From owner-freebsd-advocacy Thu Jul 30 15:14:37 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id PAA06868 for freebsd-advocacy-outgoing; Thu, 30 Jul 1998 15:14:37 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from snark.thyrsus.com ([192.190.237.102]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA06857 for ; Thu, 30 Jul 1998 15:14:27 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from esr@snark.thyrsus.com) Received: (from esr@localhost) by snark.thyrsus.com (8.8.7/8.8.7) id RAA16913; Thu, 30 Jul 1998 17:00:49 -0400 Message-ID: <19980730170048.A16844@snark.thyrsus.com> Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1998 17:00:48 -0400 From: "Eric S. Raymond" To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Cc: Brian Behlendorf , Don Wilde , freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: branding References: <19980730145939.A16709@snark.thyrsus.com> <19654.901825882@time.cdrom.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.91.1 In-Reply-To: <19654.901825882@time.cdrom.com>; from Jordan K. Hubbard on Thu, Jul 30, 1998 at 12:11:22PM -0700 Organization: Eric Conspiracy Secret Labs X-Eric-Conspiracy: There is no conspiracy Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Jordan K. Hubbard : > So let me just clarify one thing then: You also rate such successes > ONLY by how much money they make, not by any records they set or > significant alliances they make, but purely by dollar value and only > by dollar value. Correct? And this dollar value must be at least > $1M/yr to rate consideration, also correct? The 1M/year is a proxy for what I'm really trying to accomplish. If you can persuade me that other success criteria would be just as persuasive to J. Random Suit, I'll cheerfully add them to the formula. So it's not quite as open-and-shut as all that. > Boy, it sure sounds to me like you have a serious chip on your > shoulder where BSD is concerned. I'm not hostile to the BSD community -- I started out as part of it myself nearly a decade before Linux. I am pretty exasperated with the mess it's been making since 1989. You guys had a better kernel than Linux, a stronger engineering tradition, and (on average) smarter developers. But you guys blew it; you wasted your energy on factional squabbles and personality conflicts, and let Linux blow right past you and grab all the mind-share. I think that's really sad -- so sad that it makes me angry. Part of me wishes I lived in the alternate universe where the BSD people kept their shit together and Linus Torvalds never happened (or he became a brilliant BSD hacker instead of writing his own kernel). In a lot of ways that would have been a better outcome than what we've got. It isn't what actually happened, though, and as a strategist for open source I have to deal with reality. The reality is that Linux has done what the BSD efforts never delivered; it has actually achieved the critical mass to make it a credible player not just among hackers and hobbyists and partisans but in the real world as well. Maybe BSD will make that nut in the future. I hope so, if for no other than to keep the Linux crowd from getting fat and happy and complacent. But I'm not really optimistic about this. > Are you sure you're the best person > to be "point man" on the open source issue? Jordan, if somebody else were to step up and do a better job I would vanish offstage so fast your head would spin. I don't *want* this freaking job; I'd rather be hacking. The only reason I'm doing this is because it desperately needed to be done and I truly didn't see anybody else as well qualified to try. Here's what you'd need from somebody to do a better job: (1) Person must be an able speaker with experience at talking to the press. (2) Person must be an effective writer and propagandist. (3) Person must be able to identify with and speak the language of non-hacker, non-academic, non-techie types. (4) Person must have enough hacker-community steet cred so the hackers will back him/her as a legitimate ambassador. (5) Person must have enough prior reputation *outside* the hacker community that reporters and suits and other non-hackers will have some reason to initially accept him/her as a credible witness. (6) Person must be independently wealthy or otherwise have enough free time to do advocacy effectively full-time. (7) Person must not be be too busy with other things. Those are pretty tough criteria. Some I worked for. Some of them I only meet by accident of personality and history. Now point me at somebody else who meets all of them -- *please*. I sure as hell don't want to be fielding calls from journalists for the rest of my life :-(. > It sounds like your criteria is purely monetary. How am I to meet > such criteria without disclosing confidential sales figures and the > like, or are you willing to simply accept my word for it? See above on the criteria. I'd personally take your word for sales figures without a murmur, but my intended audience has no reason to. -- Eric S. Raymond All governments are more or less combinations against the people. . .and as rulers have no more virtue than the ruled. . . the power of government can only be kept within its constituted bounds by the display of a power equal to itself, the collected sentiment of the people. -- Benjamin Franklin Bache, in a Phildelphia Aurora editorial 1794 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message