BSD sleight of hand
Published: 06 Apr 2000 15:48 BST
For those of you who haven't been paying close attention: In March, BSDI -- developer of a commercial Unix flavor based on the Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) -- and Walnut Creek CDROM, purveyor of the well-regarded open-source FreeBSD operating system, fused. The goal is to merge the successful -- and woefully underpublicised -- FreeBSD with its previously commercial counterpart from BSDI and create a grand unified new OS, tentatively titled FreeBSD 5.0.
Some media outlets took note of this, but many immediately fell into the easy jingoistic trap of wondering how this will affect Microsoft. Linux has proven that the world doesn't revolve around Redmond; I just don't get the continual quest for Microsoft-related spin on events.
Jihads, pro and con
So why does Linux have such huge mind share and BSD so little? A lot of it has to do with the religious fervor evidenced by many Linux proponents. (Don't get me wrong: I have a Linux box running Mandrake 7.0 parked right here next to me, cheerfully doing its thing. But I am a Linux user and appreciator, not a zealot.)
This degree of rapture has been unseen since the days of Guy Kawasaki leading the pro-Macintosh jihad. (And despite being a Mac user myself, I could never get into the us-vs-them mentality. Crusades just aren't my thing.)
One reason the BSDs have comparatively little mind share is because there are several different camps of them -- most notably FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD -- living with an occasionally uneasy truce. While I'm all for diversity in ecosystems, this trifurcation isn't helpful. Another side effect of this lack of cohesion is the effort spent on explaining why one BSD is better/worse than another.
Those calories could be better burned elsewhere. There's also a dire lack of marketing, since even the combined might of the commercial entities associated with the BSDs doesn't have the same marketing oomph as many individual Linux firms.
Luckily, it has not gone completely unnoticed that some of the Web's largest sites run FreeBSD instead of other OSes. When companies like Yahoo! and Microsoft Hotmail proclaim their FreeBSD allegiance publicly, it's worth paying attention. In fact, Yahoo!'s David Filo says he'd use FreeBSD again if he had it all to do over. Other firms such as Intel and IBM (having bought Whistle) are using FreeBSD in various Internet devices.
FreeBSD very clearly does not suck.
Money vs. strategy It comes as no surprise, then, that Yahoo! made an equity investment in the new BSDI. Since it runs its business on FreeBSD, it makes a great deal of sense for Yahoo to own a chunk of it, if for no other reason than to provide some additional leverage in determining the OS' future direction. Hopefully, the investment will make it some money along the way, too. But no one could successfully argue that Yahoo! needed to invest the money. Indeed, if Yahoo!'s investment diversity leads the SEC to wonder if the company's stock is a mutual fund, what are we mere mortals to think?
Read on....
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