Re: Daemon's Advocate article

[David Cuthbert <dacut@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jonathon McKitrick wrote:
> the advocacy article at DNews had an interesting point: that the BSDs could
> end up being used only by developers, and not 'average' or should I say,
> typical users.
>
> Do you agree or disagree with this?  Will DFly have any effect on the big
> picture?

The problem with these studies is that they have a hard time getting 
away from a commercial standpoint and the biggest constraint it imposes: 
ship or sink --- that is, if you don't get your product accepted by the 
time your funding runs out, goodbye product.  So this kind of makes the 
notion of "ends up" irrelevant.

Linux, IMO, gained desktop traction mainly thanks to RedHat, who made 
the install process much smoother and understandable to non-developers 
(bringing screams of agony from control and tuning geeks). DF isn't 
focused on this regard -- from a technical standpoint, installation 
issues aren't terribly interesting, and mostly involve tedious bugfixing 
and tweaking to run on ill-behaved hardware -- so I'd have to say no, it 
probably won't have an effect here.

Of course, there's nothing stopping someone from taking DF (or any xBSD) 
and making an install/management system similar to RedHat.  For whatever 
reason, rolling an xBSD distribution just isn't as popular as rolling a 
Linux distro. <shrug>