[Info-vax] OT: Wrong technological decisions

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <8jpkb4F36nU26 at mid.individual.net>,
	Bob Eager <rde42 at spamcop.net> writes:
> On Mon, 08 Nov 2010 00:35:54 +0000, Simon Clubley wrote:
> 
>> On 2010-11-07, Bill Gunshannon <billg999 at cs.uofs.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>> FreeBSD is rapidly moving downhill.  Every release has less and less
>>> ports that actually work and many that have just plain been dropped. It
>>> won't boot or install on a number of Virtualization options. It
>>> continues to use an incompatable shadow password method making it
>>> impossible to include it in any heterogenous enterprise. Useful
>>> concepts like FreeNAS are being dropped as more and more of the
>>> developers move to the greater viability offered by Linux. After
>>> running FreeBSD as our server platform since the 2.1 days I am now
>>> forced to look at moving our entire operation over to Linux.
>>>
>>> So far, it looks like Scientific Linux is going to become our new
>>> baseline.
>>>  
>>>  
>> I use Scientific Linux at home and on various secondary servers (as well
>> as my desktop) at work. So far it's been reliable for me, but I
>> recommend you following the mailing lists, as (rarely) updates break
>> something but when that happens it's rapidly fixed.
>> 
>> Pity about FreeBSD; I was about to investigate it. (I wanted to play
>> with ZFS among other things).
> 
> You might like to obtain more than one data point.

I can give you more data-points if you want.  :-)

I have a Latex user here.  On FreeBSD 8.1 it took over 4 hours to install
it with me having to determine a lot of the dependancies by hand.  And in
the end, not only did it not install some of the pieces this particular
user had been using for years, they turned out to no longer be included
in the ports tree.  It took less than 5 minutes to have a completely
functional Latex installation on Scientific Linux.

Now, people here will surely verify that I have long been a FreeBSD fan.
Prior to that, I was always a real BSD fan.  I still have my copy of the
original BSD 4.2 9-track tape here somewhere and have long been a user
of BSD 2.11 on my PDP-11's.  My being forced to leave the BSD world in
favor of Linux in order to get real work done should not be taken too
lightly.  But, as always, you are free to make up your own mind.

You might notice, that like VMS I stayed in the BSD world until it became
a liability for my userbase.  As more and more applications stop providing
BSD compatability it will go the same way VMS did and become even more of
a niche OS than it already is.  While the OS is of moderate interest, it
is really all about applications and when the ones your users want are
no longer available you will go looking for a platform where they are
available, and not tell your users to just get over it. 

bill


-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>