Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1999 21:06:28 -0600 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: Tani Hosokawa <unknown@riverstyx.net> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: poor ethernet performance? Message-ID: <4.2.0.58.19990720203046.04430910@localhost> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.10.9907201430070.27096-100000@avarice.riverstyx .net> References: <4.2.0.58.19990720144745.0439ef00@localhost>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
At 02:30 PM 7/20/99 -0700, Tani Hosokawa wrote: >I'm curious -- How long has FreeBSD existed? The name "FreeBSD" was coined in 1993, IIRC. But BSD UNIX has been around for decades, and free versions were around quite awhile before FreeBSD as a project was started. 386BSD, Net/2, Net/3, and NetBSD all pre-date FreeBSD, I believe. FreeBSD is largely based on BSD 4.4-Lite, but has diverged farther from it than NetBSD or OpenBSD. Linux was first released during a period when the legal status of the BSDs was in doubt. But it was far, far behind the BSDs at that point, and was still really a "toy" even by the time the lawsuit was resolved. BSD, by contrast, was already mature. Linux passed the BSDs in installed base, features, and device support due to evangelism and idealism -- "good memes," as my friends who are into Memetics say. FreeBSD is lagging behind because the nominal leaders of the project have not adopted similar approaches. Even OpenBSD is gaining on FreeBSD, albeit slowly, due to its reputation as a security- focused OS at a time when security is becoming a big concern. This is occurring despite a smaller development group, a project leader with a reputation for abrasiveness (though I personally like him), a less user-friendly install, less optimization for the x86 platform (they need to remain platform-independent, after all), and less widespread distribution. I'm now working with some investors who seem as if they might be interested in doing a heavily promoted, marketed, and supported BSD OS distribution. They don't want to reimplement the wheel or create a fragmentary effort, and so want to track an existing code base. They're currently torn between FreeBSD and OpenBSD as a basis for that package. OpenBSD is missing a lot of things FreeBSD has got, but frankly, they're worried about the FreeBSD development team's antipathy toward evangelism. I'm rooting for FreeBSD as the final choice. So, I'm really hoping that the FreeBSD team will be willing to accept, if grudgingly, a more evangelistic approach to promoting the OS by third parties. --Brett Glass To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?4.2.0.58.19990720203046.04430910>