From owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Feb 11 12:42:40 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B916716A4CE for ; Fri, 11 Feb 2005 12:42:40 +0000 (GMT) Received: from cyrus.watson.org (cyrus.watson.org [204.156.12.53]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6EAEF43D5F for ; Fri, 11 Feb 2005 12:42:40 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from robert@fledge.watson.org) Received: from fledge.watson.org (fledge.watson.org [204.156.12.50]) by cyrus.watson.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 98BEB46B43; Fri, 11 Feb 2005 07:42:39 -0500 (EST) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 12:41:30 +0000 (GMT) From: Robert Watson X-Sender: robert@fledge.watson.org To: Julio Capote In-Reply-To: <1108080866.658.20.camel@hatter.wonderland.dn> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII cc: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: freebsd.com X-BeenThere: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: FreeBSD Evangelism List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 12:42:40 -0000 On Thu, 10 Feb 2005, Julio Capote wrote: > I think that the entire point of an IT deptartment, is to provide that > "geek abstraction"; no CEO goes to www.linux.com and decides to go with > linux for thier infastructure. They ask thier IT deptartment to make > those decisions. On the same token, no small business owner/executive is > going to goto www.freebsd.com and download an iso and install it on all > thier servers based on some marketing hype. Sites like www.redhat.com > are an exception because they are indeed a commercial entity that sells > services/products based on Linux, Freebsd has no such entity. I don't know if I buy into "FreeBSD.com" or not, but I do buy into the idea that what we need to do is provide ammunition for IT departments that want to promote FreeBSD in their organization. I.e., white papers on FreeBSD as an effective solution, a professional front page that they can point at and say "Look, this is real", and material to help third party CDROM and support vendors provide FreeBSD support to their clients. The trick will be finding the right balance in not hiding the fact that one of the greatest assets of FreeBSD is that it's driven by developers who are also consumers, but provides help to people who want to sell FreeBSD as the professional product that it is. An idea that's been thrown around by a number of people at various points is to produce a set of short, professional-looking, white papers on FreeBSD use in various environments -- FreeBSD in the computation cluster, FreeBSD as an enterprise mail solution, FreeBSD for web clusters, FreeBSD as the foundation for an appliance, and so on. Something that an IT department can take to their director/etc saying "This is a recognized solution -- it works for these people, it will work for us". Robert N M Watson