On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 12:11 AM, Jordan Hubbard <j...@mail.turbofuzz.com> wrote: > > On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Eitan Adler <li...@eitanadler.com> wrote: > >> That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the >> desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be "year of the Linux >> desktop" and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for >> server or embedded use. >> >> Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I >> must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the >> Linux world? > > The fact that this posting comes out on April 1st makes me wonder if it's > just an elaborate April Fool's joke, but then the notion of *BSD (or Linux, > for that matter) on the Desktop is just another long-running April fool's > joke, so I'm willing to postulate that two April Fools jokes would simply > cancel each other out and make this posting a serious one again. :-) > > I'll choose to be serious and say what I'm about to say in spite of the fact > that I work for the primary sponsor of PC-BSD and actually like the fact that > it has created some interesting technologies like PBIs, the Jail Warden, > Life-preserver and a ZFS boot environment menu. > > There is no such thing as a desktop market for *BSD or Linux. There never > has been and there never will be. Why do you think we chose "the power to > serve" as FreeBSD's first marketing slogan? It makes a fine server OS and > it's easy to defend its role in the server room. It's also becoming easier > to defend its role as an embedded OS, which is another excellent niche to > pursue and I am happy to see all the recent developments there. > > A desktop? Unless you consider Mac OS X to be "BSD on the desktop" (and > while they share some common technologies, it's increasingly a stretch to say > that), it's just never going to happen for (at least) the following reasons:
As you may imagine, I completely disagree! The Internet just had it's 20th birthday (it can't even drink yet!) and it's anyone's game. This is like trying to predict automobile technology and dominant car-makers by 1905. There's always room for competition. Take a look at what's happening right now in the auto-industry. Tesla came out of nowhere 125 years after the invention of the automobile and is doing pretty well. I bet there were a lot of people at Apple saying they couldn't compete in the music-player market, or the mobile-phone market, etc. In fact, if I look at the stats on freenas.org, we have about 350k visitors each month, with nearly 2% of them running FreeBSD and clearly using it to surf the internet. Sounds like a market to me! Long live the FreeBSD desktop, long live PC-BSD :P Cheers, -matt _______________________________________________ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
