Some ideas for FreeBSD

[Chad Perrin]

On Sun, Feb 10, 2008 at 12:11:29AM -0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> > [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Tore Lund
> > Sent: Saturday, February 09, 2008 12:49 PM
> > To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> > Subject: Re: Some ideas for FreeBSD
> > 
> > 
> > Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> > > Reason # 1 to be happy with Linux:  It attracts all the morons who
> > > would otherwise fuck up FreeBSD? 
> > 
> > I do wish people would not be "happy" about missing users.  Being rid of
> > all the "morons" means that we are also rid of proper attention from
> > companies like Adobe and Nvidia.  Some of us see that as a drawback.
> 
> No, this isn't true at all for the hardware vendors like Nvidia.
> When a hardware vendor contemplates entering a market like FreeBSD
> they have 3 major concerns.  First, is market size.  However, second
> is ease of porting to the OS, and last is the liklihood of having to
> supply technical support.
> 
> If you have a large market but everyone in the market is a moron and
> will be calling you for tech support, your going to make less money
> than a smaller market where everyone is an expert and nobody is calling
> you for tech support.  What is double plus good is that there's
> experts floating around in the small market who will do your support for
> you, including writing your drivers, all you have to do is supply
> a minimal set of programming interface docs.  This is a far cry from
> Windows where you have to write and debug the driver and pay Microsoft
> a lot of money to get it certified.

I think you're overlooking a major drawback of having less "mindshare",
though.  As more hardware vendors finally start to "see the light", and
release open source drivers, they have a tendency to follow the licensing
model Linux uses because that's the open source OS with which they're
familiar.  That means that, a dismaying percentage of the time, we don't
get BSD-licensed (or similarly permissively licensed) drivers.

I, for one, am not pleased with this state of affairs.


> 
> As for attention from Adobe, doesen't it bother you to use a free OS
> merely as a platform for running commercial software?  How about
> ditching the commercial software completely and using free open
> source tools on the free OS?  That's what FreeBSD is all about, honey.

In theory, I'm with you.  In practice, I have the Linux Flash player
plugin and Neverwinter Nights installed on this laptop (both from FreeBSD
ports) -- neither of which is open source.

Believe me when I say I wish they were both released under a copyfree [1]
license.

[1]: http://www.copyfree.org/

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);