From owner-freebsd-advocacy Wed Jul 29 23:52:15 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id XAA15052 for freebsd-advocacy-outgoing; Wed, 29 Jul 1998 23:52:15 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from hyperreal.org (taz.hyperreal.org [209.133.83.16]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id XAA15031 for ; Wed, 29 Jul 1998 23:52:09 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from brian@hyperreal.org) Received: (qmail 11786 invoked by uid 24); 30 Jul 1998 06:52:06 -0000 Message-ID: <19980730065206.11785.qmail@hyperreal.org> X-Sender: brian@hyperreal.org X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.0.1 Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1998 23:36:54 -0700 To: "Eric S. Raymond" , Don Wilde From: Brian Behlendorf Subject: Re: branding Cc: jkh@time.cdrom.com, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.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> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message