Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1998 11:04:58 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@snark.thyrsus.com> Cc: Brian Behlendorf <brian@hyperreal.org>, Don Wilde <dwilde1@ibm.net>, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: branding Message-ID: <19313.901821898@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 30 Jul 1998 11:39:06 EDT." <19980730113906.C16515@snark.thyrsus.com>
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> This is really rich. It boils down to "Do things my way or I'll > throw a public tantrum just to make us all look like squabbling > pre-schoolers." No, Eric, this boils down to "Eric asks me [at USENIX] to get more FreeBSD advocates to send him material since the opensource web page looks essentially like a Linux web page, I refer said advocates to Eric, they come back and say (in essence) ``Eric told us to get stuffed, what do we do now?''" I wouldn't even be *having* this discussion with you if that hadn't been the case. I also wouldn't even need to "threaten" to take this public if you willing at any stage to be reasonable about this rather than babbling about $1M run rates and why our lack of market leadership meant that you weren't going to waste any time attempting to suggest that OpenSource meant anything but Linux. I just went to your web page and clicked on every link I could find, and the only mention of "BSD" at all is made in a rather tangental fashion - we pop up in the entries for Yahoo, Walnut Creek CDROM and Whistle but nowhere does it say what BSD actually *is*, the businessman reading this being left to essentially puzzle this out for him or herself. Your "history of open source software" also begins rather conveniently in 1998 and completely ignores the long history of U.C. Berkeley releasing code to the general public (in the form of their Net/2 and later 4.4Lite releases). If that's not a slap in the face to the early pioneers of open source, I don't know what is. I'm sorry, but no matter how I read the contents of the opensource site, it's hard to see it as anything but your personal agenda masquerading as more general advocacy and it is THAT which I am most bothered about. You make snide remarks about our always taking the opportunity to miss an opportunity, dividing the community and forming spin-off groups, when that's exactly what you yourself seem to be doing. To call your latest statements "hypocracy" would be too kind! You also accuse me of lacking intelligence here but somehow fail to see that the most "intelligent" thing for you to do would be to say "how can we all win at this or at least come to some accord on the advancement of free software" rather than telling us all of the reasons why we somehow fail to meet your criteria. C'mon, Eric, we're all fighting the same battle here and your intransigence on the issue does no one any good. I don't want a public battle any more than you do, but you seem hell-bent on creating one by adopting a highly skewed and rather "exclusive" view of what constitutes free software and what you're willing to publish on the web site. I wasn't the one to create such a site and claim to speak for the open source community at large, you were. I wasn't the one to start spouting microsoft-speak about market share and why an OS with a rich 20-year history somehow didn't belong on the timeline, you were. Finally, I didn't make the claim that the only reason the opensource web site was perceivably Linux-biased because of lack of BSD-related material, only to reject that material when it was presented, you did. Really rich? Oh, indeed. Only too much so. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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