Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 18:31:39 -0500 From: bsdnooby <bsdnooby@optonline.net> To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD Documentary Shorts Message-ID: <4223A9DB.4080106@optonline.net> In-Reply-To: <421A72DD.7040001@cyberlifepictures.com> References: <421A3010.7090104@optonline.net> <421A72DD.7040001@cyberlifepictures.com>
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"That would be really great. I'm from Brazil and I am really interested in this idea. Let's get together and propose a world competition? I work for a BSD company that has came up with an unusual idea of making animated short films using our digital camera. You can count on us... Waiting for some answers, Luiz Gustavo" Sorry for the late response, I saw this response in Google, but for some reason - did not receive it from the list. I have some ideas about things I would like so see in videos (whether it be mine or someone elses). Things like the history of FreeBSD, spirit of the FreeBSD license, people who contribute to FreeBSD, people who use FreeBSD, companies that use FreeBSD, projects that use FreeBSD, places where FreeBSD is being used, and where FreeBSD is going. Also the strengths and weaknesses of FreeBSD, plus whatever else makes FreeBSD unique. Some examples.. The history of how FreeBSD is a direct descendant of UNIX, and it's legal troubles contributed to the creation of Linux (and perhaps the irony of that the defendants then are the plaintiffs now). Who the core team and other major contributors are. For example, I know who Greg Lehey and Dru Lavign are, and even what they look like - but I have no idea who makes up the core team, or anything about them. The personal users of FreeBSD might tend to be people who use it at work, and want to run it at home. While someone like me might be more interested in access to a completely legal library of 10,000 applications. A few years ago I was watching, of all things, The Jenny Jones TV show, where the show was on successful business women. One of the woman was a porn star (Mimi Miyagi) who said she ran her own website "on FreeBSD" and grossed over a million a year. Companies that use FreeBSD are the often mentioned Hotmail (originally), Yahoo, Cdrom.com, and I think Netcraft. I'm sure there are a lot more. I'm not sure which major OSS projects are developed mostly on FreeBSD. I think the guy who does SSH uses a BSD. A few years ago I read about a Japanese fellow who worked on the IPv6 stack, and I believe he was using a BSD. We could mention that Microsoft used FreeBSD's IP stack for Win2000, and that Apple used parts of FreeBSD for OSX. The places that use FreeBSD most likely is everywhere. I can imagine a video montage of the various countries where its used, from Tokyo to Times Square. Where FreeBSD is going would be important to cover, there never seems to be an end to the "FreeBSD is dying" trolling that goes on. My view of FreeBSD is that since it is essentially being developed by its users, it can never disappear unless it's users disappear - and so it doesn't really matter if it has .001% or 100% of the OS market share. The strengths and weaknesses could described as the typical ones for a *nix OS. Strengths might be free software, standards based, easy availability, low hardware requirements, efficient, internationalized, etc. Weaknesses might be higher learning curve, little commercial software, not so mainstream, etc. The unique traits would be where it really stands out. Incredible uptime for websites, as demonstrated on Netcraft. The huge number of ports available, more than any Linux distro I think. Very reliable, often it is chosen for science experiments. I read once how the USA put a bunch of earthquake measuring devices in caves throughout California, and they used the most reliable OS they could find - FreeBSD. Those machines were required to record data for years without needing service. Putting it all together... I personally envision a "longish short" video, which might be 30 minutes in length (rather than 10 mins for the typical "short") I would (personally) want to cram all of the above in to a slick video/documentary with a good soundtrack, soundbites, videos, and pictures. In order to encourage others to participate, we might need to standardize on perhaps a "short" and "long" length. The "short" might be 3 or 5 minutes, where someone could put something together quickly and easily. The "long" might be a real documentary of 30 or 120 minutes, something that would either go in to great depth on some topic or cover everything (like above notes do). If we had a library of these videos, they would make there way around the net acting as our FreeBSD emmisaries. I'm actually very new to FreeBSD, and my skills are still quite limited. I also do not know what the legal issues are in using songs, videos, pictures, and other media that is copyrighted by other parties. It would also be nice to do the video creation on FreeBSD, but I do not think that should be a requirement. As for rules, I don't think we would need any, except maybe to encourage people to aim for a certain length or filesize. That would be more for the producers benefit, so they didn't feel like they had to make a 120 documentary, or produce a 4GB video. We might want to agree on an easy to play codec beforehand. As people worked on the videos, they could share how they did it. That would enable more people to participate. The competitions would allow us to give greater recognition to the best videos. If we had a competition every 6 months, we could allow all the videos created since the last competition to be entered. If 6 months is too bold, we could do it annually. Personally, I have a lot to learn before I will be able to create a video - but I do not want that to hold back others. thx!
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