Linux "best of breed?"

Message-Id: <4.1.19981105142239.00c6f340@127.0.0.1>
Date: Thu, 05 Nov 1998 14:24:54 -0700
To: advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG
From: Brett Glass < brett@lariat.org>
Subject: Linux "best of breed?"
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ESR is circulating another memo that's supposedly been leaked from
Mirosoft. This one calls Linux a "best of breed" UNIX implementation; see

http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,28397,00.html

Ahem! It's beginning to sound as if these Linux memos, leaked by Linux
zealots, are a little too self-serving to be real.

Maybe a word or two from the FreeBSD PR machine might be useful here.

Oh, I forgot: FreeBSD doesn't DO PR.

--Brett

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Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 14:13:38 -0800 (PST)
From: "Jason C. Wells" < jcwells@u.washington.edu>
Reply-To: "Jason C. Wells" < jcwells@u.washington.edu>
To: Brett Glass < brett@lariat.org>
cc: advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Linux "best of breed?"
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On Thu, 5 Nov 1998, Brett Glass wrote:

>Oh, I forgot: FreeBSD doesn't DO PR.

Would you get off it?

Catchya Later,		|	UW Mechanical Engineering
Jason Wells		|	http://weber.u.washington.edu/~jcwells/

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To: Brett Glass < brett@lariat.org>
cc: advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Linux "best of breed?" 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 05 Nov 1998 14:24:54 MST."
             <4.1.19981105142239.00c6f340@127.0.0.1> 
Date: Thu, 05 Nov 1998 16:50:33 -0800
Message-ID: <26919.910313433@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" < jkh@time.cdrom.com>
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> Maybe a word or two from the FreeBSD PR machine might be useful here.

Already in the works - a FreeBSD myths page is being generated by Nik
and I hope he'll also put in a reference to my recent posting to
-advocacy which pretty much clarified my view, at least, of this whole
halloween nonsense.

> Oh, I forgot: FreeBSD doesn't DO PR.

Now now, such hyperbole is beneath you.  Of course we do PR, just not
enough PR to please everyone out there.

- Jordan

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Message-Id: <4.1.19981105163821.00c0dbb0@127.0.0.1>
Date: Thu, 05 Nov 1998 16:44:07 -0700
To: "Jason C. Wells" < jcwells@u.washington.edu>
From: Brett Glass < brett@lariat.org>
Subject: Re: Linux "best of breed?"
Cc: advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG
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 ashington.edu>
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Well, I'm sorry, but I don't continue to nag, it doesn't look as
if anything is going to happen. Fact is, FreeBSD is losing fast
to Linux in mindshare, and if this trend isn't turned around soon
there will be no way to do anything about it later. You'll see
lots of great UNIX programming tools, applications, etc. coded 
in a way that's so Linux-specific that you won't be able to get 
by without a Linux box. Do you really want to have to shake your
head and tell people, "I'd like to recommend FreeBSD for this
task, but under the circumstances you'd really best go with Linux?"

Sorry to disturb you, but this is your wake-up call.

--Brett Glass

At 02:13 PM 11/5/98 -0800, Jason C. Wells wrote:

>On Thu, 5 Nov 1998, Brett Glass wrote:
>
>>Oh, I forgot: FreeBSD doesn't DO PR.
>
>Would you get off it?
>
>Catchya Later,		|	UW Mechanical Engineering
>Jason Wells		|	http://weber.u.washington.edu/~jcwells/
>

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To: Brett Glass < brett@lariat.org>
cc: "Jason C. Wells" < jcwells@u.washington.edu>, advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Linux "best of breed?" 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 05 Nov 1998 16:44:07 MST."
             <4.1.19981105163821.00c0dbb0@127.0.0.1> 
Date: Thu, 05 Nov 1998 17:37:13 -0800
Message-ID: <27114.910316233@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" < jkh@time.cdrom.com>
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> Sorry to disturb you, but this is your wake-up call.

Sean Connery has a great line in The Untouchables where he, riddled with
gunfire and dying, grabs Kevin Costner by the shirt and demands "What
are you prepared to DO?  WHAT ARE YOU PREPARED TO DO??"

A lot more than be an alarm clock with an expensive college school
education, one hopes?  A lot more than that is certainly needed, of
course, and having an advocacy group which spends its days going
"wail!  moan!  despair!" in a collective fashion also strikes me as a
fine way of going under.  Any group of people engaged in such activity
are not generally notable for actually being productive.

More to the point, if we actually subjected all the messages posted to
this mailing list over the last 6 months to even the most rudimentary
statistical analysis, I'm highly confident that we'd find something
like:

	78%	General gnashing of teeth, rending of cloth
	22%	Content actually dedicated to furthering advocacy

and I'm probably being far too lenient with those figures, if
anything.  The psych majors will probably tell us that numbers like
these are a general indication of Some Sort of Group Dysfunction which
Only Trained Sociologists Can Really Understand, but I say bah.  The
numbers indicate to *me* that too many people have simply fallen in
love with reporting on the game from the sidelines and have forgotten
that they were supposed to be out on the field actually playing it.

To put it another way, if people devoted themselves to the process of
conducting their own advocacy efforts with the same energies I've seen
them devote to freaking out about Linux's own efforts or screaming
about falling chunks of sky, we'd have the BSD daemon on the cover of
Time Magazine by now.

- Jordan

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