Advocacy on ZDNet

[Johnson David]

On Tuesday 30 March 2004 02:42 am, Charon wrote:
> Anyone care to comment on this at www.zdnet.com.au
>
> 	To anonymous FreeBSD user.
>
> 	Due to its licence, FreeBSD cannot become an enterprise platform
> 	from the vendor's perspective. They all fear heavy proprietisation
> 	and forking of any non-GPL codebase.

This is nonsense. If these commercial enterprise users are truly 
concerned about the license, they are more than free to fork off a GPL 
distribution of FreeBSD! Certainly whatever code they themselves make 
can be licensed however they want it.

The licensing may be of concern to a hacker, who's actually contributing 
to the project, but it's of no concern to a company who merely wants to 
use the OS.

> 	The only OS that can fly to where the Open Source world wants it to
> 	fly is Linux, FreeBSD is now 5+ years behind in terms of enterprise
> 	readiness. Please keep up with the times and avoid this whole OS
> 	pissing contest thing.

It all depends on what he means by "enterprise readiness". If he was 
talking about IBM mainframes, he may be correct. But the vast majority 
of enterprises will NEVER have an IBM mainframe. In other areas of 
enterprise readiness, we're at the roughly the same level as Linux. A 
bit behind in some, a bit ahead in others. FreeBSD is not going to do 
as good of a job on a Sun Enterprise Server as Solaris, but then 
neither will Linux.

> 	Remember, we're not talking single-CPU internet servers anymore.
> 	FreeBSD cannot scale to 64 CPUs nor does it have the hardware
> support necessary to breach the enterprise space.

Linux can't scale to 64 CPUs either. So what's the point? And what is 
the necessary hardware support? When I can fill a roomful of racks with 
made-for-FreeBSD 7U quad Xeons, the only thing missing for "enterprise 
readiness" is perception.

David