Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 21:23:46 -0700 (PDT) From: jkh@FreeBSD.ORG (Jordan K. Hubbard) To: freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Somewhat in my own defense Message-ID: <19990417042346.CFCC614C45@hub.freebsd.org>
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[I've been trying to post this for 3 days, but it keeps vanishing into /dev/null; let's try one more time before sending a letter bomb to postmaster@freebsd.org. :-)] I've stayed out of these exchanges ever since I clearly saw that public fighting wasn't going to buy us anything, but there have been a number of points of view ascribed to me in this discussion stated as if they were "fact" rather than someone's self-serving fiction, and I just want to clear up any misconceptions people may have formed about how I really feel here in the process. First off, with respect to "passionate advocacy", I have absolutely no objection to people being passionate about FreeBSD any more so than I do about them being passionate about their wives or their professions. This is a GOOD thing, obviously, and only someone who was dead could possibly feel otherwise. What I've objected to all along, and I think quite a few of you know what I mean here, is raving advocacy with a lot of shouting and flying spit. That is to "passion" what a street riot is to "a group of people expressing their views" and really, we don't need it. As David has already said several times, we've gone to considerable lengths to ensure that FreeBSD is *not* associated in people's minds with people throwing rocks and bottles and we aim to keep it that way. Our reputation is more important than that and I've expended considerable personal effort in building bridges with the Linux community which I wouldn't care to see dynamited in the name of some short-term gain - it's just bad tactics. Second, there have been a lot of misconceptions about my stance concerning FreeBSD on the desktop or encouraging native ports to FreeBSD, largely because when I'm quoted the quoters usually strip out every bit of surrounding context and, as anyone familiar with the media knows, even Mother Theresa could be made to sound like Hitler if you were clever enough in selecting just certain parts of her public pronouncements. :-) The following, which I posted to USENET a couple of days ago, sums that up rather well so I'll just repost it here: >Date: 1999/04/14 >Forum: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc >Posted on: 1999/04/14 >Message-ID: <371576C6.9E0A2719@FreeBSD.org> >Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy >Organization: The FreeBSD Project >References: <924063216.639709173@news> Navindra Umanee wrote: [referencing my recent interview with Internet World] > Indeed! What a weird thing for Hubbard to have said... Not at all - it's called playing to your strengths. FWIW, I think Linux's desktop focus is not one which will result in long-term success if it's done to the exclusion of other, more important features which OSes like Win98 and BeOS lack. There are simply too many big guns aimed at this market and, what's more, Unix in general (and I include Linux) is coming from a long way behind and chasing a set of targets which aren't exactly standing still either when it comes to the desktop. Yes, I know about KDE and Gnome and while they're both noble efforts, they still don't really come close (for the typical computer user) to making it truly approachable. If you want empirical proof, just stick your mother or father in front of a Un*x box and see how much more productive they are with it vs Windows. Sure, there will always be somebody's grandmother who writes 1000 lines of C a day and can handle any Unix system you care to name, but that's hardly the "typical scenario" and it's definitely not what I've observed in the field. What's worse is that I can't even view a lot of web sites under Linux or *BSD because they use so damn many plug-ins that aren't even available for Netscape on *any* of its various Un*x incarnations. Or how about pointcast? You want a stock ticker-tape along the bottom of your screen, or the latest news from CNN automagically on your screen saver? Forget it. Win98, on the other hand, makes these sorts of features (which, believe it or not, a *lot* of people use) trivial to add and, again, I see a lot of my less computer literate friends using them and loving it. I don't mean to make it sound as if I'm glorifying Windows here or anything, I'm simply saying "know your enemy and don't attack his fortifications, go around - you can get killed charging machine gun nests you know! :)" Another slightly annoying thing is the extent to which I'm misquoted by some of these magazines (though this one got most things I said right, if you don't include the comment about grizzled unixheads :). For example, I'm widely quoted as saying that I actively discourage native FreeBSD ports when what I originally said was (and pay close attention) "For those companies who are contemplating ONLY a single port, or are just getting back into the Unix market and only have the initial resources for one port, I encourage them to port to Linux and get the widest possible user base." I didn't say I didn't want any FreeBSD ports at all, I said that if you're only going to do one, you might as well make it Linux and not, say, SCO or Solaris because our chances of running either binary are frankly much smaller. This is just common sense, especially when you figure that any company which does re-enter the Unix market and gets burned is not going to be a vendor which is easy to convince to try again. As far as my comment on ceding the desktop is concerned, that's another one which got somewhat overstated and is missing a lot of context. I believe the question was that if I had to choose a single focus, what would it be. I said the server, naturally, but that we'd also do what we could (given our limited resources) to make the desktop palatable also since a lot of us (including myself) do indeed use FreeBSD on the desktop. I also said that most of the desktop efforts Linux was currently engaged in, like KDE and Gnome, benefitted us just fine and that we've put a fair amount of work into encapsulating this work in the ports collection so that it's easily accessible. This is hardly the sign of a group who places no importance on the desktop whatsoever, and again the question was what our *focus* was, which is of course the server. I'm sure Linus Torvalds has this problem too and all it goes to show is that you have to take what you read in print with a grain of salt and certainly shouldn't be so naive as to assume that we've "made a pact with the devil" or any such paranoid nonsense. If you want to know my real opinion on something, try asking me. You know where to find me. :-) - Jordan Hubbard Co-founder/Release Engineer, The FreeBSD Project Walnut Creek CDROM To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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