Date: Sun, 2 May 1999 22:56:37 +0530 (IST) From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai <asmodai@wxs.nl> Cc: Kris Kennaway <kkennawa@physics.adelaide.edu.au>, advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Some thoughts on advocacy (was: Slashdot ftp.cdrom.com upgrade article) Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9905022238040.7397-100000@theory1.physics.iisc.ernet.in> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.990502184334.asmodai@wxs.nl>
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> > There's an article about the recent upgrade of ftp.cdrom.com on Slashdot > > at http://slashdot.org/articles/99/05/01/0630216.shtml - interesting > > Yeah, there are a number of people who are willing to try FreeBSD for their > own high powered servers. > > That's a Good Thing(tm) IMHO =) I'm new on this list, and have only used FreeBSD for around 3 months. I was and still am a heavy linux user, but I am very impressed by FreeBSD and do my bit these days to encourage others to try it out. (I'm an ordinary user, not a hacker, though I do some administration.) The way to get people to try out FreeBSD is to bring out more such stories, and it seems to me that sites like slashdot and linuxtoday publish quite a lot of *BSD stuff. The sniping I see on this list about "linux weenies bashing BSD on Slashdot" seems quite misplaced -- it's true of both sides and most people ignore it. There are two ways you will *not* succeed in converting linux users: (a) by bashing linux. Most linux users are perfectly happy with the stability, usability, performance etc of their systems, and will not switch merely because linux can't run ftp.cdrom.com -- they don't need that kind of power anyway. If you tell people that FreeBSD is a great system, for these reasons, they will listen. If you merely tell them linux is a lousy system, they will not -- because they know it isn't. (b) by bashing the GPL. There was a businessweek article which observed that the GPL has never really been tested in the courts; by no means can it be construed as an anti-GPL article (it calls it "innovative", "effective", etc), but a response on this list chose to lambast the GPL as "obnoxious" etc, which is quite uncalled for. Linux users may be persuaded of FreeBSD's superiority in some things, but if they are asked to choose on the basis of licence, most of them will stick with linux... This is not the time to get into a rebuttal of that letter (which definitely I would call "obnoxious", a term I would use neither for the GPL nor for any other licence). GPL haters can rm -rf /usr/src/gnu and try rebuilding their system... (And why are so many businesses jumping on the "business-unfriendly" Linux/GNU bandwagon?) Of course, this list would express a lot of extreme opinions which will not make it out into the real world. Unfortunately, many of them do, and it makes the FreeBSD crowd sound like a bunch of whining losers -- which, in technical terms, they definitely are not. Grow up, advocates. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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