From owner-freebsd-advocacy Thu Nov 5 17:36:57 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id RAA01662 for freebsd-advocacy-outgoing; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 17:36:57 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from time.cdrom.com (time.cdrom.com [204.216.27.226]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA01656 for ; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 17:36:56 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jkh@time.cdrom.com) Received: from time.cdrom.com (jkh@localhost.cdrom.com [127.0.0.1]) by time.cdrom.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA27118; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 17:37:14 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jkh@time.cdrom.com) To: Brett Glass cc: "Jason C. Wells" , advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Linux "best of breed?" In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 05 Nov 1998 16:44:07 MST." <4.1.19981105163821.00c0dbb0@127.0.0.1> Date: Thu, 05 Nov 1998 17:37:13 -0800 Message-ID: <27114.910316233@time.cdrom.com> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > Sorry to disturb you, but this is your wake-up call. Sean Connery has a great line in The Untouchables where he, riddled with gunfire and dying, grabs Kevin Costner by the shirt and demands "What are you prepared to DO? WHAT ARE YOU PREPARED TO DO??" A lot more than be an alarm clock with an expensive college school education, one hopes? A lot more than that is certainly needed, of course, and having an advocacy group which spends its days going "wail! moan! despair!" in a collective fashion also strikes me as a fine way of going under. Any group of people engaged in such activity are not generally notable for actually being productive. More to the point, if we actually subjected all the messages posted to this mailing list over the last 6 months to even the most rudimentary statistical analysis, I'm highly confident that we'd find something like: 78% General gnashing of teeth, rending of cloth 22% Content actually dedicated to furthering advocacy and I'm probably being far too lenient with those figures, if anything. The psych majors will probably tell us that numbers like these are a general indication of Some Sort of Group Dysfunction which Only Trained Sociologists Can Really Understand, but I say bah. The numbers indicate to *me* that too many people have simply fallen in love with reporting on the game from the sidelines and have forgotten that they were supposed to be out on the field actually playing it. To put it another way, if people devoted themselves to the process of conducting their own advocacy efforts with the same energies I've seen them devote to freaking out about Linux's own efforts or screaming about falling chunks of sky, we'd have the BSD daemon on the cover of Time Magazine by now. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message