Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1998 02:00:24 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: opsys@mail.webspan.net, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: your mail Message-ID: <199810040200.TAA18605@usr06.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <12464.907414597@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Oct 3, 98 04:36:37 am
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> Just to put this in perspective: Do you folks know when the last major > "mainstream" magazine in the U.S. published an article on FreeBSD? > I'll give you a hint: December 1996. That was when BYTE published my > own article on the FreeBSD project and, since then, we've had a few > single-page blurbs here and there (and the latest one-pager in PC > Magazine this month was a very glad sight) but nothing approaching > feature length. I have, in the same period of time, probably seen 30 > feature length articles on Linux in the american trade press. I saw two articles by SEF more recent than that, in Dr. Dobb's Journal. I have also seen at least 7 articles in various publications. Most of them by one "Brett Glass". In the August 1998 ";login", the USENIX Association's magazine, there is a 5 page article by Bob Gray entitled "Loading Source Code UNIX on the PC". While it mentions the other OpenSource OS's, it concentrates and gives examples solely for FreeBSD. The author promises a followup article on package management. > Now, just for a little contrast, let's go to Japan and look at their > mainstream press. Whooee! Articles about FreeBSD almost every month! > 20 different books on the bookshelves, covering everything from "How > to be an ISP with FreeBSD" to "FreeBSD kernel internals." Regular > columns on FreeBSD in several of their Unix magazines. And you know > what? In Japan, FreeBSD and Linux are neck-and-neck in terms of > users. It's not the more usual "Linux kicks FreeBSD's butt" scenario > there at all, and that's certainly not because Walnut Creek CDROM (or > even Pacific HiTech) are doing amazingly good promotion in Japan. PHT > is doing some promotion, yes, and for that they should be thanked, but > it's really the user base in Japan which is making ALL the difference > in terms of garnering market share. I believe FreeBSD supported the NEC PC98 and the DOSV machines before or at the same time as Linux did. There are also a large number of corporations who, for obvious reasons, use FreeBSD as the basis of products. The Japanese "Firepower" PowerPC comes with a BSD 4.4 source port that boots on the hardware, with pieces from FreeBSD, though they refused to sell me one in the US. Also, do not forget the WIDE project. Though FreeBSD has consistently failed to integrate their code (starting with their IPv6 and DHCP implementations, and most recently, with the failure to integrate their IPSEC implementation), nevertheless, there is a large academic following for BSD in general and FreeBSD in particular. > Do you hear me Frank? Do you hear me Brett? That's what this is all > about, and the statistics from Japan don't lie. Press == Users. I think you are comparing two exponential curves. In Japan, they started at the same time; in the US, they didn't. It's like Gallant, who starts saving for his retirement at 22, and Goofus, who waits until he's in his 30's, and starts feeling old. In the US, FreeBSD is Goofus. > don't need to go on a witch-hunt against the only company who's doing > ANYTHING to promote FreeBSD at the moment, that being a foolish attack Certainly, a witch-hunt is unproductive. But the majority of FreeBSD press is originating with Brett Glass and people like him. You don't get articles out of people who aren't so willing to back something that they make themselves a target (which is one of the reasons why I haven't written articles; the other is that what I write about will exist only on my machines and in the article, so why bother, if it's not going to get used by people; you can't raise the bar unless you can get people to agree that what you are raising is, in fact, a bar at all...). On the other hand, it's not unreasonable to try and raise FreeBSD's visibility within a company that sells both Linux and FreeBSD, runs their servers on FreeBSD, but gives Linux front-page billing on their catalog covers. A catalog cover is press of a sort, as well. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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