Date: Tue, 22 May 2001 03:57:32 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: David Johnson <djohnson@acuson.com> Cc: Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com>, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: [dn-core] Re: Perens' "Free Software Leaders Stand Together" Message-ID: <3B0A461C.58A81808@mindspring.com> References: <000101c0e0ff$44725600$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> <3B095240.F7873FAD@acuson.com>
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David Johnson wrote: > > Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > > > Well, I remember paging through that in the bookstore > > once, and while I admit I didn't look through all volumes > > (they wern't all there) what I remember of it was mainly > > reprints of the system manual pages. Not much to > > recommend purchase as the price was rather high. > > That's what 75% of their X11 series was, and it sold very well. > > I think the difference is that the X11 series was general > to all unices, while the 4.4BSD Lite was specific to a > single OS. ORA publishes a lot of Linux books because there > is a big market demand for them. But there isn't a big > market demand for FreeBSD books. Unfortunate, but true. They were 4.4BSD books, and they were 4.4BSD-Lite, at a time that Lite2 was just about to be released, and had been hyped a bunch already. So they were out of date, and they had stale code (the CDROM was a Lite CDROM, published by Usenix). The 4.4BSD code from CSRG was a rather big disappointment, since it didn't result in a running system. So basically, it was stale documentation for broken code, which was not entirely relevent to the systems derived from that code. I bought a set of the books, both because I could get a full set all at once, and because they were much less to carry around than my set of orange Ultrix manuals, which they effectively replaced as my "almost applicable to FreeBSD" manuals. It didn't hurt that much of the profit was given over in support of Usenix, either. I'm not really surprised that the books didn't sell that well; I'm actually more surprised that they sold as well as they did. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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