Re: Instead of freebsd.com, why not...

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Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2005 04:20:30 +0100
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org

Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC writes:

> I am not a Steve lover, but lumping Jobs in there with Balmer and
> Ellison is not fair. Steve has a lot more respect than that and uses
> his bully-pulpit well.

Maybe. But none of them is a Lou Gerstner or Jack Welch or even a Carly
Fiona (peace be upon her).

> Linux has the same problem.

Yes, to some extent, and it has suffered in the same way in consequence.
But a lot of people are hyping Linux, some of them with money behind
them, and many of them are not geeks, so the hype works. Linux is
inferior to FreeBSD, and yet it is taken more seriously because of the
atmosphere around it, despite its technical inferiority.

> Linux does have the advantage that their are *commercial companies*
> that have evolved around it, so you can purchase support from Novell,
> Red Hat, etc if you want.

Right. Linux is touted as "free," but in fact nobody uses anything
free; everyone is buying distributions, directly or indirectly.

> FreeBSD unfortunately does not have that branch available. However,
> your same criticisms of FreeBSD support also apply to Linux and it has
> been doing pretty well.

Unless I'm mistaken, the commercial distributors of Linux offer paid
support. There are people you can call. The quality of the support might
be miserable, but the mere fact that it is there reassures many
executives, because it makes them easier to offload responsibility.
After all, Microsoft support is pretty bad and overpriced most of the
time, but people still feel reassured by it.

> Linux seems to be doing pretty good and look at
>
> www.kernel.org
> www.linux.org
> www.linux.com

The first is on a par with www.freebsd.org; the others look a lot
better.

But I don't think decision makers are visiting these sites. They're
more likely to be looking at the branded sites, like www.redhat.com, and
those are still more pleasing to the eye.

> www.freebsd.org is not bad at all. It does not scream
> "shareware/hobbyist." It is reasonable for a project like FreeBSD.
> FreeBSD is an open source community project.

"Open source community" makes corporate people nervous. It's a synonym
for "no accountability" and "no support."

> Linux has the same problems as FreeBSD.

To a lesser extent. There are marketroids and business types working on
Linux. Linux is worse from a technical standpoint but better from a
marketing standpoint.

> Now, I agree with you about a logo needing to be designed for FreeBSD.
> And there are probably pay-for-support companies that will help you
> with FreeBSD, and maybe they need to get more "air time". But open
> source is catching on and FreeBSD doesn't suffer from anything that
> open source in general doesn't suffer from.

True--although I disagree that open source is catching on. The true
open-source model is fundamentally unstable and will gradually disappear
form all but niche markets. Historically, nothing has ever been truly
open-source for long, on a large scale.

-- 
Anthony
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• Previous message: Robert Marella: "Re: Please don't change Beastie to another crap logo such as"
• In reply to: Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC: "Re: Instead of freebsd.com, why not..."
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