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Date:      Wed, 29 Jul 1998 23:36:54 -0700
From:      Brian Behlendorf <brian@hyperreal.org>
To:        "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>, Don Wilde <dwilde1@ibm.net>
Cc:        jkh@time.cdrom.com, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: branding
Message-ID:  <19980730065206.11785.qmail@hyperreal.org>
In-Reply-To: <19980730000430.E15941@snark.thyrsus.com>
References:  <35BFEBEF.82BA6DC6@ibm.net> <35BF334C.5D5F40BD@ibm.net> <19980729104951.A14984@snark.thyrsus.com> <35BFEBEF.82BA6DC6@ibm.net>

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At 12:04 AM 7/30/98 -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
>Oh, dry up.  

That was uncalled for, eh?

>You're forgetting that the Open Source pages aren't designed
>to make hackers feel warm and fuzzy.  They're designed for the *sole
>purpose* of persuading corporate types who care about nothing but money.
>Before these guys will adopt the Open Source way, they need to believe
>doing so will make them piles of (more) money.

I would like to state that I think having the goal of the Open Source pages
be all about convincing companies who sell software that they should
open-source their software, is a mistake.  FreeBSD is an example of a
successful project, with many many commercial interests, but little
commercial interest to "FreeBSD, Inc."  What FreeBSD shows the world, and
Apache to a lesser extent, is that no company has to be selling a
"commercial version" of the open-source software in order for it to be a
successful "open source project".  While companies from Oracle to Yahoo to
Hotmail to others are using it to save bundles of money and have greater
reliability in their services, there is no one company selling a
"commercial version" of FreeBSD; and I think FreeBSD shows (even better
than Apache) that such a commercialization is unnecessary.

Maybe you didn't intend it this way, but the lead-in to that page "software
that qualifies [as open-source]" and the title for the page "open source
products" and calling projects like bind and sending "open source software"
leads to a rather confusing set of expectations when reading that page.

So maybe a quicker way of summing this up is to suggest that non-commercial
projects also be capable of being called "software that qualifies".
Perhaps a separate page for just non-commercial (or low-commercial; FreeBSD
Inc. is an Inc.) projects, and linking to them more specifically from the
front page.

>Therefore, not only do I exclude noncommercial projects, I exclude companies
>with less than a million dollars a year run rate.  Anything that plays into
>the Wall Street fat cat's prejudice that we're a bunch of idealists in
sandals
>would sabotage the message.

Why am I giving away one of my company's strategic advantages, again?
Remind me...

If given the choice between seeing 2 companies with 2B in yearly revenue
and 1000 companies with 4M in revenue, I'd much rather see the latter.

>This has nothing to do with my personal motivations.  It's completely a
>question of how you tune your propaganda to your audience.

Tell it like it is, yeah.

	Brian


--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices  |     brian@apache.org
acquired by the age of eighteen." - Einstein   |  brian@hyperreal.org

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