Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 16:48:25 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> To: The Hermit Hacker <scrappy@hub.org> Cc: "Jason C. Wells" <jcwells@u.washington.edu>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: From Slashdot... Message-ID: <79926.917830105@zippy.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 31 Jan 1999 19:53:03 -0400." <Pine.BSF.4.05.9901311936300.374-100000@thelab.hub.org>
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> This is still the point that I'm trying to find out...what is it that we > are trying to "do a good job at"? If I liked/wanted Linux, I'd The server. The server the server the server. Have I made the point clearly enough? :-) Our slogan is also "the power to serve", and while I think that doesn't exactly substitute for a mission statement, it does give a fairly reasonable indication of where we're headed and what we think our primary strengths are. > ...by and far, the *hardest* ones to convert over at the ones that see > Linux and the fact that Gaming companies are starting to do some serious > games for Linux...us, we have a very good Linux emulation, but, like Gaming users are not our focus and never will be. To be honest, I also think the Linux games (and perhaps the entire multimedia) market is a flash in the pan. If I want to play games, I turn to a Windows box and that's a trend which is only going to increase as the gaming public gets jaded with everything that's hot now and demands ever more fancy 3D, audio and game controller hardware. I stated earlier that if I wanted a multimedia desktop, I'd run Linux. If I want a game machine, however, I'd run Windows. I can't GET any of the decent games for Linux and if you look very closely at that market, you'll see it's 90% comprised of folks porting old, clapped-out games for which the manufacturers no longer see any significant value. In other words, it's sort of the elephant's graveyard for gaming. > Look at Solaris...Sun just recently announced they were going to start > working on Linux emulation also...nothing about xBSD, only Linux...where > are failing (if we are failing?) as far as users are concerned? Why would they want to do BSD emulation? Where are all the BSD apps that Solaris users want to run? I think you're rather missing the point here as far as how things are driven in this industry. > I'm not afraid to *pay* for something, but how do we convince the > companies out there developing software that there are ppl willing to pay > for the software? By being willing to pay for it, plain and simple. So far, those few companies who've dived into the FreeBSD multimedia market have gotten burned by very poor sales and that's the "convincing" that needed to happen but didn't. I'm hoping that Applixware for FreeBSD sells a few copies, of course, but I don't expect it to be anything close to what's sold for Linux. It's more of a checkbox item so that we're not totally without an office suite (those loads-of-xterms X users do also occasionally need to format and print things in fancy ways). Now given all of that, we have two choices: We can sit and sulk about the state of the FreeBSD desktop market (been there, done that) or we can realize that maybe our strengths lie elsewhere and we need to focus on our strenghts (doing that too :). Frankly, I think their Unix on the desktop strategy is fundamentally a losing one anyway and that the Linux folks are chasing a brass ring that's only receding ever more rapidly into the distance. Sure, it gets them lots of users in the short term since the great percentage of people run desktop machines, but it also leaves them increasingly vulnerable to a Microsoft which is very very strong on the desktop and has shown itself to take an exceeding dim view of competition. I see more "standards" like DirectX and DirectAudio progressively pushing Linux out of what little niche it has on the desktop, at which time many of those casting the Linux protest vote will either switch back to Windows again or find a stronger protest vote in desktop-oriented OSes like BeOS. Be's desktop is pretty slick, albeit very early technology, and if I had to run a non-microsoft commercial desktop environment then that would probably be it. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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