Why Are You Using FreeBSD?

[Thomas Steen Rasmussen]

On 01-06-2012 13:39, Daniel Kalchev wrote:
>
> Instead, lead by example. Showcase. Demonstrate how superior FreeBSD
> is because the people who keep it going are not interested to be the
> Jack of All Trades (and master of none). Showcase implementations that
> are hard to do with any other OS.

This.

When we (the Danish BSD usergroup BSD-DK) go to opensource
conferences we always have running FreeBSD systems in our
booth doing live demos of what FreeBSD can do. This is fun for
us and very popular with visitors.

- 2010 was pf-pfsync-carp failover firewalls. People get
impressed when you pull the plug on one node and stuff keeps
running.

- 2011 was a HAST/ZFS failover system with a virtualbox VM
running on the shared storage. Again, pulling the plug on
one node and showing that the VM keeps running has a big
'wow-factor'.

- 2012 was the 'year of the jail' for us. We demonstrated
jail management with ezjail, recursive jails, ressource
control with rctl and lots more.

All these have been major successes in the sense that people
are impressed, grab a cd and go home to try it out. We often
hear that people didn't know that FreeBSD was capable of this
and that.

I firmly believe that live demonstrations of unique features
is the best way to get more (of the right kind of) people to
run FreeBSD.

Best regards,

Thomas Steen Rasmussen
Chairman, BSD-DK