Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1998 02:11:40 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Brian Behlendorf <brian@hyperreal.org> Cc: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>, Don Wilde <dwilde1@ibm.net>, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: branding Message-ID: <17287.901789900@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 29 Jul 1998 23:36:54 PDT." <19980730065206.11785.qmail@hyperreal.org>
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> I would like to state that I think having the goal of the Open Source pages > be all about convincing companies who sell software that they should > open-source their software, is a mistake. FreeBSD is an example of a > successful project, with many many commercial interests, but little > commercial interest to "FreeBSD, Inc." What FreeBSD shows the world, and > Apache to a lesser extent, is that no company has to be selling a > "commercial version" of the open-source software in order for it to be a > successful "open source project". While companies from Oracle to Yahoo to > Hotmail to others are using it to save bundles of money and have greater > reliability in their services, there is no one company selling a > "commercial version" of FreeBSD; and I think FreeBSD shows (even better > than Apache) that such a commercialization is unnecessary. Even though we have indeed passed Eric's "1 million dollar barrier" in direct sales of FreeBSD, I have to also agree with all of the above. There are many less tangible indicators of success, nor is it fair to groups like Apache to say "IBM's backing of you doesn't count since they're not selling $1M worth of Apache servers, they're selling their own product *based* on Apache." I think that Eric has, by inference, chosen to speak for all of us by putting up the OpenSource pages and if that's the case then he'd either better START speaking for all of us or find a number of arrows fired in his direction from the very community he's claiming to support. Will that better the cause of free software or make us look any more professional in the eyes of the "Wall Street fatcats" he claims to be courting here? No, it most definitely will not, and if Eric really DOES have an eye for the "bigger picture" as he claims here, he'll wake up and realize this before creating yet another unwonted and destructive schism in the free software community. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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