[nycbug-talk] BSD in the enterprise....

[Rick Aliwalas]

On Sat, 29 May 2004, Nigel Clarke wrote:

> What will it take to have *BSD in use in corporate environments? Linux
> was not successful until companies like Solaris and IBM started to
> endorse it. When I say successful, I'm speaking of making it into
> corporate environments. 
> 
> One of the other advantages that Linux offers is that it is economical.
> That and stable vendor support make it an easy decision for management.
> 
> How does BSD compare? How will BSD make it into corporate environments?

I work for a Fortune 200 company and we use Free/OpenBSD heavily for
infrastructure (mail, DNS, firewalls, etc).  We chose to use BSD over
Linux because at the time (~1997) the TCP/IP stack was much more robust.
We are starting to use Linux for WebLogic and Oracle but it's displacing our
Solaris machines, not BSD.  I've found the BSD's to be much easier to 
maintain for a number of reasons.  The documentation for the BSD's is
really complete.  The man pages in OpenBSD are just awesome.  The man pages
for RedHat on the other hand...  Also, keeping up with the security upgrades
for the RedHat kernel has been a hassle.  Upgrading the kernel in BSD is
trivial.  In fact, upgrading the entire o/s via CVS is trvial.

-rick aliwalas