a feature, but the COM interface is either missing or crippled (for example, with encryption stuff).
You are still talking about upgrading a system that's less than one year old. That has nothing to do with "investments" and everything to do with your hobbies. (Although, unlike most Intel stuff, Socket 939 was pretty much designed only for the "enthusiast" market.)
For system-administration scripting, Windows can be annoying. For anything application-level, it is either (A) the same as other OSes, or (B) better. I'd like to see someone argue otherwise without resorting to hand-waving about "baroque libraries". (COM is designed for scripting, nothing baroque about using it there.)
The biggest issue is that you don't get as many little tools as you would with a Unix OS, but for a single installation, that's not that big of a deal.
Well, ESR hardly seemed like a big OS/2 fan, considering the jargon file entry for it:
The anointed successor to MS-DOS for Intel 286- and 386-based micros; proof that IBM/Microsoft couldn't get it right the second time, either. Often called 'Half-an-OS'. Mentioning it is usually good for a cheap laugh among hackers -- the design was so baroque, and the implementation of 1.x so bad, that three years after introduction you could still count the major apps shipping for it on the fingers of two hands -- in unary. The 2.x versions were said to have improved somewhat, and informed hackers rated them superior to Microsoft Windows (an endorsement which, however, could easily be construed as damning with faint praise).
http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/O/OS-2.html
There was a design factor as well. If you had File Sharing enabled and created a dial-up TCP/IP connection, Windows 95 would actually warn you about the security issue. Later versions of Windows dropped this dialog. (And as memory became less of an issue, enabled more services even on desktop OSes.)