Date: Tue, 09 Mar 1999 05:20:45 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> To: advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: A week at LinuxWorld, a short report. Message-ID: <63927.920985645@zippy.cdrom.com>
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As some of you may have already heard, FreeBSD did its first "linux
show" this last week at LinuxWorld in San Jose, CA. This was a very
large gathering of vendors and Linux aficionados and appears to have
attracted well over 10,000 people - a very healthy turn-out by
anyone's standards. So, how did it go for us?
In a nutshell, the show was a big success. We were very well received
by the Linux crowd and sold a very respectable amount of FreeBSD
merchandise to them as well; not only did they like us, they bought
our stuff! :) The vendor show itself was fairly large and represented
a good cross-section of the small-time Linux shops with their
one-person booths in the corners and the big vendors like Oracle and
Coral, with its shouting evangelists and screaming audiences in the
middle.
The overall geek factor was also very high for an event of this size,
and when you've got this many people at a show it's usually in a more
Comdex-like atmosphere with a high proportion of suits and
salespeople. LinuxWorld represented a very pleasant inversion of the
usual geek-to-suit ratio and that meant that we were able to at least
get beyond the usual "What's a Unix?" question and into the more meaty
issues of performance and ease-of-use with the people who stopped by
the booth. Many people who came by were overtly supportive of FreeBSD
("I run both FreeBSD and Linux at home/work/..." was a frequent
refrain) and even the Linux die-hards seemed happy that we'd at least
shown up to answer their questions.
I got the impression that we in the general *BSD community are
perceived as being somewhat aristocratic in our attitude towards the
Linux folks (an accusation I can't even deny very strongly) and our
being there did a lot to change this perception. I also got the
chance to berate, in a reasonably constructive way, about 200 Linux
developers about the merits of source code control and group
collaboration as part of a panel on CASE tools in the open source
community and I think it went pretty well. Just about every Linux
aficionado I had a chance to talk with at any length went away with
the impression that they needed to give FreeBSD a serious looking at,
if nothing else, and perhaps even dedicate a partition to it for
tracking on an ongoing basis.
On the last night of the show, Eric Raymond threw his usual Geeks with
Guns event and I was invited along to be one of the range instructors,
the whole "teach the Linux people" theme continuing into the area of
firearms instruction. I can now say that I've contributed something
positive to the Debian team's understanding of both CVS and practical
pistolcraft. :-)
If this somewhat tiring but rather instructive week taught me any
single thing, it's that the Linux community represents a vastly
untapped resource for the FreeBSD project given their sheer numbers
and general willingness to listen to any *reasonable* argument on why
FreeBSD, or even just one or two of its operating principles, offers
some advantage. I didn't try to argue FreeBSD's inherent moral
superiority to Linux or any such rubbish, I took individual points
like the ports collection, the unified source tree, cvs/CVSup/CTM,
some of the package system II issues to be dealt with, etc. and argued
those instead. Since FreeBSD has implemented many of these things
already, anyone who was really interested in those topics (and many
were) went away convinced that FreeBSD should be looked at more
closely and that's all I wanted. You don't win mind share by clubbing
people over the head, you do it by making them curious enough that
they come of their own free will.
I think I'll be talking to the Linux community more often in the
future. To be honest, they were a lot nicer to me than most parts of
the *BSD community and I can get better bang-for-the buck by talking
to people who aren't *already* FreeBSD users. :)
- Jordan
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