[Info-vax] New CEO of VMS Software

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Sun, 7 Jan 2024 12:48:25 +0000, chrisq wrote:

> Been running FreeBSD for years now, Works out of the box on various
> architectures and a base install takes  around 20 minutes.

The BSDs are a good illustration that the health of an open-source project 
doesn’t depend on how many users it has, but on the strength of 
contributions from the community.

Having said that, I am mystified and disappointed by the amount of 
fragmentation in the BSD world. There are maybe half a dozen BSD variants 
still in active use, and maybe 50 times that number of Linux distros. Yet 
it is easier to move between Linux distros than it is to move between BSD 
variants.

> Ditched Linux
> as it became more bloated and especially, the systemd trainwreck,
> which I saw as a power grab by Red[H]at. Gross amount of complexity
> added for no good reason.

I don’t understand that. You realize you can build a kernel with as 
little, or as much, of the available functionality as you need? And nobody 
can force all the Linux distros to adopt systemd; they did so because it 
was useful, nothing more. There are ones that don’t, because they seem to 
think like you do, so you still have that choice in the Linux world, if 
you want it.

Or, do what all the other distro creators did: if none of the existing 
ones satisfies your need, start a new one. Probably easier than starting a 
new BSD variant, at any rate.

> With Sun, the os came with the machine and you could do more or less
> what you wanted to do with it.

This is what I said before about a “workstation”: it combines both 
“desktop” and “server” functionality in a single box, with no artificial 
boundaries between the two. This was pretty much normal in the Unix world, 
until Microsoft introduced the concept of NT “Workstation” (really just a 
“desktop” with multitasking and memory protection) and having to pay a 
much higher price for NT “Server”.