From owner-freebsd-advocacy Fri Mar 26 7:20:14 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from iquest3.iquest.net (iquest3.iquest.net [209.43.20.203]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id D2BDD14C08 for ; Fri, 26 Mar 1999 07:20:13 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from toor@y.dyson.net) Received: (qmail 18763 invoked from network); 26 Mar 1999 15:19:49 -0000 Received: from dyson.iquest.net (HELO y.dyson.net) (198.70.144.127) by iquest3.iquest.net with SMTP; 26 Mar 1999 15:19:49 -0000 Received: (from toor@localhost) by y.dyson.net (8.9.3/8.9.1) id KAA01629; Fri, 26 Mar 1999 10:19:46 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199903261519.KAA01629@y.dyson.net> Subject: Re: Swan song In-Reply-To: <199903261349.IAA01571@pechter.dyndns.org> from Bill Pechter at "Mar 26, 99 08:49:13 am" To: bpechter@shell.monmouth.com Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 10:19:46 -0500 (EST) Cc: brett@lariat.org, advocacy@freebsd.org From: "John S. Dyson" Reply-To: dyson@iquest.net X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL38 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Bill Pechter said: > > I hate to say this, but Linux has won for the time being. > I'm considering a switch to NetBSD or Linux here at home because of > a number of problems with the direction FreeBSD has taken with the 3.x > and 4.x releases. > > I've pushed hard to get FreeBSD into work, but I've begun working with > Linux at the office and it requires much less push to get it adopted. > That is similar to what happened to me at NCI, the direction is more of a NetBSD and another (which I cannot talk about yet). Oracle did Linux probably because of pure numbers, an appearance of critical mass, and the advocacy that certain people with 'le bec fin' seem to hate so much. After all of what I had tried to do, the total lack of *effective* marketing support just scuttled whatever FreeBSD could offer. There have been almost NO technical complaints about FreeBSD (that we couldn't resolve), but goof-ball market positioning (depending on technical excellence only, and misunderstanding what marketing is) was disaster. The fear of legitimate technical comparisons needs to be resolved, with organized comparative analysis done for real world applications. The fear that I always had (even when I gave out technical performance measurements) was giving away too much info to the competition. I still have very, very nice (but ugly) performance measurement tools... I certainly wouldn't release much information about those, but spending time with the real applications gives enough info to the end-user, while not giving very much info to the competition. On the technical side, I suggest that those who make changes that impact performance, should develop carefully constructed performance measurement tools. There is alot of risk of cowboy development breaking things. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dyson@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdyson@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message