[TUHS] Dynamics between BSD and Linux

[Warner Losh]

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 11:11 PM, Bakul Shah <bakul at bitblocks.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 01 Feb 2018 19:44:48 -0800 Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> Larry McVoy writes:
> >
> > It's a bummer because BSD brings minimalism to the table.  You can run
> > a BSD machine in 128MB and it works.  Hell, it used to work great in 4MB.
>
> I think this is the crux of the issue. As a group gets bigger,
> minimalism is hard to maintain. To have a fighting chance you
> have inculcate new people in the same minimalism culture and
> that takes time. This puts a higher bar to entry.


Though even in the early days of Linux, it could run in a slightly smaller
footprint. It just grew more quickly than BSD, though retained a better way
to subset that let it retain much of the lower end that BSD had grown too
large for for many years.

> The BSD stuff isn't being taken seriously because the BSD people aren't
> > interested in taking new people seriously.  Which is a shame because the
> > work that Netflix and other BSD people have done is really cool.
>
> If you think what BSD folks have done is cool, just join in.
> Why not ignore the personalities and the popularity contest.
>

Honestly, most of the heavy BSD contributors do just that. There's drama
here and there, but it's mostly away from larger contributors...  And so it
goes...


> Regardless of how we got here, the reality is that BSD at this
> point has a tiny footprint in the market.  Even Linux has a
> small footprint in the desktop + laptop market, compared to
> Windows and Mac. BSD isn't even counted separately any more
> there. In the server market Linux is basically it. In the
> cloud market it is mostly Linux (almost all of it, if you
> don't count Azure). In the Mobile+desktop+laptop market, other
> than Android, Linux is under 1%. BSD numbers are just in the
> noise.
>

Yet, according to Sandvine, Netflix serves 35% of peak internet traffic,
all from FreeBSD. Go figure :)


> The reality is that BSD just doesn't matter to most folks. The
> same with minimalism. So it goes. [And neither fact matters to
> me for my non-pay work.]
>

Warner
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180201/590e8b79/attachment.html>