Alan Clegg reports in a story at Daily DaemonNews that twelve people associated with the FreeBSD project were laid off from Wind River Systems. Only four remain. Also, at least one FreeBSD person was let go from iXsystems (formerly BSDi).
David Huff notes, “The comments to the story are worth reading, as they include a lengthy response to this from Jordan Hubbard (FreeBSD release manager and current Apple employee).”
BSD is dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when last month IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we’ve known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by http://www.sysadminmag.com/articles/2001/0107/0107a/0107a.htm“>… [sysadminmag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don’t need to be a <a href=”http://www.amdest.com/stars/Kreskin.html“>Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict *BSD’s future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won’t be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all.
Let’s keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let’s see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
*BSD is dying
Mr. Anonymous Visitor seems to be possessed of a quite gloomy spirit. I highly doubt there are so few FreeBSD users as s/he surmises.
You again, you just don’t sleep. Seams like its dark enuff up in your ass, whats the problem. Your going to run out of stupid things to say soon, oh wait you have you’ve been just cutting and pasting OS’s in the same damn post all over the fucking place. Go the hell away. maybe we will get lucky and a cruise missle for a terriost will hit you to. Time for a OS jihad on Asshole trolls
It is very seldom that we get to see such soaring intellect as that displayed by Brad. Judicious use of metaphors, throw in a few terrorist images and the picture is clear to us all – a genius is in the making.
God save us from the wit of this clever man.
This BSD is dead talk seems strange to me since the Linux crew recently got caught with yoinked FreeBSD code. Now what would they want with code from a dying operating system? One thing that is certain is that BSD will *never* die. You’ve clearly gone beyond practicality and your verbosity does not make you correct. These projects existed for years before the recent economic boom, and they *will* continue. I’m sure I speak for most BSD users when I say we’re enamoured with our OS.
Why don’t you go be ugly somewhere else.
Icarii, in case you’re not aware (and it seems very much you’re not) this “”post”” is a generated one. We’ve
seen variants of it posted to Be newsgroups, with the FreeBSD string replaced by BeOS (plain and simple)
and it reportedly was used to throw mud, doom and gloom at Linux and MacOS X IIRC. I slightly disapprove
of the strong owrding of Brad too but I can perfectly understand his being astonished and angered that such kind of
people can exist (people whose only pleasure in life is troll).
Don’t feed teh trolls. Don’t even acknoledge their existence. (whops).
This same Anonymous Coward (or group thereof) posts the same bit of nonsense on Slashdot everytime they run a *BSD story, too. So not only is it a bunch of fsck-ing misinformation, he/they aren’t even creative enough to be original…
Glad to see some normal folks, I know cedricd is cool, and of course we all Love Eugenia! I’ve actually been contemplating bsdforever.com. 🙂 I guess it would be redundant, but beforever.com still gets hits…
Anyway, OSNews is cool.
Ahh.. that’ll explain the depth of feeling then I suppose. However there is no need to be rude on these news columns as it only seems like a knee-jerk reaction rather than a well thought out reasoned argument.
Pete,
yeah don’t give up! Even if unlikely, one of the BeOS-rewrite initiatives could mkae signifiant progress that BeOS specific news sites would have to report about.. Let’s not do like teh amigans and say “BlueOS/openBeOS/whatever will be back RSN and take over the world” but let’s not totally give up either…
Yes I do lurk here.. don’t have time to post most of the time, but this one was one too much.. don’t want this place to resemble benews forums before The Gret Going Under, it would be too sick.
Icarii: I get your point.. anyway, one important change here compared to BeNews and (supposedly) /. is the showing of the IP address of the poster: always thought it would be a nice to have.. glad that Eugenia put this in; maybe the next step should be to automatically label from now on all posts from *hotkey.net.au as “warning, this post could be from a harmless 3rd party posting
from the same ISP, or maybe from the actual “human” oyster whose thinking and cognitive abilities only allow to post the same gibberish trolling again and again with minor changes” 🙂
cedric d. (who’s just received the latest EFF.org alert about the WWW consortium being about to allow *patents* in web standard and immediatly sent the WWW some nice “feedback” about it. Call me an activist 🙂
Nik Clayton has a Q&A with WindRiver’s PR department on this over on Slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/bsd/01/10/05/0855222.shtml“>Wind
What a load of verbal wank. If anything, Linux is dead. Releasing a new kernel due to security issues and local exploits every two (2) days is *not* the sign of a strong Operating System. Supporting the latest video and sound cards is not the goal of BSD, as it is of Linux – which will be its downfall. The goal is for a clean, well-rounded OS, with security given preference over SMP – OpenBSD. NetBSD is far more ported than Linux is, and FreeBSD has a *huge* and devoted following.
BSD is *not* dying. If it were, Linux developers would not have the inclination (read: need) to rape BSD code for their own distributions.
:wq