Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1998 19:39:23 -0400 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>, "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: Brian Behlendorf <brian@hyperreal.org>, Don Wilde <dwilde1@ibm.net>, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: branding Message-ID: <v0401170bb1e6ab0959b7@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <19980730145939.A16709@snark.thyrsus.com> References: <19313.901821898@time.cdrom.com>; from Jordan K. Hubbard on Thu, Jul 30, 1998 at 11:04:58AM -0700 <19980730113906.C16515@snark.thyrsus.com> <19313.901821898@time.cdrom.com>
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At 2:59 PM -0400 7/30/98, Eric S. Raymond wrote: > If your "BSD advocates" couldn't meet those tests, that's their > problem and not mine. The Open Source site will stop looking like > a Linux site when, and *only* when, FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD have > substantial and persuasive real-world successes comparable to those > of Linux to display. > > In the meantime, I am not going to let you or anyone else bully me > into giving BSD special treatment that it has not earned -- any more > than I would let Linus Torvalds bully me if the situation were reversed. Most of my job (what I get paid for) deals with providing support for things on Solaris, AIX, and MacOS. Lately there's also a little WinNT being thrown into the mix. I have a minor interest in FreeBSD, but that's not where I get my salary from. I've only been following the FreeBSD mailing lists for a month or two now. That said, your efforts with the opensource site is losing crediability with me. The web pages at www.opensource.org do not frustrate me as much as they seem to bother Jordan. I do notice, for instance, that the "white papers" section includes something on Yahoo and FreeBSD, so I don't see you has overtly hostile to FreeBSD. I admit I do find it odd that the site makes so little mention of Walnut Creek as a place *running* FreeBSD to get it's business done. Your info on it just says that it "sells CD-ROMs featuring Linux and FreeBSD", but for all your web pages say, the *business* might be run off IBM Mainframes running MVS. There was just a press release at Yahoo on how WC's ftp site just transferred more information in a single day then any other site has ever transferred -- breaking a record set by Microsoft during the release of Win95. Microsoft set their record with 40 machines, WC is running a single FreeBSD machine. I think that is an example that business people can relate to, even if they don't ever expect to make a million dollars selling Open Source software. In any case, that wasn't the main point I wanted to make. Every message I've seen from you in this thread makes me think "This is a guy who has his fixed vision for his web site". This is fine, but it is quite different than "This is a guy who is interested in the success of open source software". I don't know Jordan all that much more than I know you, but at least he leaves me with the impression that he's *trying* to help out *all* interesting open-source efforts. You sound like a guy who has one particular set of open-source products that "you like", and are determined to promote them over any and all products, including other open-source products. Now, that's perfectly fine if you are claiming to be a spokesman for those products, but it really is a bit odd if you imagine yourself as a spokesman for "open source" as a concept. It is even more odd that Jordan, who is definitely a spokesman for FreeBSD, comes across as more "generically open source"-ish than you, when you claim to be for open source as a whole. So, I don't mind what you're doing with your site, I don't intend to threaten you with anything (I don't even know what I'd threaten you with), but every message you type makes you seem less crediable to me. That's just my opinion, of course. --- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or drosih@rpi.edu Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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