Where is FreeBSD going?

[Allan Bowhill]

On  0, Timothy Beyer <beyert at cs.ucr.edu> wrote:
:Brett Glass wrote:
:>FreeBSD also keeps falling farther and farther behind Linux in the area of
:>advocacy (and, hence, corporate adoption)
:
:Granted, this is true.  However, you should be more specific when you 
:refer to advocacy.  When I think of the term "advocacy," blind, relentless 
:loyalty comes to mind.  This is one of the things that bothers me about 
:Linux in particular, since it seems to have the most "advocates" of any OS 
:that I have used.  Linux Users and Developers [in the "advocate" category] 
:insist Linux is "superior" to other offerings, (usually windows, when in 
:actuality, its strengths are quite different) quite often without stating, or even 
:understanding what exactly constitutes these "superior" qualities of the 
:operating system.   This comes across to most people as zealotry, and as a 
:result, people will think less of the hard work done by the developers, many 
:of whom would only express an opinion that they fully understood.  Quite 
:frankly, it was this type of behavior in the Linux community that kept me 
:away from using non-proprietary operating systems for a long, long time.

I empathize. Being alienated by platform twits has a damning effect.

You can get the same deception from any community that surrounds a
software platform, not just Linux. Apple, MS, Java, C, C++ advocates
come to mind. Some are more knowlegable than others.

The knowlegable ones can be just as bad.

I had a similar problem with C. Back in the early 90's in Seattle there
were a lot of technically adept but socially arrogant people who knew
the language. They basically owned the programming subculture here.
They worked at the big companies, and were lucky enough to get their
compilers and knowledge for free, or nearly that.

I don't know whether these people were advocates of anything other than
themselves and their C-ness. But, when you would talk to them, they
appeared to be honest in saying C was the language of choice for
everything (aka DOS). Maybe this should be called advocacy in-place.

Being an outsider who wanted to learn C, I had a very hard time
getting information or tools to play with it. To get any information, I
had to grovel to some abusive twerp on a BBS for a morsel of knowledge,
or figure out how to save up 100's of dollars to buy a compiler suite 
out of chump-change from restaurant jobs.

The platform twerps turned me off to the language. When the tools and
documentation became available to me ala Linux, I already had a full-
blown aversion to learning it.

Years later, I took a course in it. Now I know the big systems
programming language of C is just a dinky pea-shooter of a language. And
no great shakes to learn. So, it comforts me to know that all those
egotistical twerps I had to deal with were hiding their big secret
behind an oak leaf.

Strangely, it seems that even bad advocacy draw people to knowlege.

-- 
Allan Bowhill
abowhill at blarg.net

You don't sew with a fork, so I see no reason to eat with knitting
needles.
                -- Miss Piggy, on eating Chinese Food
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