FreeBSD problems and preliminary ways to solve
Lars Engels
lme at FreeBSD.org
Fri Aug 19 07:38:24 UTC 2011
On Thu, 18 Aug 2011 22:17:25 +0000 (UTC), Vadim Goncharov wrote:
> Hi Lev Serebryakov!
>
> On Fri, 19 Aug 2011 01:24:21 +0400; Lev Serebryakov wrote about 'Re:
> FreeBSD problems and preliminary ways to solve':
>
>>> The other social problem is lack of companies which offer
>>> commercial
>>> support of FreeBSD like RedHat does.
>> Main social problem, IMHO, that there WAS NOT (I forgot Linux
>> history and don't rememberfirst uf-distributive) and, later,
>> Ubuntu-like versions of FeeBSD. Even if these doen;t replace Windows
>> on many desktops (1% now?), they prepare Linux-aware users, and some
>> of these users becomes admins or people, who decide which OS should
>> be
>> used in their business.
>
> PC-BSD is exactly for that.
>
And IMHO PC-BSD should get pushed more. The changes in 9.0 are a great
opportunity for this. We should write mails to PC magazines and ask
them
to include a version of PC-BSD on their DVD, ask IT websites to write
some
news about the release, tell the people that it's a system which is
actually
easy to use, has some unique features and is definitively worth a try.
To gain market share, PC-BSDand FreeBSD need to be known!
In my experience, maybe one out of ten IT admins have ever heard of
FreeBSD,
and one out of hundred has actually tried it. Of them, maybe 10 percent
actually used it for some time but for whatever reason eventually went
back
to Windows or Linux where they came from. So there's only a very small
amount
of fresh users with every release, while others go ahead and switch to
different
OSes because of the reasons Vadmin wrote about.
But that was only the situation of our fellow admins. What about their
bosses who
are the ones who decide which way to go and which OS is allowed to run
on their
servers? I know answers like "Free-what? Ah, some Linux-like OS. Never
heard of
it. Why don't we use Linux if it's similar? Everybody uses Linux, it's
standard!
Do you get support from Big Companies for FreeBSD? Who do we call if we
have a
problem with it on our servers? Doesn't HP hang up the phone if we tell
them
that we installed that Free.. what was it called? FreeBSD??? on it?"
So FreeBSD urgently needs a wider awareness level.
People have heard of FreeBSD -> People are more willing to try it ->
Some people
try it -> Some people stay with FreeBSD and like it -> Some people
spread the word
-> More people try it -> At the end of the chain we have some new
contributors, devs,
donors, and new installations
For the people who may say now: "We don't want Ubuntu-like users, they
only ask stupid
questions I don't want to answer again and again."
We need them! Everybody once started by asking dumb question but
eventually we began to
answer other people's question.
Take a look at FreeBSD Forums: 26,000 members, 137,000 posts in 20,000
threads. Only a
small fraction of theses posts are from FreeBSD developers, the others
are good and valid
answers to the questions you don't want to answer any more.
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