Lennart Poettering: BSD Isn't Relevant Anymore

[Arthur Barlow]

> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2011 14:00:49 +0200
> From: Jerome Herman <jherman at dichotomia.fr>
> Subject: Re: Lennart Poettering: BSD Isn't Relevant Anymore
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Message-ID: <4E242071.9050204 at dichotomia.fr>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> On 17/07/2011 15:02, "C. Bergström" wrote:
>>  On 07/17/11 07:43 PM, Dick Hoogendijk wrote:
>>> Op 17-7-2011 14:17 schreef Subbsd:
>>>> community decreases. It is a pity that many developers of FreeBSD have
>>>> left in Apple, the small part works over {NET,OPEN,DRAGONFLY}.BSD but
>>>> as a whole it already absolutely small small groups of people.
>>> And do you feel this will be the end of FreeBSD?
>> I doubt that *BSD will *end*, but at which point does lack of usage
>> make an OS irrelevant?
>>
>> 1) Is it used in production?  If so does it serve a critical role?
>> 2) What commercial support options are available?  (Also what popular
>> commercial/proprietary software are available )
>> 3) How well is it keeping pace with existing sw and hw technologies?
>> 4) How focused and productive is the development community?
>>
>> I have some personal views on the above, but I consider *BSD severely
>> lacking in a few areas.  (No I can't personally help and only kick
>> these questions off from the sidelines)
>>
>> Software typically exists to solve a problem.  What problem is *BSD
>> trying to solve?  If something serves a purpose then there should be
>> no denying it's future relevance.
> The problem *BSD is trying to solve (in my humble opinion) is reliable
> long term maintenance, from developers and sysadmin point of view.
> Linux frequent API/ABI breaks makes it a real hell to maintain. And the
> ever changing method of configuration/ever moving location of
> configuration files doesn't help.
>
>  *BSD are stable in every sense of the word.
>
> This of course implies that there are a lot fewer "advanced" features in
> BSD than in Linux (by advanced I actually mean hyped). But then again
> most of these features end up in the rubbish can with Linux. SE-Linux ?
> Realtime ? Hal ? Containers ? You do not want to look in what state they
> are in. And you hardly want to learn how to use them as the entire thing
> is very likely to change completely before 6 months are passed.
>
> Jerome Herman
>
Amen!!

I'm sick and tired of Linux people reinventing the wheel five or six
times with very little if any benefit to the end user.  Thank goodness
for more sensible *NIX types with BSD.