Re: German Advocacy on BSD

> It would be great, if you could try to contact Juergen Kuri from
> C't magazine if they would be interested in publishing your nice
> article about the 'history' of the different BSD's.
>
> Additionally it would be fine, if you could add perhaps some
> features of the latest Release 3.2. Maybe you could make this more
> a FreeBSD 3.2 article, am not sure, if they are interested in a
> history article.

I also found the article to be interesting but thought it missed one
of the key points in comparing *BSDs: The sizes of our respective user
bases. This may seem a pure marketing point, but it's really not and
it's one of the reasons we still occasionally recommend Linux to
people who really need a fair amount of hand-holding and "peer
support". If you can find other people to talk to and exchange tips
somewhere reasonably local to you, it can make all the difference for
some folks and hence why the size and composition of the user base is
a very important factor in selecting an OS. It's not the *most*
important, by any means, but it's still somewhere in the top ten. :-)

The size of a user base, along with a rough count of all the
USENET/WEB/EMAIL articles it generates, is also a reasonable indicator
of how approachable an OS is and "approachability" is another
important factor in our favor, something which Stefan's article sort
of touches on but doesn't really illustrate in depth.

Yet another thing Stefan doesn't touch upon but should be noted
somewhere is FreeBSD's reputation for stability under high load. I'm
not saying that the other *BSDs are incapable of similar feats, but
until they've powered a Yahoo, a Hotmail or an ftp.freebsd.org, it's
an academic rather than proven fact. :-)

Tuning an OS for maximum performance takes more than just a will to do
so (and I think we've done pretty well there too), it takes test beds
which actually subject it to serious stress so that you can measure
the results and know empirically, rather than subjectively, where it
needs improvement. FreeBSD has had quite a few of these "trials by
fire" and I think it only fair to note that somewhere since that's
very definitely what businessfolk want to hear - not whether it's capable
of doing XYZ but whether it's actually DONE XYZ somewhere.

All that said, good article! Good practice at reading German! :)

- Jordan

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Received on Sun 30 May 1999 - 00:21:32 CEST