[nycbug-talk] questions for BSDCG?

[Andy Kosela]

Charles Sprickman <spork at bway.net> wrote:

> On Fri, 5 Jun 2009, Dru Lavigne wrote:
>
> >
> > BSDMag has offered space for a column regarding BSD certification in 
> >the next issue of the mag. We were thinking of writing it in a Q&A 
> >format, perhaps discussing such things as an overview of how the exam
> >is doing so far or how to host an exam event.
> >
> > Does anyone have any questions they'd like to see answered?
>
> Are there still two competing BSD certification groups?  If so, what's the 
> difference?
>
> Are there any success stories or any sightings of job listings "in the 
> wild" that specifically call for any BSD certs?

Yes, I am interested in that part too.  As far as todays trends go,
everybody, especially in the enterprise sector is using RHEL or Windows
Server on x86.  I haven't heard recently any stories about how FreeBSD
is used to power enterprise servers.  Even Yahoo! seems to use a lot of
Linux nowadays.  Lack of support from major hardware vendors like HP,
Dell, IBM, Oracle/Sun seems to kill FreeBSD as an operating system
platform.  It still performs well in network/embedded appliances market
though.  Juniper, Nokia and Cisco are constantly looking for FreeBSD
kernel hackers, but probably even they are using RHEL and/or Windows to
power their system servers and databases.

BSD Certification efforts are a move towards positive direction, but
what we need is an official or even unofficial support from some major
hardware vendors, so companies will once again start thinking about
deploying FreeBSD as in the late nineties.  I remember the times when
sendmail and apache groups were specifically recommending FreeBSD over
Linux.

HP recently started supporting Debian, they even had FreeBSD as one of
their systems in the testdrive program, although it has been recently
shut down.

I spoke to some HP engineers about the trends inside HP, and they told
me they are trying to create standards across the the whole company
based on three operating systems: HP-UX, Windows and RHEL, both on
Itanium and x86.  That means they are very committed to Linux and it
seems very unlikely they will ever support any other open source Unix.

Is FreeBSD going to face similar fate as NetBSD or some other even more
exotic niche operating systems?
 

--Andy