Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

I'd like to ask "competitive with what?". This is not intended as sarcasm, it's an honest question.

To my mind, FreeBSD is losing ground to Linux in a number of areas. One of these areas is in published technical references. Linux has published technical references, and FreeBSD does not.

While nearly anyone can write a book that purports to be a technical reference work, actually building a useful one is very difficult. It takes on the order of one man year.

As skeptical as people might be about this, Linux has in fact had a number of *good* technical references written for it, and these books are not easily dismissed as "shallow fluff": they are *real* works, with *real* depth.

I would go so far as to say that the Rubini/Corbet book "Linux Devices Drivers" is *excellent*.

I'm going to argue that the reason these works have been able to be written is stabilization of interfaces over time.

What are the *primary* arguments people have historically used when evangelizing BSD?

o "BSD is more stable" o "BSD is more mature" o "BSD has a long history" o "BSD was developed by experts with lots of experience, who learned from the past" o "BSD doesn't suffer gratuitous changes gladly"

None of these look like the moral equivalent of "turn on a dime".

Yet here we are, arguing that it is flexibility that makes FreeBSD competitive... and it's *not* winning the competitions that matter.

-- Terry

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