From owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Jan 7 03:23:05 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5261416A4CE; Wed, 7 Jan 2004 03:23:05 -0800 (PST) Received: from www.cyclades.de (mail.linux-router.org [62.225.173.194]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1E9FE43D1D; Wed, 7 Jan 2004 03:23:03 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mh@kernel32.de) Received: from pd9ff8813.dip.t-dialin.net ([217.255.136.19] helo=kernel32.de) by www.cyclades.de with asmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 1AeAQ3-0002JM-00; Wed, 07 Jan 2004 10:56:08 +0100 Message-ID: <3FFBD7B4.8010207@kernel32.de> Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2004 10:56:04 +0100 From: Marian Hettwer User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031115 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Robert Watson References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-MailScanner: Found to be clean X-MailScanner-SpamCheck: cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Where is FreeBSD going? X-BeenThere: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Non technical items related to the community List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2004 11:23:05 -0000 Hi there, Robert Watson wrote: > > > The best advocacy FreeBSD can get is to have happy users explain to the > rest of the world how much they like our cool aid. Or rather, one of the > greatest contributions end-users can make to FreeBSD is to tell their > friends (and then help them get up and going :-). It's also one of the > greatest compliments you can give. Developers are typically fairly bad at > advocacy, and perhaps it's better that the developers work on what they're > good at (since it always seems a few more hands can help). So if you (in > the general sense, not you specifically) like FreeBSD, and feel like > documentation or code aren't your fortes, go out and give a talk at your > local Linux user group about FreeBSD. Or explain to the people at your > company that they could go out and buy Windows, Solaris, or Linux with > support, or they could rely on your own expertise in-house and get the job > done at a fraction of the cost. > For introduction, I've been using FreeBSD since 4.0-release, so I'm still pretty new. I've changed directly from Windows to FreeBSD; never tried Linux before. Anyhow, I'm not a developer, more likely a user and sysadmin. Your hints for giving advocacy to FreeBSD are all very good and I'll keep them in mind. However, if you talk to a company who is already using Linux (and that's what we do) the only freedom I have is to put on my Router/Gateway a FreeBSD, or to put it on my Laptop, if I want to. When I talk to our sysadmins (who are Linux folks), I will always get the answer "This can be done by using Debian, we won't use FreeBSD." And the reason for that ? The momentum of Linux was bigger in the past years, and is still bigger for the time being. The majority of Linux users I know are looking forward to Linux 2.6 and it's pretty hard to convince them to just give FreeBSD a try. So I start blathering about good features. The answer will mostly always be "Linux can do this also". If you than reply that FreeBSD may be still the better choice, than you are in an open flamewar. Which ain't cool and which is the point where I stop discussing, going back to my Laptop and enjoy my FreeBSD. However, when talking about advocacy we may follow your suggestions. Additionally it would be cool if we just get better reviews in magazines. Some Linux magazines write an article about FreeBSD too. But this only happens once or twice in a year. (I'm actually talking about German Magazines, dunno about US or UK mags) Howto improve this ? just my 0,02 EUR. Keep up the good work, and improve talking to end users / non-programmers ;) There are a bunch of "features" missing in FreeBSD which a Laptop definitly needs. best regards, Marian