freebsd.com

[Devon H. O'Dell]

On Fri, 2005-02-11 at 12:41 +0000, Robert Watson wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Feb 2005, Julio Capote wrote:
> 
> > I think that the entire point of an IT deptartment, is to provide that
> > "geek abstraction"; no CEO goes to www.linux.com and decides to go with
> > linux for thier infastructure. They ask thier IT deptartment to make
> > those decisions. On the same token, no small business owner/executive is
> > going to goto www.freebsd.com and download an iso and install it on all
> > thier servers based on some marketing hype. Sites like www.redhat.com
> > are an exception because they are indeed a commercial entity that sells
> > services/products based on Linux, Freebsd has no such entity. 
> 
> I don't know if I buy into "FreeBSD.com" or not, but I do buy into the
> idea that what we need to do is provide ammunition for IT departments that
> want to promote FreeBSD in their organization.  I.e., white papers on
> FreeBSD as an effective solution, a professional front page that they can
> point at and say "Look, this is real", and material to help third party
> CDROM and support vendors provide FreeBSD support to their clients.  The
> trick will be finding the right balance in not hiding the fact that one of
> the greatest assets of FreeBSD is that it's driven by developers who are
> also consumers, but provides help to people who want to sell FreeBSD as
> the professional product that it is.
> 
> An idea that's been thrown around by a number of people at various points
> is to produce a set of short, professional-looking, white papers on
> FreeBSD use in various environments -- FreeBSD in the computation cluster,
> FreeBSD as an enterprise mail solution, FreeBSD for web clusters, FreeBSD
> as the foundation for an appliance, and so on.  Something that an IT
> department can take to their director/etc saying "This is a recognized
> solution -- it works for these people, it will work for us".
> 
> Robert N M Watson

I'm actually busy with a couple of whitepapers for some of these subject
for work. I'll see if I can come up with a convincing layout and perhaps
if others contribute, we can get an officially endorsed site.

We do need something to show that FreeBSD is a powerful tool in
commercial areas, and I agree that a site to show that is a good
solution. Especially if we have backing from the kind folk from the
FreeBSD core :)

Kind regards,

Devon H. O'Dell