Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2000 20:07:57 -0500 From: Sergey Babkin <babkin@bellatlantic.net> To: Dennis <dennis@etinc.com> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Is FreeBSD dead? Well, not in theory... Message-ID: <38C99C6D.71069A08@bellatlantic.net> References: <200003101712.MAA12621@etinc.com> <200003101840.NAA12885@etinc.com>
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Dennis wrote: > the people buying linux servers from VAR research and the like dont care > about source, they care about functinality. Thats why BSDI doesnt get it. > its not about the source, its about the price. People perceive that BSD/OS > and FreeBSD are substantially similar in functionalty, and freebsd is free. I guess one of the throubles stalking them was the name of the product. First it was BSD/386 which was easily confused with 386BSD. Then BSD/OS which was not much better because inevitably caused a question "_which_ BSD OS, you say? Ah, the BSDI one!" > The source is only important to a tiny, tiny portion of the market. The > hackers list is not the market...corporate america is the market. > > We all have source to the eepro driver but if DG doesnt fix it it doesnt > get fixed. I'll take a driver that works anyday over the option to fix it > myself. and so will most commercial entities. I think that's a fundamental mistake. Of course a driver without sources that works is better than the one with sources but not working. But the trouble is that too often you can't say in advance if some particular driver will work well. And the one with sources thus has additional warranty. > The "strategy" is not to sell to existing BSD-heads. Its to create > incremental business. BSDI doesnt do all that advertsiing just to appeal to > existing die hards. They are trying to get people to use their product > instead of NT. Instead of Linux. The existing BSD market is too small. They > have failed to convince the world that BSD is the answer. Outside of the > US. linux is totally dominant. One of the reasons was that Linux was able to run the Oracle for SCO Unix very early. BSDI did not have this compatibility for a long time nor their own port of Oracle. And not even Informix. So they were immediately out of competition with any other Unix maker in the database-oriented market. > Although in the BSD arena you are right. I told the DOM of BSDI at a show > that their decision to support our competitors card in their OS and shun > everyone else cost them hundreds of sales a year, because all Development of the drivers is expensive, especially for a small company. For example, SCO is much bigger than BSDI and still does not develop any network nor disk drivers except IDE because that's not cost effective, it just gets the drivers from the card manufacturers. So I guess what your company could have done was develop a driver for BSDI and give it to them. -SB To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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