Lennart Poettering: BSD Isn't Relevant Anymore

[Michael Sierchio]

IMHO what has helped Linux is the existence of commercial
distributions with support - Red Hat, SUSE, etc.  The only attempts to
do this for BSD have been undercapitalized and/or half-hearted.

But I find the general premise of the discussion to be - how to say
this politely? - stupid.  Things that interest me are relevant, things
that don't presumably are not, until they are.

- Michael  (FreeBSD since 2.2.2)

On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 2:03 PM, Sam George <tech at dracoquies.us> wrote:
> On 7/17/2011 05:10, Jerry wrote:
>>
>> While I usually consider Slashdot nothing more than a bunch of
>> juveniles ranting against Microsoft; however, I did find this rather
>> interesting post this morning.
>>
>> "Lennart Poettering: BSD Isn't Relevant Anymore"
>>
>>
>> <http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/11/07/16/0020243/Lennart-Poettering-BSD-Isnt-Relevant-Anymore>
>>
>> Interestingly enough, a great deal of it is true. It might be
>> interesting to know how others feel about it. Obviously, asking that
>> question on this forum is like playing against a stacked deck; however,
>> it still might prove interesting.
>
> Having come to BSD from Linux less than a month ago, I find it interesting
> that the very thing, which Mr. Pottering is encouraging in Linux
> development, is what has lead me to search for other options besides Linux.
>  Of late Linux has been loosing the 'plays well with others award'.  First
> they cut the .AppleDouble support from the appletalk drivers, then they
> refused to let the ReiserFS code into the kernel, and I suppose their lack
> of implementing ZFS is possibly same motivation (given that they _do_ have
> the man power to port the code).
>
> If they feel that they are an end-all and be-all and don't need to support
> "legacy" systems, obscure hardware, or other ways of doing things, well,
> I'll find another way.  This thing is about Freedom, if they cut that from
> their development plan, then it's time to say farewell.
>
> Pottering seems to have forgotten, or perhaps he is too young to remember?
> Linux was a 'toy OS'.  And if it's too big a burden to support 'toy OS'es
> then Pottering is no different from the people who worked at the big
> companies twenty years ago.
>
> Getting back to the message I'm replying to, I disagree with mr pottering's
> basis statements: "If Debian was my project I'd try to focus on making (or
> keeping) it _professionally relevant_"  -- I'll translate this as: If it
> ain't business and making money, drop it.  "...we want to make sure Linux
> enters the mainstream all across the board."  --  This sounds like desktop
> systems to me, but there is much more to the world than the shrinking market
> share of the desktop.  UNIX was born in the research world as a pet project
> to have fun -- written after hours.  BSD continued that journey toward
> freedom recoding the parts of UNIX that had been stripped out by
> unscrupulous business dealings.  Hopefully Linux won't turn out to be an
> evolutionary miss-step, but...
>
> If Kerningham and Richie were focused on staying 'professionally relevant'
> UNIX would never have /existed/, and as its decedents, neither would have
> BSD or Linux.  Is BSD relevant?  Looks like it's /essential/ given the
> context of the question.
>
> Live Free.
>
> Sam George
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