[Format recovered--see http://www.lemis.com/email/email-format.html]

Your message was one line per paragraph.

On Sunday, 22 April 2001 at 14:44:28 -0700, Mike Cheponis wrote:
> Seen on slashdot today:
> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/04/22/0056207&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=80

I've seen effectively the same post several weeks ago.

> "We should all keep in mind this simple truth: *BSD is dying.  You
> don't need to be Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing
> is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be
> any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking
> very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues
> to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
>
> Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
>
> OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD.

I'm sure he didn't put it like that recently.  Last time I asked him,
he wasn't able to give me any real details.

> How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD
> versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1.

Who uses USENET any more?

> Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts
> on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore
> there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at
> about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are
> (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the
> number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Well, if that's the number of FreeBSD users, each of them has bought
several copies of my book.

> Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on,
> FreeBSD went out of business

Strange thing to happen to a free software project.

> and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS.

He seems not to have noticed that it's also BSD.

> Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel
> house.
>
> All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market
> share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are
> very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyists,
> dabblers, and dilettantes. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of
> a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical
> purposes, *BSD is dead. "

I wonder what makes this guy so intent on promoting this nonsense.
Does he need medical attention, or is he just trying to annoy people?

It *would* be interesting to know how many users there are of each
BSD, though.  I do relatively frequent presentations at conferences
entitled "BSD: The other open source operating system", in which I
present all three varieties.  See
http://www.lemis.com/grog/KL/slides.pdf for more details.  I've
guesstimated 2 million users for FreeBSD, but I didn't know what to
say about NetBSD or OpenBSD.  If anybody could give me some idea, I'd
be grateful.

Greg
--
When replying to this message, please take care not to mutilate the
original text.
For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/email.html
Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key
See complete headers for address and phone numbers