Post about BSD's alleged demise on /.

[Guy Van Sanden]

Hi

I saw this post on /. today, under the announcement about a FreeBSD 5.1
review.

Is there much truth is this?
How many FreeBSD servers are out there? And is there number declining?

I really hope that BSD will be arround for a long time to come...

Kind regards

Guy


http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=70502&cid=6404771

It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying

Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when
recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1
percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft
survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this
news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing
in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last
[samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict *BSD's
future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In
fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying.
Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware,
*BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of
blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of
its core developers.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers. 

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How
many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus
NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there
are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about
half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users
of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD
market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users.
This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts. 

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD
went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another
troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet
another charnel house. 

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share.
*BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If
*BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD
continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this
point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead. 

Fact: *BSD is dead