Please don't change Beastie to another crap logo suchasNetBSD!!!

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew L. Gould [mailto:algould at datawok.com]
> Sent: Friday, February 11, 2005 12:34 AM
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Cc: Ted Mittelstaedt
> Subject: Re: Please don't change Beastie to another crap logo
> suchasNetBSD!!!
> 

> > Explain how this has nothing to do with money, please?
> >
> > Ted
> 
> I thought it referred to FreeBSD driver support in retail products.  
> Sure, it means the companies will get more of my money because there 
> would be more compatible hardware that's easy to identify.  It 
> does not 
> necessarily equate to money for FreeBSD developers, however.
> 

I never said it did.  But quite obviously if FreeBSD usage expands,
the developers skills become more valuable, they are worth more, can
command more money, you know the rest.

However, I will say that I don't think the developers in favor of
this are looking at that.  I do think though that the ones in favor
have had pressure from companies to dump beastie - not perhaps
direct pressure, but indirect pressure.  And so far the strongest
reasons cited by the developers in favor of this have been because
corporate groups have made an issue about Beastie.  Why do these
developers care what some corporate group thinks if money has nothing
to do with it?

This gets into the question of just who are we creating FreeBSD for -
ourselves and other users of FreeBSD - or the rest of the world who
isn't using FreeBSD, and our goal is to go try pushing it.  FreeBSD's
strength has always been precisely because the people creating and
contributing and using it have not been interested in writing it
how someone else wants it, but have been interested in writing it
how THEY themeselves want it.  What happens is developers and
the users that help them in the development process (beta testing,
user feedback, etc.) are only concerned with their own problems
and so they spend all their time perfecting the software to fix
their problems.  Because of this focusing, the code really can become
very close to perfection and ends up solving that problem very, very
well.

Then what happens is the rest of the world sees how good it works
and starts thinking about ways that they can modify their own
environment to take advantage of the FreeBSD way of doing things.

Novell in it's heyday had a phrase for this:  "Think Red"

What this meant was that Novell understood one of the truisms in
software: you can either do a few things very good, or a lot of
things rather poorly.

When Novell lost sight of this was when they came out with 
Netware 4, which was an attempt to satisfy a bunch of large
customers.  Instead of writing Netware to be even better at
what it was doing, they tried to make it a kitchen sink that
would fix everything for everybody.  Since the result didn't
fix anything for anybody well enough for production use, the
large customers never materialized, and the smaller customers
decided they had had enough of this shit, and all went to
Microsoft.

Ted