Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2000 13:55:46 -0400 (EDT) From: Marty Poulin <mpoulin@honk.org> To: Joe.Warner@smed.com Cc: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Some questions re: FreeBSD Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.96.1000623131840.13283A-100000@spectre.honk.org> In-Reply-To: <85256907.0054D783.00@Deimos.smed.com>
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These are some tough ones to answer. > "If you can do all this with FreeBSD and get everything for free, why > isn't everybody using it? I suppose there are a number of reasons: - lack of knowledge on the part of the user - market saturation / domination by other commercial OSes - lack of marketing / advertising for FreeBSD - don't want to learn something new The main thing is that people don't usually choose something because it's the *best*, they choose it for other, less easily definable reasons. People are generally not very wise when they make decisions about their computers. There is still this attitude of "if it's free, it can't be very good" and people shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars for something that isn't half the product that FreeBSD is, simply because it "comes with the computer" or their neighbour uses it, or they saw a really cool ad for it on T.V. > "This is an excellent OS but if people can get it for free, how do the > people that produce it make any money?" From what I understand, they don't. At least not much - there's some money to be earned from selling the CD's, and Greg Lehey's book must generate some dollars, and there are some people who donate (financially) to the project: (http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/donors.html) Mostly, the project exists through the efforts of volunteers. (http://www.freebsd.org/releases/2.0/credits.html) > How can they produce such an excellent product and support it without > any profits?" I believe that one of the strengths of the free software concept is that it is done without the motivation of profit. The people who contribute to FreeBSD do so because they *want* to, and their goal is to produce a quality, robust operating system. If the goal was to deliver a product on a certain date set by some abstract marketing deadline, then the quality would slip. Also, the amount of money spent to develop a product must be less than the amount of revenue the product will generate, otherwise there is no profit. This means that a software company might decide to cut costs by limiting the number of programmers on a given project, and demand more work from them. The open source concept means that anyone can contribute; this essentially means unlimited resources. The best way to explain it to people is to demonstrate by example. Ask them if they've heard of Yahoo, or even better, Microsoft's Hotmail. That's the best way to show people that even though it's free, it really does work, and some very big companies agree. - M - On Fri, 23 Jun 2000 Joe.Warner@smed.com wrote: > > > I hope I'm sending this to the correct mailing lists. Please forgive me if > I am not. I have a couple of questions regarding FreeBSD that I hope > someone will help me address. > After recently installing FreeBSD on a Compaq Deskpro 2000 at work and > setting it up with various applications and servers, Apache and FTP to name > a couple, I've had the opportunity to demonstrate to others that I work > with a small portion of the vast amount of things this powerful operating > system can do. The response has been tremendous and also, a little > overwhelming. Most of my co-workers think it's awesome. They couldn't > believe all the functionality built into FreeBSD and the huge number of > applications that come with the CD ROM set. They also were surprised to > learn that you can download the OS and most of the applications for free. > Here's where I'm having some trouble --- Some of the most frequent > questions I'm getting are: "If you can do all this with FreeBSD and get > everything for free, why isn't everybody using it?" Another one is: "This > is an excellent OS but if people can get it for free, how do the people > that produce it make any money?" or.."How can they produce such an > excellent product and support it without any profits?" I'm having trouble > addressing these questions because my understanding of the current Open > Source Movement is a bit limited and the topic seems fairly complex to me. > I would be so grateful if someone could help me provide some good answers > to these questions or point me to a related site? > > Thanks. > > Joe > > > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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