a public relations opportunity for BSD

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 9:53 PM -0500 5/14/03, Josef Grosch wrote:
>On Wed, May 14, 2003, Sergey Babkin wrote:
>  > Hi,
>>
>>  If you haven't heard yet, SCO has sent a letter to about 1500
>  > companies claiming that Linux infringes on SCO's intellectual
>  > property. I won't comment on whether this claim is true (there
>  > are enough comments on slashdot). But for BSD it's...
>
>
>I think we need to stay as far away from this self inflicted
>fiasco as possible.

I agree completely.  For one, you can't "Not comment on whether
the charges are true", and then turn around and try to advertise
your product based on the very same charges.  It is particularly
bad to do when talking about such a desperate brain-dead set of
charges as these are.  It is even worse when our own project went
through the frustration and irritation of similar lawsuits, and
now we are going to clap gleefully that another stupid lawsuit
is trying to undermine a different open-source project?

If we can't sell freebsd based on freebsd's code and freebsd's
features, then we deserve to have absolutely no users.  While
FreeBSD could use more of a marketing department, we should never
encourage a "marketing-through-FUD department".  I think we need
to avoid doing *anything* which could even *remotely* suggest
that we are trying to cash in on this lawsuit in any way.

[speaking only for me, IMHO, etc, etc...]

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu