Where is FreeBSD going?

[Marian Hettwer]

Hi there,

Robert Watson wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.
>
For introduction, I've been using FreeBSD since 4.0-release, so I'm 
still pretty new. I've changed directly from Windows to FreeBSD; never 
tried Linux before. Anyhow, I'm not a developer, more likely a user and 
sysadmin.
Your hints for giving advocacy to FreeBSD are all very good and I'll 
keep them in mind. However, if you talk to a company who is already 
using Linux (and that's what we do) the only freedom I have is to put on 
my Router/Gateway a FreeBSD, or to put it on my Laptop, if I want to.
When I talk to our sysadmins (who are Linux folks), I will always get 
the answer "This can be done by using Debian, we won't use FreeBSD."
And the reason for that ? The momentum of Linux was bigger in the past 
years, and is still bigger for the time being. The majority of Linux 
users I know are looking forward to Linux 2.6 and it's pretty hard to 
convince them to just give FreeBSD a try. So I start blathering about 
good features. The answer will mostly always be "Linux can do this 
also". If you than reply that FreeBSD may be still the better choice, 
than you are in an open flamewar. Which ain't cool and which is the 
point where I stop discussing, going back to my Laptop and enjoy my FreeBSD.
However, when talking about advocacy we may follow your suggestions. 
Additionally it would be cool if we just get better reviews in 
magazines. Some Linux magazines write an article about FreeBSD too. But 
this only happens once or twice in a year. (I'm actually talking about 
German Magazines, dunno about US or UK mags)
Howto improve this ?

just my 0,02 EUR.
Keep up the good work, and improve talking to end users / non-programmers ;)
There are a bunch of "features" missing in FreeBSD which a Laptop 
definitly needs.

best regards,
Marian