Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 12:01:22 -0400 (EDT) From: Brett Taylor <brett@peloton.runet.edu> To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai <asmodai@wxs.nl>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Contributors, or lack thereof Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9909101134170.21709-100000@peloton.runet.edu> In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.19990910084750.0479a540@localhost>
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My try at rational behavior (without getting irate) follows.... :-) On Fri, 10 Sep 1999, Brett Glass wrote: > At 08:43 AM 9/10/99 +0200, Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai wrote: > From comments I've seen on this list and in private e-mail. "Where > are your PRs?" they say. "So-and-so speaks with authority about > advocacy because he has contributed lots of code." (Never mind the > obvious non sequitur here.) Um, PRs work fine for all kinds of problem reports, be they docs, ports, web page errors/corrections/additions, or source code. No one, except you, is suggesting, that PRs are solely code submissions. I personally would trade two to three pieces of code for one good piece of documentation. Not to slight anyone else on the docs list (or coders), but I _always_ enjoy Nik's writing. Nik has done a number of great articles on make and CVS for Daemon News. They are great. And I personally know 5 people who learned how to start using CVS from Nik's Daemon News article. All of them are _NOT_ using it for code, but for writing their PhD theses or web pages and keeping track of various versions, changes by their committee members etc. Has Nik submitted any C code? Not that I know of. Is he a valuable member of the team? Holy cow yes! > My articles on UNIX, and sometimes specifically about FreeBSD, carry > little or no weight with this group. Actually I've always liked your articles. The articles you've written have been even-handed and well written. They've also been enjoyable and informative. That said, when you get into personal conversations, whether it be here or in other places (typically feedback areas) you seem to be an entirely different person than the person who writes those articles. > Alas, a large number of people in this group genuinely base their > appraisal of, and respect for, others on how many lines of C they've > added to FreeBSD. This is a mistake, as proper marketing, promotion, > advocacy, and memetics are what the OS now cries out for most. > Documentation, while important (which I as writer value more than > most) is likewise useful but not the key issue right now. If you think documentation doesn't affect user base you're wrong. Is it the key element? Probably not, but I know of people who've left groups because they could not find documentation to do what they wanted. > > With all the respect for what you did in the past I have > > not seen anything from you since early January, > > Have you even bothered to look? Yes - I'm the co-editor of Daemon News and I'm always looking for links or blurbs to put up about any article about any of the BSDs. In the past 9 months I haven't heard of any articles from you and we get news submissions that report articles from purely print magazines too. We've had a number of news items about BSD articles which came to us from the print version of C'T (which were never released on the web). So no - I haven't heard anything and I have looked. If you could tell me some of them I would like to read them. Heck if they're recent we could even add them to the news items for the next issue - even if they're a month or 2 old we could put them in - libraries keep back issues so surely some people could read them there. If, as you believe, PR is more important than PRs I suggest you write something for Daemon News (since we at present are the only BSD zine I know of that is active now, what with the much lamented break of FreeBSD'zine which I always enjoyed reading). Will this gain you PR? Sure - we got 90,000 hits the first day of the last issue, mostly from SlashDot announcements about us. We have contracts with 2 different Japanese companies for print versions of the ezine or articles from it and we had (not sure of the status right now) interest from a publisher in the US about creating a print version. Admittedly Japan is already a FreeBSD hot bed, but we've gotten many emails from many people telling us that they were going to at least try one of the BSDs after reading articles on DN. Can we offer you mainstream, daily newspaper type, coverage? Not yet, but we can help get the grassroots areas going. It also may be a good "test bed" for you to try out your advocacy ideas which you've talked about previously. What I would like to see is the BSDs grow. That requires efforts in all areas - PR, coding, docs, etc. I write C code like I speak latin - not very well at all, but I do what I can. If you can write an article on how to do BSD advocacy for submission to DN we'd be glad to have it. Authors retain the copyright so you'd be set to publish it again and again in other places if you wanted to. Anyway, I think that there is room for more PR - I think Jordan is doing good work by doing what he's doing. Could more be done? Sure. Should more be done? Sure. Do we need people to do it? Sure. So go team! Brett ***************************************************** Brett Taylor brett@peloton.runet.edu * Co-editor in Chief brett@daemonnews.org * Dept of Chem and Physics * Curie 39A (540) 831-6147 * ***************************************************** To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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