From owner-freebsd-advocacy Fri Aug 6 10:35:27 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from mercury.webnology.com (mercury.webnology.com [209.155.51.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2DC9A155F4 for ; Fri, 6 Aug 1999 10:35:23 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jooji@webnology.com) Received: from localhost (jooji@localhost) by mercury.webnology.com (8.9.2/8.9.2) with SMTP id LAA01128; Fri, 6 Aug 1999 11:38:49 -0500 (CDT) Date: Fri, 6 Aug 1999 11:38:48 -0500 (CDT) From: "Jasper O'Malley" To: Brian McGroarty Cc: freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Marketing FreeBSD / FreeBSD as a product In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Fri, 6 Aug 1999, Brian McGroarty wrote: > I love Chucky. And I'd like to see him as part of BSD/FreeBSD forever. > However he's a poor choice for the cover of the Walnut Creek CD-ROMs. The > character, especially in his current incarnations, has a very cartoonish > appearance. He's certainly a draw and a recognizable symbol for those already > using FreeBSD. But for someone picking over the packaging cold, he grossly > misrepresents FreeBSD as a product. Barring a massive shift in the alignment of the planets, there's absolutely no chance that the BSD Daemon will disappear from the cover of the FreeBSD CD-ROM distributions. I'd almost be willing to say most people in the project are willing to risk the loss of market share to avoid playing to the ignorant masses that immediately identify the daemon with the Christian image of Satan and choose not to buy as a result. > FreeBSD itself is an unknown in most circles outside established UNIX > production environments and academia. Thus, not only does Chucky carry little > branding value, "FreeBSD" itself doesn't describe the product well. Every bit > as large as the FreeBSD logo, the cover needs "UNIX" to identify FreeBSD. The > strengths should be listed underneath. "STABILITY. PERFORMANCE. SECURITY." FWIW, FreeBSD can't use the name UNIX anywhere. It's a trademark owned by the X/Open Group (unless they've sold it to someone else at this point). To use the name, an operating system needs to meet some arbitrary standard of what a "UNIX" is, and the distributors need to pay an obscene licensing fee. I like the rest of your ideas, though. I've always felt strongly that we'll need a boxed product someday. Cheers, Mick The Reverend Jasper P. O'Malley dotdot:jooji@webnology.com Systems Administrator ringring:asktheadmiral Webnology, LLC woowoo:http://www.webnology.com/~jooji To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message