Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 12:12:57 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: "Frank Pawlak" <fpawlak@execpc.com> Cc: Ashort@concentric.net, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: BSD vs Linux Message-ID: <10811.895086777@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 13 May 1998 12:50:32 CDT." <199805131250320375.007F66C9@mailgate.execpc.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> I am as we speak working on these two critical issues. Understand, that my > time is limited as is that of all the volunteer staff. The intent of my > post was to get the ball rolling and gather ideas. I understand, and I don't mean to come across like a big wet blanket here or anything with my constant harping about tangibles, I'm just trying to get people to stay focused on the realities of what it takes to _really_ get publicity, and posting lengthy messages to this list are simply (beyond a certain point) not the way to go about it. I've sat here watching the Linux camp for close to 5 years now and what I've determined is that it's almost NONE of the "high profile" evangelists who are making the most difference there. It's all the folks whom I've never even heard of before, quiet unsung types who's postings appear in public rarely if at all, diligently working away at home on their little word processors to hit the major magazines with feature articles or editorial pieces on Linux and the phenomenon of free software (as seen through the eyes of a Linux devotee) in general. The editors of these magazines, who are as often as not DESPERATE for material, naturally eat it up. I'm sure that a large measure of the success of any Linux author doesn't come from heavy peer support or a great body of knowledge about the product (many, if not most, of Linux's print advocates have probably never even looked at the Linux kernel sources). It comes from being willing to set aside a certain number of hours a day to just write write write, even when it's the last thing one wishes to do. It comes from having the discipline to write an outline and then doggedly fill it in despite the hassles of screaming children banging on the study door and a dog throwing up pieces of frog in the hallway. Writing is NOT an easy thing to do and if it were easier, I'd have a lot more than a single mainstream magazine article under my own belt. For most of us, writing is simply a pain in the butt! :-) It also doesn't take lots of fancy statistics or even anything particularly NEW to say in order to write a good article - far from it. Sometimes just writing about something interesting you did with FreeBSD is enough and the article doesn't necessarily have to be about FreeBSD itself - you can often evangelize more effectively through focusing on something completely different and mentioning FreeBSD only in passing. People will generally respond better to this than yet another puff-piece extolling the virtues of the OS itself and you'll get the attention of people who share your definition of "interesting" far more directly than you would have otherwise. More to the point, you can cover a lot more ground. Write just about the OS and you've got maybe 3 magazines to hit up, perhaps less. Write about how the OS can be used to create a home audio mixing station, on the other hand, and you've got about 10 audio magazines and 2 or 3 do-it-yourself publications to target. :-) And on that note, I'm off to write my article about using FreeBSD and a Toshiba Libretto to create a pocket web page demonstration platform. Here's hoping that I manage to get it into something like "Yahoo Life" or "Webmaster Magazine". - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?10811.895086777>