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Links Operating Systems BSD

FreeBSD Plays Big Role on the Internet 5

Posted by Nik from the NP:-A-perfect-day-to-drop-the-bomb dept.
ocipio writes "The article on sfgate.com discusses the use of FreeBSD on the largest Internet companies in the world. FreeBSD is used by Yahoo!, Hotmail, MindSpring, UUNet, and Verio. BSD will also get an indirect boost next year as Apple releases Mac OS X. Comparing the BSD family to Linux, BSDi's Rose said, "We think we have a product that's more reliable, scalable and robust for high-performance, infrastructure-grade computing." Yahoo!'s Chief David Filo agrees, noting he couldn't imagine moving to a proprietary system. "
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FreeBSD Plays Big Role on the Internet More

FreeBSD Plays Big Role on the Internet

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  • Every one of these articles has been a fluff piece which does nothing to really explain the differences in design and philosophy between the Unix variants. Everyone one of these articles has said the exact same thing and it really doesn't help to keep posting them.

    -sirket
  • After a while they do become boring... but apparently they're needed to "sell the product" to the upper management. Whatever. I couldn't care less about things as "user base" and such. (My chosen BSD) works for me.

    Now for some real news:
    Did you know that you can now get access (source license) to different BSD-versions from 1BSD via 2.xBSD, 3BSD and upto 4.3BSD-Reno ?? Yes,siree!

    A click through license available a here. [sco.com]. PUPS [adfa.edu.au] archives contain a lot of other material too...

    Now just dig out that VAX 11/780 [netbsd.org] from the closet and start hacking!
  • The article may mean little to us, but to those who are not familiar with BSDs, seeing these names all together in one article by a respectable source means a lot to upper level management. It is difficult for many people to switch to a free OS when all their lives they've had to pay through the nose for a good OS.

    -Adam

    Trust is a trick that dogs play. They don't want you to know how delicious they are.
  • The article repeats a lot of other material written from dozens of previous articles. I'm not dissing FreeBSD (I love and use FreeBSD, I manage and own several machines that only run FreeBSD), but these kind of articles are just getting really boring.

    The articles I would like to definitely see is how a company incorporated xBSD and what their success and horror stories are. Another thing I'd like to find out is how the companies go about getting support or help on xBSD if some large issue occurs.

  • Re:and now the bad news (Score:3)

    by dragonfly_blue ( 101697 ) on Monday June 05, 2000 @08:28PM (#1031211) Homepage
    BSD hasn't "lost". (Even if they have, do you really want to be standing in the "Winner's Circle" with Bill Gates? Do you really want to have NT/Win2K on your "Killer Resume"?)

    Most people don't need the reliability/security/speed of a BSD these days. Those that do, well, we seek them out. That's why market share for the BSDs is slipping; not because there aren't more BSD machines coming online, but because there are far more user machines (i.e. not bulletproof OpenBSD servers) proportionally coming online.

    Believe me, when some of the larger sites out there start to find out that NT sucks harder than a Studebaker vacuum cleaner, and that Linux isn't the answer to everything (yeah yeah mod me down), there will be *many* conversions to BSD. Until then, market share will suffer as Linux continues to get the hype, NT continues to get the $ale$, and BSD continues to get overlooked.

    The BSD's are a niche operating system. They are never going to have the mass appeal of a Windows GUI or a Windows GUI ripoff (KDE?), but that's OK; they don't need to. The BSDs attract people who are serious about building clean, stable, robust systems. They don't need to attract a large market share; the people who run BSD systems already aren't going to abandon them for Red Hat or NT anytime soon. Remember when Hotmail tried to move to NT?

    It only took me about 6 months to figure out that I wanted to run OpenBSD on most of my servers. It might take other people longer, but they'll figure it out.

    Oh, and I'd forget about a BSD "Summit" anytime soon; the grudges that caused the NetBSD/OpenBSD rift still sting a little too much.

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