[nycbug-talk] OSCON ports idea

[Dru]

Here's an idea that was brought up at OSCON by a Mac user who has recently 
become a FreeBSD newbie after dabbling a bit with Linux.

All these years he had heard of BSD but was under the impression that 
there was no software for it. (I can hear everyone shouting "ports 
collection" but stay with me here.) The reason why? Every time he went to 
an open source software site (firefox, xmms, acrobat, abiword, webmagick, 
gaim, nvu, digikam...) the download page had links for Windows, several 
Linux distros and Mac. No BSD link. Just the scary "source for Unix". 
(aaah, this is why all my students think tarballs are the way to go...)

I checked out some sites yesterday. Audacity even had the audacity to use 
the beastie icon to go to downloads for several Linux binaries! 
(http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/)

Now, we all know better. But this guy did bring up a valid point on 
perception. A nice little project would be to hit the top used open source 
software sites and give them the URL to the FreeBSD package along with a 
nice little beastie pic. Anyone interested, I've already compiled a list 
of the top 50 I can send to you. Otherwise, it's on my list of things to 
do if I ever get bored (ha ha).

Dru