Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!news.dacom.co.kr!news.kreonet.re.kr!usenet.kornet.nm.kr!agate!reason.cdrom.com!usenet From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc Subject: The real story on Netscape Commerce Server on FreeBSD/BSDI. Date: Thu, 30 Nov 1995 22:40:37 -0800 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 36 Message-ID: <30BEA365.41C67EA6@FreeBSD.org> References: <49g2hp$i6q@tampa2.is.ge.com> <49ha19$22f@times.tfs.com> <1995Nov29.222811.782@system9.unisys.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0b3 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-CURRENT i386) Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:9941 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:1632 OK, I can see that things are getting a little unnecessarily tangled here. Some facts which I hope will help straighten things out: 1. Yes, the Netscape Commerce server for BSD/OS works just fine under FreeBSD. This includes the secure key generation and every other aspect of the system's usage - the SAME binary works the SAME way. We use it ourselves, it works, end of story. 2. Netscape is not actually hostile towards us and has, in fact, discussed the situation frankly with me on several occasions. The fact that the BSD/OS product already works under FreeBSD sort of lowers the porting incentive, as I'm sure most here can easily see, and there's the additional fact that FreeBSD isn't really a blip on Netscape's radar. We're pretty small, as measured by Netscape's own navigator usage stats, and frankly pretty low on the totem pole. Given all this, you really don't need hostile intent on Netscape's part to account for the current state of affairs. I also hope and believe that FreeBSD's "market penetration" will improve, but at the same time I'd like to be able to say that it shouldn't matter if vendor X does a native FreeBSD port - we'll just run the closest version we can get. We're not quite at that stage yet, but I think that it's a prize worthy of the race. I find the fact that we can currently run the BSD/OS commerce server and navigator clients as well as the latest Linux BETA version with Java to be very promising, and if the day should come where an ISV like Netscape doesn't even have to *think* about providing a FreeBSD specific version then I'll consider that day a victory. There are too many incompatible UNIX executable formats as it is. Enough! If we can't agree on a common ABI then let's at least try to run eachothers binaries seamlessly enough that we don't scare away what few vendors we have left. -- Jordan