Why the BSD family is rejected by the industry? (besides the all big ones that everybody knows)

wolffnx

wolffnx

Hi, this post is not for say "Linux is bad" ..etc..etc
No, is for read your opinions, in resume "why?" , for example, a couple of days ago I went to a job interview,they ask for Linux and windows admin but when I talk face to face with the IT "boss" , he tell me that love FreeBSD(really he only uses PFsense for firewall,not pure FreeBSD) but well,we talk about the diferences besides BSD and Linux, systemd..etc..etc...

but in general,at least here in Argentina everybody is cult related fanatism with Linux(almost RHEL) , I know, red hat offer paid support but besides that,another time.."why?"

in your countries is the same situation? FreeBSD is a tabu word for business? and the other..in my last job there was a old man(56-59) years old,A life experiencie in IT and when I tell the word "FreeBSD" he tell me "is a clon of Linux?"

forget..in the job interview the guy tell me that FreeBSD is more dificult that Linux, I started to laugh..and I say it "really?" if the opposite way
 
Espionage724 said:
I blame Docker and containers :p (new training probably starts at that and AWS/cloud VMs), and if it works good-enough, why look into something else less-popular?
Click to expand...
that is the word I dont found "popular"
but here whe got jails...but go to tell someone who use Docker,Kubernets and all that
 
It all boils down to the lawsuit from ATT back in the day that held FreeBSD back for years and allowed Linux to jump in front of it. The general public of developers then latched onto it and didn't bother or take the time to learn BSD cause they were busy with other things. VHS vs BetaMax. It's hard for an industry to back up and start again though not impossible.

Remember this. Linux Torvalds himself said that, if BSD was available back in the day, he never would have created Linux.
 
A lot of this is old history. Greg Lehey's Complete FreeBSD goes through it. To brutally over simplify--AT&T was fighting FreeBSD in court for several years and during that time Linux took the audience that might have been FreeBSD's. Someone around here had a sig that if FreeBSD hadn't had those legal troubles, there wouldn't have been a Linux. (It might be a quote from Linux himself). Anyway, as non MS stuff became mainstream, Linux had for more users, developers, and later, money behind it. My anecdotal impression is that BSD-ers tend to skew older than Linux users and are more likely to prefer written material, vs. videos, but that's just my general impression.
 
Even in military there was more open source in past than now.
Sonar shack on subs ran on rackmount 68k macs with OpenSource OS in use. I seriously doubt that is still the case.
 
Part of the reason Open Source was used during my term in the military is the Naval Labs had great influence on what was used shipboard. Many employees were ex-military and knew engineering.
Much like Ballistic Labs and other national specialty laboratories. They developed quick solutions from research.
Now all that has been replaced by industry and their lobby.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Click to expand...
That's exactly it. Except for one little thing: 386BSD was actually available. As were other BSD versions.

I started looking for a serious OS for home around 92 or 93; I had been using cp/m machines (which were always a home-built experimental thing, and at the edge of what they could do), and has a 386 tower running Windows. BSDi was available, but not really cheap (about $1000 license fee); I would have happily bought it, except that I needed graphics, and the X support wasn't available yet (there were lots of problems with the Tseng ET5xxx or 6xxx card which was the only one X on BSD was going to support). The Jolitz' 386BSD was downloadable (if one had internet in the office, home internet was de-facto non-existing), but it had no X support. In the meantime, around late 93 Linux came out of nowhere, and immediately exploded in popularity. Within months, several colleagues at work were using it. And this was the kind of workplace that was VERY computer savvy ... for example, the world's first web server outside of CERN was at my workplace. And within a year, several big work-related software packages had been ported to Linux (in particular PAW, the physics data analytics and graphics package). All during that time a few hardy souls were running BSD, lawsuit or not. Matter-of-fact, I worked on a project with Van Jacobsen (didn't know who he was at the time!), and several of my colleagues from "Berkeley" (actually in my case that meant LBL, not the CSRG) were BSD lovers.

The AT&T lawsuit might have held back BSD in commercial deployments, but I don't think it was a big factor: That lawsuit was 92-94, and over before Linux conquered the world.

By the time I went to work in industrial CS research labs (99), Linux was everyone's first or second choice for Unix variant. Second only inside companies that had their own Unix variants (HP-UX, AIX). Interestingly, most people used Windows on laptops and white-box (non-workstation) desktops, even in places like HP and IBM where Unix workstations were easily available to employees. As an example, when I went to work at IBM, the priority order for developing supercomputer and storage systems OS support was: (a) AIX, (b) Linux, (c) Windows; other Unixes (Sun, HP, SGI ...) were all secondary. (That list deliberately ignores zOS, which is handled very separately.)

