FreeBSD problems and preliminary ways to solve

[Brandon Gooch]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 9:42 PM, Milo Hyson <milo at cyberlifelabs.com> wrote:
> On Aug 24, 2011, at 3:09 PM, Vadim Goncharov wrote:
>
>>> walking all over the competition.  Buzz is a critical part of selling ideas in
>>> open source (for better or worse), and there's no reason we can't play in that
>>> game a bit while maintaining our boring and staid personalities :-).
>>
>> Sure. And taking surveys into account, we could just simply summarize:
>> FreeBSD needs marketing :-)
>
> That begs the question of to whom FreeBSD should be marketed. Home users? Small-office admins? Datacenter admins? Embedded developers?
>
> - Milo Hyson
> Chief Scientist
> CyberLife Labs, Inc.
>

FreeBSD should be marketed to DEVELOPERS.

Users of all skill levels have needs, wants, and ideas. Developers are
the ones who implement these things in code. I think the question is
"how do we lure the developers?".

FreeBSD is well documented for an open source project. In particular,
the Handbook serves as an excellent guide and reference for FreeBSD
from an end-user's perspective. But is the documentation for
developers as well-structured? I'd like to hear stories from the devs
out there in this regard.

Perhaps the FreeBSD current developer community (see: decades of
experience and knowledge) should focus on the creation (or revision)
of solid, comprehensive documentation for developing software in the
FreeBSD environment. Even something as simple as this forum post is an
awesome place to start:

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=1566

Maybe a restructuring of the primary FreeBSD website is in order, with
an emphasis on marketing to developers, from the fresh (university
students) to the seasoned (industry minds involved in company
decision-making process).

I believe that a beneficial side-effect of being a developer-centric
OS will  the eventual refinement of FreeBSD as a "first choice"
desktop operating system. Seems to me that developers are more likely
to use the operating system for day-to-day "desktop" tasks, fixing and
adding features they require (eventually moving away from running Mac
OS X or some Linux distro on their laptops to running FreeBSD
primarily). Eventually, enough development occurs in key areas such as
hardware support and features (reliable suspend/resume, Wireless N,
KMS/GEM, etc...), that it's feasible to imagine a group spinning their
own "distro" -- would that really be so bad? We don't seem to mind the
PC-BSD folks, who are doing a fine job as things stand :)

Imagine a horde of new college graduates, with FreeBSD under their
belts (instead of some Linux distribution), ready to deploy it as soon
as they have the chance in their new roles as system administrators
and engineers -- sounds great to me.

More bodies, more eyes, more minds -- this brings along with it more
energy. We should focus on making FreeBSD the most developer-friendly
OS out there.

-Brandon