From owner-freebsd-advocacy Tue May 22 16: 5:56 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from wantadilla.lemis.com (wantadilla.lemis.com [192.109.197.80]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F17E337B42C for ; Tue, 22 May 2001 16:05:51 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from grog@lemis.com) Received: by wantadilla.lemis.com (Postfix, from userid 1004) id B4DE86ACBE; Wed, 23 May 2001 08:35:50 +0930 (CST) Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 08:35:50 +0930 From: Greg Lehey To: Terry Lambert Cc: David Johnson , Ted Mittelstaedt , freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: [dn-core] Re: Perens' "Free Software Leaders Stand Together" Message-ID: <20010523083550.F41189@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <000101c0e0ff$44725600$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> <3B095240.F7873FAD@acuson.com> <3B0A461C.58A81808@mindspring.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <3B0A461C.58A81808@mindspring.com>; from tlambert2@mindspring.com on Tue, May 22, 2001 at 03:57:32AM -0700 Organization: The FreeBSD Project Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tuesday, 22 May 2001 at 3:57:32 -0700, Terry Lambert wrote: > 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 So they were out of date, and they had stale code (the 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. The real issue that surprises me is the lack of understanding at O'Reilly. As a result of the poor sales of these books, they concluded that there was no market for any BSD book. Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message