Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Tue, 22 May 2001 03:57:32 -0700
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
To:        David Johnson <djohnson@acuson.com>
Cc:        Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com>, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: [dn-core] Re: Perens' "Free Software Leaders Stand Together"
Message-ID:  <3B0A461C.58A81808@mindspring.com>
References:  <000101c0e0ff$44725600$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> <3B095240.F7873FAD@acuson.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
David Johnson wrote:
> 
> Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> 
> > Well, I remember paging through that in the bookstore
> > once, and while I admit I didn't look through all volumes
> > (they wern't all there) what I remember of it was mainly
> > reprints of the system manual pages.  Not much to
> > recommend purchase as the price was rather high.
> 
> That's what 75% of their X11 series was, and it sold very well.
> 
> I think the difference is that the X11 series was general
> to all unices, while the 4.4BSD Lite was specific to a
> single OS. ORA publishes a lot of Linux books because there
> is a big market demand for them. But there isn't a big
> market demand for FreeBSD books. Unfortunate, but true.

They were 4.4BSD books, and they were 4.4BSD-Lite, at a
time that Lite2 was just about to be released, and had
been hyped a bunch already.

So they were out of date, and they had stale code (the
CDROM was a Lite CDROM, published by Usenix).  The 4.4BSD
code from CSRG was a rather big disappointment, since it
didn't result in a running system.

So basically, it was stale documentation for broken code,
which was not entirely relevent to the systems derived
from that code.

I bought a set of the books, both because I could get a
full set all at once, and because they were much less to
carry around than my set of orange Ultrix manuals, which
they effectively replaced as my "almost applicable to
FreeBSD" manuals.  It didn't hurt that much of the profit
was given over in support of Usenix, either.

I'm not really surprised that the books didn't sell that
well; I'm actually more surprised that they sold as well
as they did.

-- Terry

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?3B0A461C.58A81808>