Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1999 19:06:53 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> To: Jeremy Shaffner <jer@jorsm.com> Cc: Bob.Sullivan@MSNBC.com, sgd@tfm.com, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: MSNBC Article Message-ID: <5479.932695613@zippy.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 22 Jul 1999 15:25:08 CDT." <Pine.BSF.3.95q.990722143613.11007I-100000@mercury.jorsm.com>
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There are a few other mistakes in this otherwise interesting article, unfortunately, and I'll take them in order of appearance. It's also a shame that I didn't get the voice mail from MSNBC until the day the article went to press since, with a little more advance notice, I could have helped to prevent many of the following errors: 1. Hotmail is *still* using FreeBSD, not just having begun with it, and now has close to 2000 FreeBSD machines serving up web pages. I believe Solaris machines are used for back-end mail delivery. They're not the only Microsoft-owned company using FreeBSD aggressively either; Link Exchange is another large FreeBSD user. 2. Not all the BSD groups were giving CDs away at DEFCON, only FreeBSD. I believe the OpenBSD group was selling theirs, for example, so it's not quite accurate to use "BSD" as the classifcation in that context. 3. BSD actually only had 2 variants when Linus Torvalds first started with Linux, 386BSD and BSD/OS. The others came along either slightly after this or some years later. 4. Berkeley never funded the 386BSD effort in any way, the "split" coming about because 386BSD stopped making public progress. 5. FreeBSD does more than "optimize BSD for Intel" - we have also gone out of our way to make the system more approachable by the average user, much as companies like Red Hat and Caldera have done for Linux. We also now run on the DEC Alpha architecture and will be tackling the SPARC, PowerPC and ARM architectures in the near future. 6. The comments about Oracle not being interested may be premature; discussions with them are still ongoing and I think it's too early to say that FreeBSD, at least, will remain Oracle-less for the forseeable future. It should also have been noted that FreeBSD is more than capable of running Linux applications, including Oracle, and is how many people currently run applications like StarOffice and Applixware. Applix has also done a native port of their product to FreeBSD and we're currently in test testing phase before bringing it to market. This was otherwise an excellent article and I look forward to working with the author, or with MSNBC, on more material like this in the future should they care to expand their coverage of the BSD world. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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