Re: Daemon's Advocate article

[Chuck Robey <chuckr@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Rahul Siddharthan wrote:

> Jonathon McKitrick said on Feb 29, 2004 at 22:24:51:
>  
>
> > the advocacy article at DNews had an interesting point: that the BSDs could
> > end up being used only by developers, and not 'average' or should I say,
> > typical users.
> >
> > Do you agree or disagree with this? 
> >    
>
> Seems to me you've been asking this question for many years now on
> freebsd lists: whenever an article comes up that says BSD won't
> overtake linux/windows/whatever, you want everyone's opinion on it.
>
> Let's turn it around: what do *you* think?  :)
>
> (What I think is: it doesn't matter too much.  Most hardware vendors
> will continue to have windows in mind.  Linux will do a service in at
> least reminding them that other systems exist.  Some of them will
> release binary-only drivers for linux, but that's not popular in
> linux-land; others will actually release specs that will enable
> drivers for both Linux and the BSDs.  Meanwhile, the BSD's will
> continue as always... I think it's also true that, at least in popular
> perception, linux has definitely caught up with the BSDs on the
> performance level, nobody claims anymore that FreeBSD is "ultra-fast"
> as they used to a few years ago.  But this was never the main reason
> to run the BSDs.)
>  
Actually, in talking with vendors, it's becoming apprent to me that they 
all think that Linux and BSD are all dependent on drivers being released 
by the hardware manufacturers; they refuse to belive that any drivers 
are written by Open source foks.  That may be hard to believe, but it's 
true.  That's more the reason that they don't release specs, they think 
that the info would just be abused, and not help them at all.

> R
>