Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2005 23:39:37 +0100 From: Farid Hajji <farid.hajji@ob.kamp.net> To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Pleasing both suits and the community (Logo Contest) Message-ID: <20050212223937.GB39237@fw.farid-hajji.net>
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Hi, some posters here suggested that a "professional" logo (whatever that means) would please the suits and help the development of FreeBSD (drivers, new code...) and its deployment in the enterprise. This is difficult to predict, to say the least. Some of you may have experienced difficulties introducing FreeBSD to your company or university, but that is by no means representative. There are not so many companies that would provide code to the project. The few of those that do, are mostly technically active and very few of them would care about the logo (or Beastie). Most of them would just say: "Hey, your user base is too small to justify our time porting drivers." So that leaves R&D corps out of the equation. The other point is to increase the user base within the mainstream (so that R&D can say: "okay, we can now start developing code for fBSD"), and here, *some* (but by no means the majority of) suits may be sensitive to a Beastie logo. We therefore have two camps that are fiercely opposed. On the one hand, there are those would would like to appease "the suits" and aggressively commercialize FreeBSD. On the other hand, we have a lot of grass roots sysadmins and other users, who have been the driving force behind FreeBSD's success in recent years, you don't want to have people mess with Beastie in any way (including removing it from it's role as a logo). How can we reconcile both camps? Why not keep FreeBSD absolutely non-commercial, with Beastie as a logo *and* mascot, and fork "sanitized" distributions (a la linux) that could be sold to those ultra-conservative suits? Like FundiBSD or so? (Nah, just kidding). But seriously: the only people who would be interested in commercializing FreeBSD are enterprises that are not related to The FreeBSD Project. Let them create (and use) their *own* logos (beastified or not, that's their call) and *please* leave this project alone. This way, the FreeBSD Project would be saved from being taken over by people with a political agenda, and remain the excellent technical development platform it has been since its creation. Farid Hajji.
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