Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 22:32:08 +0100 From: Anthony Atkielski <atkielski.anthony@wanadoo.fr> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Thank you! Message-ID: <103965421.20050114223208@wanadoo.fr> In-Reply-To: <e8.aa6fa22.2f1961e8@aol.com> References: <e8.aa6fa22.2f1961e8@aol.com>
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Freebsd0101@aol.com writes: Fac> The entire point of this extended discussion, for those who have Fac> paid attention, is that FreeBSD 4.x, which is admittedly the Fac> fastest version available, DOES NOT work with intel's fastest CPUs Fac> because it doesnt support the necessary chipsets ... While I'll grant that this is an inconvenience, it doesn't seem to be any different from any other software publisher's policies. Most publishers will stop improving an older release family at some point in favor of a new release family. There are both good and not-so-good reasons for such policies. One good reason is that trying to continually move forward with two independent release families requires nearly twice the resources of a single family, and spreads development resources quite thin. One not-so-good reason is that old release families aren't as much fun to code for programmers as new families are, and so developers like to find reasons to abandon them. I have the same problem with other operating systems, and with other applications. My old copy of Windows NT Server won't run on or support many modern hardware configurations--that's what forced me to install Windows XP on another machine. Worse yet, I can't recycle the NT machine because some of the essential applications and hardware I use have been abandoned in Windows XP. New versions of Windows server OSes cost far more than the (already expensive) old versions, too. I don't see how this is any better than the situation with FreeBSD. Fac> ... AND, that freebsd "people" would rather ridicule people that Fac> ask why than fix things. People who work on FreeBSD have a rather puerile tendency to push away anyone who says anything they don't want to hear--I'll certainly grant that. While one can understand a certain lack of enthusiasm from a volunteer organization (they receive nothing for their efforts, so one can hardly expect them to jump on every problem and work three shifts to fix it), actively rejecting anyone who doesn't say nice things is a bit immature. This is, IMO, the single greatest obstacles to using FreeBSD in corporate and mission-critical environments, and it's the main reason why I'd be extremely hesitant about recommending FreeBSD in such environments, unless the organization in question has highly qualified in-house technicians to support the OS. You need someone to fix the OS urgently if a serious problem develops, and developers who get all pouty and stop answering the phone if you don't constantly say good things about their work are dangerously unreliable for support. Fortunately, FreeBSD is extremely reliable. But if you are using it for mission-critical production, you need to hire someone who can fix the OS on the spot if something does go wrong, because you probably won't be able to get adequate support for it from a third party. Of course, this is true for several flavors of UNIX, not just FreeBSD. It tends to militate against open-source software generally. Proprietary solutions cost a fortune, but their publishers won't stomp off in a huff just when you need them most. Fac> So your claim that its a "heavy-duty server" platform is tainted by Fac> the fact that in order to use the fastest server Mobos, you have to Fac> use the slower, still-under-development 5.x. Which seems Fac> counterproductive for an O/S that is trying to establish itself as Fac> a choice as a server platform. If you are using the fastest server motherboards, then you can afford to run an operating system that is a tiny bit slower ... assuming that this is only a temporary situation, of course. If 5.x _never_ achieves parity with 4.x for performance, that's a much more serious problem. New release families should always be more performant than old release families (and don't bother to tell me that it can't be done, because I know it _can_ be done). One reason I've moved away from Windows is that it has consistently bloated over its lifetime, making every new release slower than its predecessors, and I'm not getting enough with each new release to justify the loss of performance. -- Anthony
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