Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1998 00:30:14 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Dan Janowski <danj@3skel.com> Cc: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>, Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>, David Shanes <dshanes@personalogic.com>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Subject: Re: Fw: Your Article "Freeware: The Heart & Soul of the Internet" Message-ID: <6025.892193414@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 09 Apr 1998 23:35:19 EDT." <352D9376.79BA2FB7@3skel.com>
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> We have not done much to enhance the appeal, visibility or > accessibility issues. We can't fault ourselves because we are > doing real work with our OS. But, confronted with the risk of > being marginalized, we need to deal with these three things. Yep! > We should also be careful about panning Linux. We will only catch shit > for it. As we all know this whole thing is really about cosmetics not > merit. Panning MS does little good aside from satiating our own need to > bitch about that which is lacking in merit. I didn't mean to imply that we should take on a negative publicity campaign with respect to Linux in my last message, though it certainly reads that way if you look at it from the right angle. What I was referring to was more of a willingness to grapple with the "which is best?" question rather than coming from a "linux sucks because .." perspective. We need to be more willing to say "WE ARE BETTER AT X, Y and Z - CHOOSE US!" rather than always falling back to the "try them all and see for yourself" argument - that may be the more asthetically desirable of the two, but it just doesn't fly for most folks - they are not interested in doing that research for themselves and resent being told to do it. > As I think about it, I get a sinking feeling that what we really lack is > capital. Do we need a FreeBSD version of RedHat or Caldera that will Again, it's really not lack of capital so much as talent. "But capital buys talent" I hear you say, and to that I can only respond by saying that it hasn't worked so far - we've had an open req for a marketing guy at Walnut Creek CDROM for 3 years now and still haven't found the right guy. We're also willing to pay that person a more than generous salary, assuming we can find a marketing guy who doesn't go ``CD what?'' when we get to the job description part of the interview, so it's really not the money. It's finding the people who are: A) Talented in marketing a product like FreeBSD or willing and able to become familiar enough with it to do the job right. B) Available. That's proving really really difficult here. Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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