Date: Thu, 09 Oct 1997 01:35:05 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Wes Peters <softweyr@xmission.com> Cc: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Digital, Intel, Silicon Graphics (fwd) Message-ID: <4489.876386105@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 08 Oct 1997 23:23:13 MDT." <199710090523.XAA01838@obie.softweyr.ml.org>
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> Unfortunately, the trade press in general still sees "UNIX losing the > desktop war to Microsoft" as a bad thing. I suggest the opposite is > true: UNIX was never meant for a word processor/spreadsheet system. > Since we never really wanted to go there, why would we lament somebody > else inheriting that stick ball of goo? I ask myself this question almost every day. ;-) > UNIX, on the other hand, offers lots of tools, small and large, and a > pretty straightforward way to tie them together: scripting languages. As Van Jacobson put it during his USENIX keynote a few years back: "Unix gives you words, Windows gives you only whole sentences" - you'd never teach a child a natural language this way but yet we seem to feel that restricting programmers similarly won't stunt their intellectual growth. Uh huh. :-) > I use a configuration management tool called Perforce (highly > recommended, by the way) which runs on Windows and a variety of UNIX > systems. The servers are available for both UNIX and NT. It's pretty Hey, and you forgot to mention this (from http://www.perforce.com): Free Software Developer Pricing for FreeBSD and Linux Bona fide organizations developing free software (e.g. products distributed under the Berkeley or GNU copyrights) may be eligible to obtain Perforce servers for FreeBSD or Linux gratis. This includes upgrades but not support. They're very friendly to us free OS folks, they're enthusiastic FreeBSD users and, if we had thought that the rest of the FreeBSD community could live with a commercial SCM tool vs CVS (which we don't), we'd probably be using Perforce now as FreeBSD's official source code control system. Our CVS repository manager loves the product. The president of the company came over and personally gave many of the FreeBSD core team members instruction on its use. It's truly about as close as we've ever come to ditching a free solution over a commercial alternative - it's a better mousetrap, no question. > Another marketing channel we FreeBSDers must concentrate on is the > university. UNIX originally climbed into commercial existence through Oh we do, we do. Let me just repeat (for what is at least the 10th time :-) that university promotion is a major priority of ours and if your school is willing to use FreeBSD somehow, even if it's just within the local Unix user's group, I'm happy to get you into Walnut Creek CDROM's promotional give-away program. I've sent out literally thousands of CDs that way over the last couple of years. > Recruit a Doug White at each and every college. Get them to stock > FreeBSD CD-ROMs and books in the bookstore. And get them to take "Remember users, ask for it by name!" :-) Jordan
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