Weinter said:
From what I know Linux is making big progess in BOTH SERVER AND WORKSTATION what you are saying FreeBSD can only progress one way...
Could you please elaborate on that progress.
I see failure in both area. On the desktop side after all that mambo-jambo crap Linux is holding less than 1% of the market share. Is that success for you? I can hear the laughs from Redmond about that one. They are million time more scared from piracy than from Linux. At least BSDs have never been advertised
as a desktop OS for wide masses. Even if you think of OS X as a
BSD derivative (despite Mach kernel) Apple computers have always
been a choice of a small elite (maybe as technically ignorant as Windows users) but never the less self proclaimed elite.
OS X market share has never exceeded 5% in my life time.
Lets go now to the Server market. Even though Linux has become
somewhat popular solution on the entry server level (file or mail server for a small academic department comes to mind) it completely unable to penetrate mid and high server range.
There are several reasons for it. I will state some.
1. Lack of proper enterprise support due to the too many distros. Yes, people who use OS for work are willing to pay and expect support. Even though RedHat and Novel have established as
the market leaders that fact that RedHat lost 80% of its market share in the past five years since it went proprietary. That could be hardly ensuring for a business that looks to last more that 5-10 years.
2. Interoperability. Different Linux distros are so different
that it is extremely difficult to deploy more than one distro at the time and take advantage of their most advanced features.
No Linux distro is good across the board.
3. Lack of trained Linux system admins. Jumping from one to another Linux distro hardly makes for the good system admin.
You have to stick with your guns for a long time to be good at
something.
Lets go now about more serious technical issues.
1. With the exception of SGI port of Linux, Linuxes in general are in terms of multithreading and 64 bits support on about the same level as proprietary Unixes of early 90s if not late eighties (of the last century).
2. Serious lack of support for time proven non i386 architectures. Linux support for both sparc64 and ppc is .
mediocre. Even though nobody denies popularity of the cheap
crappy i386 hardware the fact is that various RISKs architecture
still rule mission critical parts of network and wider computational infrastructure.
When it comes to serious game read my lips (Solaris, AIX, HP Unix).