Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2014 10:11:28 -0700 From: Matt Olander <matt@ixsystems.com> To: Jordan Hubbard <jkh@mail.turbofuzz.com> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org, current@freebsd.org, freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Leaving the Desktop Market Message-ID: <CAK6u07Vfpe4VJUSh7QxK8JTbRanMNs2qQR7tK6dxFdph7E6e0Q@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <A70900DF-4BAA-427F-8731-01211FFD1887@mail.turbofuzz.com> References: <CAF6rxgkeBozvfV-L0%2BrFZ6fWRn0=Gi3BNq1kPL=-HTq0TD6MkQ@mail.gmail.com> <A70900DF-4BAA-427F-8731-01211FFD1887@mail.turbofuzz.com>
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On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 12:11 AM, Jordan Hubbard <jkh@mail.turbofuzz.com> wr= ote: > > On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Eitan Adler <lists@eitanadler.com> wrote: > >> That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the >> desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be "year of the Linux >> desktop" and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for >> server or embedded use. >> >> Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I >> must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the >> Linux world? > > The fact that this posting comes out on April 1st makes me wonder if it's= just an elaborate April Fool's joke, but then the notion of *BSD (or Linux= , for that matter) on the Desktop is just another long-running April fool's= joke, so I'm willing to postulate that two April Fools jokes would simply = cancel each other out and make this posting a serious one again. :-) > > I'll choose to be serious and say what I'm about to say in spite of the f= act that I work for the primary sponsor of PC-BSD and actually like the fac= t that it has created some interesting technologies like PBIs, the Jail War= den, Life-preserver and a ZFS boot environment menu. > > There is no such thing as a desktop market for *BSD or Linux. There neve= r has been and there never will be. Why do you think we chose "the power = to serve" as FreeBSD's first marketing slogan? It makes a fine server OS a= nd it's easy to defend its role in the server room. It's also becoming eas= ier to defend its role as an embedded OS, which is another excellent niche = to pursue and I am happy to see all the recent developments there. > > A desktop? Unless you consider Mac OS X to be "BSD on the desktop" (and = while they share some common technologies, it's increasingly a stretch to s= ay that), it's just never going to happen for (at least) the following reas= ons: As you may imagine, I completely disagree! The Internet just had it's 20th birthday (it can't even drink yet!) and it's anyone's game. This is like trying to predict automobile technology and dominant car-makers by 1905. There's always room for competition. Take a look at what's happening right now in the auto-industry. Tesla came out of nowhere 125 years after the invention of the automobile and is doing pretty well. I bet there were a lot of people at Apple saying they couldn't compete in the music-player market, or the mobile-phone market, etc. In fact, if I look at the stats on freenas.org, we have about 350k visitors each month, with nearly 2% of them running FreeBSD and clearly using it to surf the internet. Sounds like a market to me! Long live the FreeBSD desktop, long live PC-BSD :P Cheers, -matt
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