The thing is that in spite of BSD being available, Linux had an incredible and very rapid success. I credit the burgeoning internet feedback mechanism for that: once it attracted attention, it attracted software development (companies porting all kinds of stuff to it), which in turn made it highly usable. In contrast, BSD was only used as an embedded OS for devices such as NetApp and Jupiter.
 
cy@ said:
It was the lawsuit. By the time the lawsuit was settled the damage had already been done. We can never get that time back and we can never get that opportunity back either.
Click to expand...
You might be right, but I didn't notice that.

A similar thing happened with the various SCO versus "Linux" lawsuits (they really involved Novell and IBM and Sequent). It didn't put a damper on Linux' popularity.
 
wolffnx said:
in your countries is the same situation? FreeBSD is a tabu word for business? and the other..in my last job there was a old man(56-59) years old,A life experiencie in IT and when I tell the word "FreeBSD" he tell me "is a clon of Linux?"
Click to expand...
I wonder if more FreeBSD use in the industry would require more entrepreneurs using it from the start? Be the change you want to see and all that :p

A start-up becoming big with FreeBSD at the base would be interesting and newsworthy, and higher-ups might hear about and become interested in how their company can use FreeBSD!
 
Phishfry said:
In my industry, ship repair, the government dictates what Operating Systems and software we can use.
Even though we have an somewhat even balance with military/commercial work. Nobody in commercial world cares.
Military specifies in detail. With penalties and audits.
Click to expand...
In any country, all operating systems used in the defense industry are under constant and close scrutiny by intelligence agencies. I think that's as it should be.
 
Espionage724 said:
I wonder if more FreeBSD use in the industry would require more entrepreneurs using it from the start? Be the change you want to see and all that
Click to expand...
My web dev company did a few million a year and we were FreeBSD front to back.
Espionage724 said:
A start-up becoming big with FreeBSD at the base would be interesting and newsworthy, and higher-ups might hear about and become interested in how their company can use FreeBSD!
Click to expand...
There's my story and I'm sticking to it! But I guess we weren't big enough. :'‑(
 
ralphbsz said:
You might be right, but I didn't notice that.

A similar thing happened with the various SCO versus "Linux" lawsuits (they really involved Novell and IBM and Sequent). It didn't put a damper on Linux' popularity.
Click to expand...
By that time Linux was well entrenched. SCO, which had purchased USL from AT&T, tried to revive the BSD lawsuit. When that went nowhere they went after Linux and the companies that backed Linux. That stands to reason because there was more money there.

The fact that they went after Linux after they failed to revive the BSD lawsuit is telling about the company.

I knew someone who had worked there prior to SCO folding.
 
'Cause the "industry" is all slim shady central. From a pure technical standpoint of people who deal with the architecture of the backend, can you say that Linux actually has a nice design? It's, like, the worst of the nightmares to deal with hardware, but it's just also bad for security, bad for management, bad for humanity. Again, the slim shady central might prefer it that way.
 
Andrey Lanin said:
It's the same in my country. Why do we need FreeBSD here when we're perfectly happy with Linux and Windows? Some people here (in my country) are convinced that FreeBSD is under the auspices of the NSA.
Click to expand...

The joke on this is that in every job I was interviewed, I say to all "I can make a realtime presentation for you and show you that's why FreeBSD is better than Linux" (in server use) , maybe someday when Linux become too bloated or windows like $$(red hat here) the people noticed bsd family
 
A lot of the history around the original AT&T lawsuit is interesting reading. The original license was roughly "pay for a tape, share changes" because AT&T was not allowed to be in the "general computing" business. Looking at the original judgement, AT&T lost more than they gained.
I think around that time there was a difference between "BSD not available" and "There were commercial variants of BSD if you wanted to pay for them". Here's one from WindRiver I have on my bookshelf. I think this is after WindRiver bought VxWorks (which was originally based on BSD)
bsd.jpg
 
But we can see it also as advantage too. If FreeBSD was the mainstream it would be bloated and possibly over complicated as Linux is today. We can only wish FreeBSD would be used more as it is. In the past I did not consider FreeBSD as I thought it will be more difficult with so few user. In reality now I found FreeBSD much easier than Linux for the tasks I need. Development on Linux may be often driven by hypes which make more changes then necessary and over complicate things.
 
For some reason big companies prefer to support financially Linux instead of BSD. The result is better support for hardware in Linux => more users. And most people do not understand what is GPL.
 
6502 said:
For some reason big companies prefer to support financially Linux instead of BSD. The result is better support for hardware in Linux => more users. And most people do not understand what is GPL.
Click to expand...
But it also has more compromises. For example FreeBSD tends to support older hardware for longer than Linux. Similar in concept to Windows. FreeBSD supports way more hardware than Windows 11 for example. With all the industry backing in the world.

Big companies want people to consume, and it is affecting Linux quite negatively.

One of the best things about BSD is that it hasn't been rinsed and extorted by the "industry". It has very much remained true to the same goals as research operating systems it evolved from.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top