“After jousting with windows NT and Solaris, Vijay Vaidyanathan
last month threw down the gauntlet and declared that his company
would no longer pay for brand-name operating systems.”
“While the gesture was hardly original, colleagues of the CTO
(chief technology officer) at online community Xoom.com Inc., in
San Francisco, were surprised when he announced his choice in
operating systems. Setting aside the Linux hype, Vaidyanathan
decided to convert his remaining Solaris-based Web servers to run
FreeBSD, the other open-source Unix variant.”
“Linux may be the open-source operating system pegged as NT’s
newest competitor, but a growing contingent of developers and IT
managers is running FreeBSD. The attraction? Scalability,
reliability and its ability, as a Web server, 7to support enormous
download volumes. That’s attracted many ISPs (Internet service
providers) and companies that run Web sites with heavy traffic to
FreeBSD. Unfortunately for FreeBSD believers, however, the
operating system still is not ready to challenge NT or even Linux
as a mainstream platform for running business applications.
Continuing to hold back FreeBSD from mainstream use are the same
problems that, until recently, limited Linux: a lack of business
software and database applications and spotty professional
support.”