Where is FreeBSD going?

[Robert Watson]

On Tue, 6 Jan 2004, David Schwartz wrote:

> 	FreeBSD does need more advocacy if it wants to get the kind of
> visibility and credibility that Linux has in the public perception.
> Frankly, I'm kind of baffled that it doesn't. I've always found the two
> OSes more or less interchangeable and tend to install whichever one
> whose CD I can find first. 

The best advocacy FreeBSD can get is to have happy users explain to the
rest of the world how much they like our cool aid.  Or rather, one of the
greatest contributions end-users can make to FreeBSD is to tell their
friends (and then help them get up and going :-).  It's also one of the
greatest compliments you can give.  Developers are typically fairly bad at
advocacy, and perhaps it's better that the developers work on what they're
good at (since it always seems a few more hands can help).  So if you (in
the general sense, not you specifically) like FreeBSD, and feel like
documentation or code aren't your fortes, go out and give a talk at your
local Linux user group about FreeBSD.  Or explain to the people at your
company that they could go out and buy Windows, Solaris, or Linux with
support, or they could rely on your own expertise in-house and get the job
done at a fraction of the cost.

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