Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1998 23:19:58 -0400 (EDT) From: Open Systems Networking <opsys@mail.webspan.net> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: David Shanes <dshanes@personalogic.com>, Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Fw: Your Article "Freeware: The Heart & Soul of the Internet" Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.95.980409225048.7629B-100000@orion.webspan.net> In-Reply-To: <3980.892169423@time.cdrom.com>
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On Thu, 9 Apr 1998, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> I was told by Eric Raymond (whom I met briefly at the Mozilla party)
> that the *BSD people were deliberately excluded because there were too
> many BSDs and they didn't want to get involved in any political issues
> over it. I find these continuous allegations of the BSD world being
> gratuitously and needlessly "split" (even though each *BSD seeks to
> fill a different niche) by the Linux community to be rather tiresome
> considering the amount of division in their own ranks and can only see
> this as something of a double standard, but I've long since given up
> on any hope of fair play from this particular crowd.
>
> This and several other incidents of a similar nature has pretty much
> convinced me that this crowd would rather prefer it if we really
> didn't exist at all and is going to essentially conduct their
> operations as if we didn't. Oh well. Perhaps it *IS* time to go on
Thats why I thought our own mozilla tree would be best, since they have
never had any priority for releasing a BSD version of netscape until
yahoo, and im willing to bet, screamed bloody murder to get them to make a
port. I could be wrong but thats what I think happened.
> the PR offensive here ("Why Linux doesn't work") since playing nice
I think we SERIOUSLY need a PR plan of some kind. I think also we can take
the gloves off and start kicking heads without getting nasty about it. We
have several FACTUAL resources that they just CANT compete with. One being
our ability to server better than ANY OS out there. We have proven this
with yahoo and wcarchive and probably a few other places. They do not have
such visable factual references to point at. Our stack is better. That is
not a holy war comment thats just being based verifable facts. They can't
argue with yahoo or wcarchive. The best they can do, and i'm referring to
any OS vendor, is point at similar flagship places. Linux may have
dejanews but there are no printed numbers that im aware of for them, or
the like. So I mean you can get to the nitty gritty about performance with
facts and just kill the banter of which stack might be better. I know this
has been done to death on IRC and other low key places. But not in
articles, not in highly visable places.
> guys hasn't appeared to have won us anything but lots of nice comments
> from folks like Marc A. at netscape to the effect that "Linux is the
> only free OS alternative." I'm getting tired of that, and if it's
> going to take "breaking ranks" with the rest of the free OS community
> to get our own message out, maybe it's time.
I second this! But the problemhere is that we have zero PR. I am not
making light of jordans efforts at all. His trips, his talks, his free CD
handouts to promote FreeBSD. But the fact is we dont have any PR that is
making any difference to anyone but geeks. ORA flat out annoys me by
pretty much refusing to do a FreeBSD book. The only publisher I can
respect now would be addison wessley since they have seemed interested in
publishing gregs book. I dont know what happened on that front.
But im straying from my rant. We need PR. Can we get the PR we need? I'm
not so sure. The simple fact since for as long as I can remember has been
money. money to do drivers, moeny to hire coders, moeny for PR. But the
simple fact is FreeBSD Inc, isnt seeing jack &@#$, money wise.
As far as I can tell. They get minor donations from people im aware of
that, and I thank those people. But it's pretty obvious big companies that
are using FreeBSD are not very keen on donating the money we need to
advertise in magazines, journals, etc.. I could be wrong but I just dont
see it. The entire PR for FreeBSD is non-existant. Other than the IRC
banter, the job jordan does ot promote it etc.. But were not putting ad's
out all over, were not saturating certain places with info. And im not
taking anyone to task. I know everyone involved in -core and commiters
works very damn hard alot of the time to make FreeBSD what it is today.
But how do we resolve these issues? How do we get funding for PR? Should
PR take priority over SMP? Bascially we need a freaking game plan. It's a
volunteer project, and thats good IMO, but we need an organized strong
game plan for doing some serious PR now. We have lost out to many times.
We took a hit a while back on the article comparing linux, bsdi, and
freebsd cause we only recognized 64 megs of ram by default instead of 128.
That hurt us. I'm just tired of loosing out to the satanic penguin all the
time. They get precedence over us, they get more articles, people will
publish THEIR books. Book wise were like the plaugue for some reason.
I'm really teed off now. I think we do need to take the gloves off and
start beating people over the head HARD with facts, and shoving FreeBSD
down their throats. Jordan is right being nice gets us no where. nice guys
finish last is the saying. and its becoming quite true. I think we need to
form a game plan. We need to have alot of open dialogue of PR, marketing,
strategy, etc.. We keep struggling and it does us no good. Were spinning
wheels but going nowhere. Well maybe slooowly we are. But we need to get a
game plan going and attack with teeth. But stick to facts. I think we just
need a PR plan. We need to organize an assault :)
Im done venting, im going back to my corner now,
Chris
--
"I am closed minded. It keeps the rain out."
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