Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 10:01:31 -0600 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: Foxfair Hu <foxfair@drago.cert.org.tw>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD, the follower of Linux ? Message-ID: <4.2.0.58.19990831094953.04670380@localhost> In-Reply-To: <37CB916C12C.56BBFOXFAIR@drago.cert.org.tw>
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At 04:25 PM 8/31/99 +0800, Foxfair Hu wrote: >FYI: > >http://www.startribune.com/stOnLine/cgi-bin/article?thisSlug=TECB29 > > and Jordan said "we were the snobs!" *sneaking :p > > -Foxfair. Actually, the most telling line in this article is a quote from Eric Raymond, who says: "The BSD people had a lot of advantages," Raymond said, but "they got one thing wrong that completely overcame all their advantages. They got their sociology wrong." ESR is largely correct in this. FreeBSD's current development group does chase away good people by requiring conformity and unquestioning assent; mavericks, no matter how much good they might do, are not welcome. But Steve Vaughan-Nichols also hits it on the head when he says that marketing is a problem. As a person who (in somewhat of a Jekyll and Hyde manner) both hacks and markets, I can see the problems in FreeBSD's approach. It is possible to work around it, and I'd love to mount an effort to bring FreeBSD's marketing and evangelism up to par. In fact, as I've mentioned in earlier messages, I now have some folks volunteering funding and asking me to do this. And I am close to getting the TIME to pursue it as well. What I'm concerned about, though, is that the developers might literally try to sabotage such an effort. In that case, it'd be necessary to do a fork (which I'd hate to do; it entails much wasted and duplicated work) or to go with one of the other BSDs (perhaps OpenBSD). So, I'm in somewhat of a quandary here. Would Jordan Hubbard, in a million years, even accept the existence of an effort that would actively market and evangelize BSD UNIX? Would Walnut Creek try to take FreeBSD private if such an effort became too successful? --Brett To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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