BSD is dying

[Paul Richards]

On Thu, Jul 28, 2005 at 01:12:42PM +0100, Paul Civati wrote:
> 
> I don't have time to read the main freebsd-* lists so I don't know how
> much discussion this has had, but I personally think every single file
> (base o/s) needs to be part of a package and also a revised package
> system to allow updates.  I'm not sure what technical or political
> restrictions would prevent this (Mr Watson? comments if you're 
> reading :) other than someone having the time to implement it.

You're basically confirming a long held belief of mine and that is
that FreeBSD is appealing to a very narrow group of programmers who
like to hack kernels.

The vast majority of IT people are users, app developers or admins.
FreeBSD has turned into an elite kernel hacking community and doesn't
see beyond it's own hard core hacking fan base. I've heard from other
admin type people that they don't like bsd events because it's all
about hacking and not about actually deploying and using bsd in the
real world.

Because of that internal focus very few resources go into other
aspects of what makes an os successfull, such as good installation
tools. The challenges of supporting large numbers of boxes in a
corporate environment involve a totally different mindset to that of a
developer who thinks the ideal solution is to rebuild the box from
source.

It's this lack of corporate focus, and I mean technical not
commercial, that has meant that Linux has surpassed us in terms of
mindshare. You never hear about council X or govt Y considering the
adoption of BSD to replace windows because bsd doesn't even get close
to ticking the boxes that they need to have ticked.