Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1998 14:45:58 -0500 (CDT) From: Derek Laufenberg <laufen@wi.net> To: laufen@wi.net Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Fw: Your Article "Freeware: The Heart & Soul of the Internet" Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980410135406.274B-100000@chardonnay.vineyard> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.95q.980410083442.10264B-100000@federation.addy.com>
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I've been reading this thread and finally decided to throw my .02 cents in. I've been a user of FreeBSD for about 3+ years and have watched the OS grow and improve since 2.0. I selected it over linux because it had to me a more reputable background (4.4BSD). Numerous times I have tried to use the product with in a corporate environment and have gotten shot down by bean counters, marketing weenies, and narrow minded Micro$oft share holders I've worked with. For the record, I was with GE - Medical Systems at the time. Let me review a situation or two. Corporations like GE like the warm and fuzzy feeling of having some other legal entity which they can blame should a problem occur. The mindset is that if support is needed, they can go to the company which sells the OS. Even GE has trouble getting useful support form MSFT, but that doesn't stop the big public agreements which force the use of only their products. The source is available line of argument never seemed to help the support objections. I don't know why, since anytime we incorporated a product into one of our products, we would get a source escrow. I guess the source is hard and takes experts to fix. Beleive or not, I had one of the legal staff tell me that with the name "FreeBSD" we shouldn't use it inside one of our products. It implies an inferior level of technology - clearly, a "you get what you pay for" line of thought. (You should have seen him go over the GPL for some compression code one of my engineers incorporated.) I remember the "whats in a name" thread a few years back. I really wished a new "Marketron"(tm) name would have been selected. "Free" in the coporate world is only good if the customer doesn't know it was free. I did manage to get FreeBSD into one product. It slipped by only because it was for a university research program and would have a limited distribution. (oh yea, the M$FT solution would have cost $1000 more) When our group was force fed PCs for SW development, when our primary tools were Sun/Unix. The "correct" solution was to run xterminal software on the PCs connected to a Sun server. Then two sun servers. Soon six sun servers... We were told to stop using Emacs because it was a resource pig... I brought in my own Freebsd box to show an alternative, but I was told corporate policy prevented users from changing the operating system - or even adding personal software. Yes, Dilbert is a documentary. One valid complaint was made, that was that there were no good tools for working with MS-WORD documents. I still think this is true. I run the StarOffice stuff (not available at the time of this incident) now, but find it very slow and not very compatible. Our system adminstrator made the objection the FreeBSD was insecure and should not be used. His theory was that source code was public so it could be hacked... What I think is needed is the following: 1) A corporate release version of product with - Marketron name - Word, Excel, and Win/NT networking work-a-likes - GUI installed at setup (most corporate admins I've worked with can't handle XF86config files.) - include many office/user packages as part of the install - netscape 2) A support company which charges $$$ for support. - advertising (maybe with enough of this "FreeBSD" name can stay) - (800/900) support number - list of corporate users and the products 3) Stable, predictable releases - Ok, we have this. :) 4) GUI admin tools - adduser, backup, DNS for weenies, ... (i've seen some talk, but they need to be incorporated like AIX or Slowaris) 5) simplified printer setup - GUI I'm sure there are hundreds of other "needs" others can come up with. Thanks for letting me vent a bit. I am truely impressed with the quality of FreeBSD. It has the potential to be a silver bullet, but it needs killer applications - WORD & Excel. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Derek Laufenberg Laufenberg Consulting laufen@wi.net Networking, DICOM To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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