[nycbug-talk] BSD Success Stories (fwd)

[Isaac Levy]

Hi Sunny, All,

On Oct 25, 2004, at 5:41 PM, Sunny Dubey wrote:

> On Monday 25 October 2004 16:29, Dru wrote:
>
>> Wanna email O'Reilly and ask? ;-)
>>
>
> heh, what would I say ?
>
> "this is nameless hax0r from NYC, please add bsd.o.com!
> kthx
> bye"

Yes- I'm gonna do it.

>
> haha
>
> that being said
>
> I think its really important that people eat their own dog food.  If 
> was a
> clueless twit, and I saw "http://linux.o.com/BSD_Advocate.pdf" I'd 
> probably
> think to myself "Linux is BSD's older brother".

Yep.

>
> I also think "marketing from the server room" is doomed to fail.  For 
> every
> example of corporate BSD usage you can show me, I can easily show you
> examples of corporate NT usage.  Sure people like you and I will be 
> able to
> distinguish fact from FUD, but the PHB reading that PDF can't.
>
> I don't mean to offend when I say this, but such written material IMO 
> is not
> going to help the BSD cause.

I have to strongly disagree here, everything is useful to 'the BSD 
cause'.  I'd also state that it's stuff like this that rocketed Linux 
into the enterprise computing enviornments in the late 90's, (i.e. how 
many glossy Linux white-papers are filling the landfills post 
dot-bomb?)

>
> IMHO how available an OS to users at *home* is what is going to help 
> it in the
> corporate sector/adoption.  People took the concepts they learned of 
> Windows
> 95/98 at home, and took it to the work place with Windows NT4/2000.  
> Everyone
> downloaded some copy of Slackware/Redhat and eventually had most ISPs 
> running
> on it.  etc etc etc
>
> What BSD really needs is a whole bunch of BSD guys to show up at random
> computing conferences, and to simply boot BSD on their laptops, with 
> their
> BSD wallpaper.

This is something I've seen a LOT of actually, Macs all over, and BSD 
laptops in the hands of major heavys at a lot of conferences.  The 
little Daemon shows up where it counts.


>   That IMO is extremely powerful and priceless advertising.
> People are going to look at these "cool BSD guys" and they are going 
> to want
> to do the same thing .... at home!  Once they get comfy with it at 
> home, they
> start bringing it to the work place, and loading it up on machines 
> their
> manager isn't going to care about.  The rest is history.
>
> Of course I'm over-simplifying this, but hopefully you all get the 
> idea.

I see your point, and think it's valuable Sunny, but I don't believe it 
invalidates things like this flyer.  Today for instance, I distributed 
the PDF to a client who got to see some statements about BSD which they 
can apply to their own business practices, (they run BSD, and have for 
several years now, at my reccommendation).  They have had so few 
problems with BSD over the years, that in their case, they really 
appreciated hearing something that re-enforced how they work.

Sure, folks like us aren't swayed by stuff like this, but we're not who 
it's for IMO.  This, to me, is like putting on a clean pressed shirt to 
go out into the world.  It's silly, and ultimately eqates to wearing a 
clean pressed shirt... It says nothing and everything, all at once.  :)

Rockin' my .02?-
.ike