Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 13:19:30 +0200 (CEST) From: Konrad Heuer <kheuer2@gwdg.de> To: Guy Van Sanden <n.b@myrealbox.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Post about BSD's alleged demise on /. Message-ID: <20030710130101.X53219-100000@gwdu60.gwdg.de> In-Reply-To: <1057830936.109.11.camel@horus>
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On 10 Jul 2003, Guy Van Sanden wrote: > I saw this post on /. today, under the announcement about a FreeBSD 5.1 > review. > > Is there much truth is this? > How many FreeBSD servers are out there? And is there number declining? > > I really hope that BSD will be arround for a long time to come... > > Kind regards > > Guy > > http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=70502&cid=6404771 > > It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying > > Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when > recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 > percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest 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 > [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test. > > You don't need to be a Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] 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. > > 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 hobbyist 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. > > Fact: *BSD is dead To my mind this contribution on /. misses some interesting and important facts. I've been a FreeBSD user since 2.0-RELEASE and I see the following facts: * FreeBSD today runs on five hardware platforms now; some years ago, only one was supported. * A lot of books cover FreeBSD today; some years ago, there was only one. * Hardware manufacturers supply drivers for FreeBSD today; some years ago, none did so. These things do make me believe that FreeBSD isn't dead. It would make no sense to publish books noone will read and to supply drivers noone will use. The number of FreeBSD developers and users must have grown if new platforms get supported, I suppose. I don't know about the number of BSD oriented servers on the net. I'm sure that will be hard to stand against improved MS operating systems like the 2003 server. It will be a hard stand against Linux sponsored by IBM and others with lots of money. Maybe Linux is better today in some aspects of system performance than FreeBSD. But things will change as they always did. Best regards Konrad Konrad Heuer (kheuer2@gwdg.de) ____ ___ _______ GWDG / __/______ ___ / _ )/ __/ _ \ Am Fassberg / _// __/ -_) -_) _ |\ \/ // / 37077 Goettingen /_/ /_/ \__/\__/____/___/____/ Germany
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