Getting attention (was Re: Where is FreeBSD going?)

[Robert Watson]

On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, Marian Hettwer wrote:

> Somebody else mentioned writing white papers for business level. This
> may be a way to push easier FreeBSD at corporate level. Means, you are
> the sysadmin, going with a nice white paper to your CTO, sort of. 

It seems there are some very strong arguments for building network and
storage appliances on FreeBSD -- not just the license, but also the
maturity of the software, etc.  Since the arguments are made frequently,
gathering them in one place is almost certainly a good idea.  It would
provide mulch to be distributed at conferences, stapled to walls, handed
to the boss, provided to FreeBSD redistributors and bundlers, etc.  The
trick is to write the bumf in a strong way, and to pick arguments
carefully.  One of the biggest problems FreeBSD has in the advocacy space
is that the developers like to use guarded language in describing features
-- we don't want to promise something that isn't there.  In some places
that's considered admirable, but when it comes to paper in a booth at a
conference, overuse of guarded language isn't so useful :-).

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research