Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1998 17:00:48 -0400 From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@snark.thyrsus.com> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: Brian Behlendorf <brian@hyperreal.org>, Don Wilde <dwilde1@ibm.net>, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: branding Message-ID: <19980730170048.A16844@snark.thyrsus.com> In-Reply-To: <19654.901825882@time.cdrom.com>; from Jordan K. Hubbard on Thu, Jul 30, 1998 at 12:11:22PM -0700 References: <19980730145939.A16709@snark.thyrsus.com> <19654.901825882@time.cdrom.com>
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Jordan K. Hubbard <jkh@time.cdrom.com>:
> So let me just clarify one thing then: You also rate such successes
> ONLY by how much money they make, not by any records they set or
> significant alliances they make, but purely by dollar value and only
> by dollar value. Correct? And this dollar value must be at least
> $1M/yr to rate consideration, also correct?
The 1M/year is a proxy for what I'm really trying to accomplish. If you
can persuade me that other success criteria would be just as persuasive to
J. Random Suit, I'll cheerfully add them to the formula. So it's not quite
as open-and-shut as all that.
> Boy, it sure sounds to me like you have a serious chip on your
> shoulder where BSD is concerned.
I'm not hostile to the BSD community -- I started out as part of it
myself nearly a decade before Linux. I am pretty exasperated with the
mess it's been making since 1989. You guys had a better kernel than
Linux, a stronger engineering tradition, and (on average) smarter
developers. But you guys blew it; you wasted your energy on factional
squabbles and personality conflicts, and let Linux blow right past you
and grab all the mind-share.
I think that's really sad -- so sad that it makes me angry. Part of me
wishes I lived in the alternate universe where the BSD people kept their
shit together and Linus Torvalds never happened (or he became a brilliant
BSD hacker instead of writing his own kernel). In a lot of ways that
would have been a better outcome than what we've got.
It isn't what actually happened, though, and as a strategist for open
source I have to deal with reality. The reality is that Linux has
done what the BSD efforts never delivered; it has actually achieved
the critical mass to make it a credible player not just among hackers
and hobbyists and partisans but in the real world as well.
Maybe BSD will make that nut in the future. I hope so, if for no other
than to keep the Linux crowd from getting fat and happy and complacent.
But I'm not really optimistic about this.
> Are you sure you're the best person
> to be "point man" on the open source issue?
Jordan, if somebody else were to step up and do a better job I would
vanish offstage so fast your head would spin. I don't *want* this
freaking job; I'd rather be hacking.
The only reason I'm doing this is because it desperately needed to be
done and I truly didn't see anybody else as well qualified to try.
Here's what you'd need from somebody to do a better job:
(1) Person must be an able speaker with experience at talking to the press.
(2) Person must be an effective writer and propagandist.
(3) Person must be able to identify with and speak the language of
non-hacker, non-academic, non-techie types.
(4) Person must have enough hacker-community steet cred so the
hackers will back him/her as a legitimate ambassador.
(5) Person must have enough prior reputation *outside* the hacker community
that reporters and suits and other non-hackers will have some reason to
initially accept him/her as a credible witness.
(6) Person must be independently wealthy or otherwise have enough free
time to do advocacy effectively full-time.
(7) Person must not be be too busy with other things.
Those are pretty tough criteria. Some I worked for. Some of them I
only meet by accident of personality and history. Now point me
at somebody else who meets all of them -- *please*. I sure as hell
don't want to be fielding calls from journalists for the rest of
my life :-(.
> It sounds like your criteria is purely monetary. How am I to meet
> such criteria without disclosing confidential sales figures and the
> like, or are you willing to simply accept my word for it?
See above on the criteria. I'd personally take your word for sales
figures without a murmur, but my intended audience has no reason to.
--
<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr">Eric S. Raymond</a>
All governments are more or less combinations against the
people. . .and as rulers have no more virtue than the ruled. . .
the power of government can only be kept within its constituted
bounds by the display of a power equal to itself, the collected
sentiment of the people.
-- Benjamin Franklin Bache, in a Phildelphia Aurora editorial 1794
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