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Date:      Fri, 26 Mar 1999 10:19:46 -0500 (EST)
From:      "John S. Dyson" <dyson@iquest.net>
To:        bpechter@shell.monmouth.com
Cc:        brett@lariat.org, advocacy@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Swan song
Message-ID:  <199903261519.KAA01629@y.dyson.net>
In-Reply-To: <199903261349.IAA01571@pechter.dyndns.org> from Bill Pechter at "Mar 26, 99 08:49:13 am"

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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.


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