Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 13 May 1998 16:16:37 -0700
From:      "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
To:        Andrew Short <Ashort@concentric.net>
Cc:        Ted Stein <ted@taki.net>, advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: BSD vs Linux 
Message-ID:  <12237.895101397@time.cdrom.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 13 May 1998 17:49:05 EDT." <Pine.SUN.3.96.980513173348.2778C-100000@voyager.cris.com> 

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> distributor like Linux has 10.  I would venture to guess that even the
> great Walnut Creek sells a lot more Linux CD's than FreeBSD...

This is true, though FreeBSD is rapidly gaining ground.  When Walnut
Creek CDROM started selling FreeBSD CD dists, it was very near the
bottom of their 50+ product catalog and is now the #1 product,
outselling Slackware Linux though not, indeed, all the Linux products
combined...  YET. :-)

> I wouldn't want multiple distributions either.  But I do think that
> FreeBSD needs a champion somewhere in commercial enterprise...there are a
> lot of businesses running quality intranets on FreeBSD but not talking
> about it...maybe it's so good they don't want anyone else (their
> competition?) getting wind of it?  =)

It's usually simple conservatism at work.  Free software still scares
a lot of people who wear suits and this will change only slowly and as
the developer community learns that the best way to stop scaring suits
is to stop chasing them around with fire axes. :)

> Whether that champion is Walnut Creek, Yahoo!, whomever...some company 
> needs to step up and do this.  I can't imagine the publicity if Yahoo!
> would put in somewhere VISIBLE on their web site the fact that they use
> FreeBSD!  How about we strike a deal with them....something like "Ok you

Believe me, it's something which has already been proposed and
discussed at the very highest levels of both organizations. :)

For the aformentioned suit-scaring reasons, it's not likely to happen
anytime soon and we're just going to have to be content for now with
the fact that David Filo did at least go out on his own personal
recognizance to write the article that we published in Newsletter #1.
"Officially", and at the level of the various executives who's job it
is to sit around worrying about the stock price all day long, they
think of www.yahoo.com more in terms of $$$ per square millimeter and
we don't really even register on their radar.  Oh yeah, they did also
give us a banner ad in rotation at Yahoo - we're not totally forsaken. :)

- Jordan

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?12237.895101397>