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Date:      Thu, 30 Jul 1998 04:45:44 -0400
From:      "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>
To:        Brian Behlendorf <brian@hyperreal.org>, Don Wilde <dwilde1@ibm.net>
Cc:        jkh@time.cdrom.com, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: branding
Message-ID:  <19980730044544.A16278@snark.thyrsus.com>
In-Reply-To: <19980730065206.11785.qmail@hyperreal.org>; from Brian Behlendorf on Wed, Jul 29, 1998 at 11:36:54PM -0700
References:  <35BFEBEF.82BA6DC6@ibm.net> <35BF334C.5D5F40BD@ibm.net> <19980729104951.A14984@snark.thyrsus.com> <35BFEBEF.82BA6DC6@ibm.net> <19980730000430.E15941@snark.thyrsus.com> <19980730065206.11785.qmail@hyperreal.org>

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Brian Behlendorf <brian@hyperreal.org>:
> At 12:04 AM 7/30/98 -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> >Oh, dry up.  
> 
> That was uncalled for, eh?

Possibly.  But I get really tired of seeing this exact same question five
times a day from people who are clearly smart enough to figure out the
answer for themselves, if they'd bothered to pay attention to what the
Open Source site itself *says* about its objectives.
 
> 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.

Nevertheless, that is one of my major goals, and has been since Feb 5th.
Furthermore, we've racked up some successes.  Jini from Sun is the latest.

>                                           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".

True, but irrelevant if your goal is to persuade Mr. Businessperson in the
language that matters to *him* -- i.e. that he can make *money*.

> 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".

They certainly do, yes.

> 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.

I'll do this once I get the branding program in place.  

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

The site is designed to show that this question is founded on a false
premise; that the theory that closed source is a business advantage is
fundamentally bogus.
 
> >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, I have lots of respect for you; Apache is an astonishing
success and one of our very best arguments.  But that last sarcasm
reveals that, like most hackers, you are breathtakingly naive and
self-sabotaging about some things.

I've been part of the hacker culture for twenty years now.  I've seen
a lot of brave dreams and brilliant ideas get stomped and disappear
down the memory hole because we were out-marketed, out-spun, and
out-propagandized by people peddling garbage.  And dammit, *I got tired
of losing*!

And I'm tired of the whole attitude that considers presentation and
spin and (gasp) *marketing* so far beneath us that we'll never do it,
even though that means that in the real world we're going to lose.

When the Netscape release broke, I swore to myself that this time it
was going to be different.  That I was going to do every freaking thing
I could imagine short of lying to make sure that this time, *we* won
the propaganda war.

You sneer "Tell it like it is, yeah."  Well, I *am* telling it like it
is -- with the right selection and emphasis to persuade the audiences
I'm after.  And I am getting results, too.  Did you think the recent
wave of respect for "open source" in the computer trade press was a random
quantum fluctuation or something?  And where do you suppose all those
recent announcements out of IBM and Oracle and Informix and etc. came
from, psychologically speaking?

The naive (and wrong) answer is that they happened because the hacker
community got its technical ducks in a row.   Bullshit.  Technically
we've been ready for this kind of success since around 1994.  What has
actually happened is a *change in the climate of opinion* -- one
Netscape made conceivable in January, but that took a lot of evangelism
to turn from potential to actuality.

"Evangelism" is just another term for "propaganda" -- in fact, the
latter word originated as a back-formation from the Latin title of the
Roman Catholic Office for the Propagation of the Faith.  It's
marketing.  It's spin.  It's image- and brand-building.  And what's
different this time around from all the previous times that the 
hacker community has taken a run at the reigning Evil Empire is
that *this time we're doing it competently*.

More specifically, *I* am doing it competently on our behalf.  I'm not
the only one; Bob Young is a pro at it, and Linus Torvalds has a
surprising knack when he chooses to exercise it.  But neither of them
is pushing it effectively full-time, and neither of them managed to
talk around Forbes *and* InfoWorld *and* the Economist *and* the
Village Voice (and more than a dozen other national media).

The cold fact of the matter is that if you count by column-inches of
responsive press (which any PR guy will tell you is a pretty good
proxy for business-world mind-share) I am probably the person most
responsible for the current boom in interest in our culture -- and
that's even if you leave out "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".

I'm not asserting this to blow my own horn.  I'm telling you this to
point out, as forcefully as possible, that you are sneering at
success.  Our tribe is finally beginning to get the mainstream respect
it has long deserved because somebody was both willing and *able* to
play the propaganda game the way the big boys do.  It didn't have
to be me, but I'm the one who got down in the mud and did the job.

The Open Source site has been a key part of that job.  You want to
slang my methods and my "propaganda"?   Fine.  *Now go do better!*
-- 
		<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr">Eric S. Raymond</a>

No matter how one approaches the figures, one is forced to the rather
startling conclusion that the use of firearms in crime was very much
less when there were no controls of any sort and when anyone,
convicted criminal or lunatic, could buy any type of firearm without
restriction.  Half a century of strict controls on pistols has ended,
perversely, with a far greater use of this weapon in crime than ever
before.
        -- Colin Greenwood, in the study "Firearms Control", 1972

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