[nycbug-talk] BSD Success Stories (fwd)

[Dru]

On Mon, 25 Oct 2004, 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"


Either that or something along the lines of "I'm a regular reader and was 
curious as to why BSD Success Stories is at linux.oreilly.com and not 
bsd.oreilly.com". You know, the few sentences you sent in your original 
email were just fine :-)

Never underestimate the cumulative effect of the nameless individual...


> 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".
>
> 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'm not offended. Written material is just one thing out of a 100 
different things that can be and should be done. Even the pieces of the 
puzzle that don't particularly appeal to me advocacy-wise still have their 
place in the bigger picture.



> 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.  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 agree completely. Even better, get in the habit of carrying around 
give-away CDs (Freesbie, OpenCD, etc.) I don't know how many times I've 
brought up Open Source at the local Futureshop (insert local PC shop name 
here) and people were fascinated by the Live CD idea (you mean I can try 
it out without losing my data???) Even the ones who aren't interested in 
the big scary Unix are more than happy to try out Firefox, OpenOffice, and 
Gimp. Heck, they're legally free and not virus laden :-)

Dru