Re: Back from nycbsdcon!

[Tom Davis <tom@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
> >     I hope everyone survived the financial meltdown!  There were a  
> > few
> >     no-shows at the Con due to the mess, it being NYC there were
> >     numerous local BSD users working in the financial industries  
> > who got
> >     messed up pretty badly.

On 2008 Oct 14, at 20:41, walt wrote:
> Maybe I shouldn't be surprised to hear that, but I am.  Are you  
> saying that those BSD users are employed to use and/or maintain BSD  
> systems in
> the financial sector?  I'd have figured the Wall Street herd for M$- 
> only
> shops.

In my experience, Wall Street (and financial companies in general) are  
much more likely to be IBM shops than Microsoft shops. And that  
usually means AIX or sometimes Linux (and at one time even meant OS/2  
2.x for desktops and OS/2 1.3 for ATMs, for heaven's sake). One of the  
NYC BSD Users Group meetings I attended was presented by an IT guy  
from Morgan Stanley who described needs that companies such as his had  
which would have to be addressed before they would consider moving to  
BSD systems (faster support for new hardware, longer support for older  
OS versions, and especially support for new hardware in older OS  
versions being the main ones I remember. Plus support for variables in  
soft links such as /usr/local/$APP_VERSION/lib which is apparently  
supported in some other Unixen, and binary compatibility between  
various kernels so that software doesn't need to be recompiled which  
was really only supported in AIX using SOM [this talk was a couple of  
years ago and I'm pulling this from memory]).

Many of the people I know who work for financial companies are Perl  
programmers (I know, my associations are not exactly what most people  
would regard as respectable).

Of course people who use, administer, or program for AIX during the  
day are fairly likely to use BSD systems personally, AIX being  
somewhat more costly.

In many cases, the people who have already been affected by the crisis  
are contractors whose clients were primarily financial companies.