Re: Leaving the Desktop Market

On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 12:11 AM, Jordan Hubbard <jkh_at_mail.turbofuzz.com> wrote:
>
> On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Eitan Adler <lists_at_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