From owner-freebsd-advocacy Sat Feb 26 14:23:20 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from zippy.cdrom.com (zippy.cdrom.com [204.216.27.228]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CB6F237B52D for ; Sat, 26 Feb 2000 14:23:18 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jkh@zippy.cdrom.com) Received: from zippy.cdrom.com (jkh@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by zippy.cdrom.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id OAA52163; Sat, 26 Feb 2000 14:22:25 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jkh@zippy.cdrom.com) To: Steve Lumos Cc: Louis Bertrand , netbsd-advocacy@netbsd.org, advocacy@openbsd.org, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Request for Comments on article In-reply-to: Your message of "Sat, 26 Feb 2000 14:06:46 PST." Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 14:22:24 -0800 Message-ID: <52160.951603744@zippy.cdrom.com> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > Thanks to everyone for the great comments. I have a few questions, but > I'm going to combine them into one message and work on the next draft My suggestion here would be to pull a trick from the Linux camp's standard bag of tricks and talk about "BSD" in the global sense, e.g. lumping everyone's good points together for the purpose of talking about BSD's overall feature set. That is to say that if FreeBSD has a rep for having lots of x86 bells and whistles as well as reliability and industry acceptance then you say BSD has all of those things. If OpenBSD has a good rep for security then you can say that BSD offers better security. If NetBSD is known for wide cross-platform support, then you say BSD... etc. I'm sure you get the picture and, again, this is no less than what the "Linux" camp has done in spades. It might be Caldera/Red Hat with the best installer, Debian with the most developers or TurboLinux with "clustering", but talk to the press and what they're being fed is "Linux has a great installer, offers clustering and has lots of developers." There is very little distinction between the actual linux distributions themselves, and the fact that many of them are in bitter competition with one another is conveniently ignored. As far as the press is concerned, Linux is a single phenomenon with a single god at its head. I'm also not saying we should just paper over our differences, but we might do well to combine our individual "brand strengths" rather than fall divided when it comes to position papers like this. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message