Date: Wed, 22 Apr 1998 11:48:34 -0700 From: Don Wilde <dwilde1@ibm.net> To: Woody Carey <wcarey@cs.uoregon.edu> Cc: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>, dg@root.com, Mark Ovens <marko@uk.radan.com>, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: An idea for promoting FreeBSD Message-ID: <353E3B82.2D7540FE@ibm.net> References: <Pine.GSO.3.96.980422112250.5564A-100000@statix.cs.uoregon.edu>
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Woody Carey wrote: > > On Wed, 22 Apr 1998, Don Wilde wrote: > > [snip] > > be workable. Remember, we're not worried about them being able to USE > > BSD, we're only concerned with showing them how powerful it is. For > > [snip] > > I don't think I am understanding what you are suggesting here. IMHO > we should be very concerned about people Using FBSD, not just knowing that > it is powerful. What audience is this for? Surely a physicist would not > be concerned with showing Joe User how powerful their linear particle > accelerator is? Why try to make something complicated appear simple to > lure people in? To use your example, we want to show Joe Congressman that it can do neat things that he's willing to pay for. In the real world, this is Joe Boss. Actually, [and my father worked at LANL for many years, he can attest to this] lots of their time was spent making wow-gosh-gee-whiz demos to impress Congress, DOD and media people. I'm not trying to imply that setup to do these things is simple, only that it can do amazing things when set up. The reality is that many users will fall away when they discover that it takes some thought to understand [even if it still doesn't crash!], but some will stay, and it doesn't take much of a percentage of a few hundred thousand disk-testers to stick to add measurably to our user base. Some smaller percentage of those will actually learn enough that they start to get the courage to contribute code, as I'm now just starting to do myself after almost 3 years of FreeBSD experience. The big point is that we will impress all of those users who take the time to load the disk, and if they ever do need a serious OS, they will consider FreeBSD in a positive light. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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