New Logo

[Bart Silverstrim]

On Nov 1, 2005, at 7:00 PM, ke.han wrote:

> In any efforts to expand the market share of freeBSD, I suggest the 
> following:
> a - It is important to show professionalism, courtesy and restraint as 
> a community.  I chose to move from Linux to freeBSD in large part 
> because of the quality of the community and documentation.  Public 
> fits on the maillists do more damage to any attempt at large corporate 
> acceptance than a new logo might help.

Yes, because PHBs and non-techs spend much of their time researching 
and culling through online forums and archives when making decisions 
about what servers to use in their IT department.  It's hard enough 
just getting techies to RTFM and Google for previous solutions...

Plus, it's VERY professional to non-techs to have them look answers up 
online instead of through a dedicated support contract with a large 
company, and with polished manuals and updates handed to the client in 
shiny wrappers.

Oh, and most companies I know of shine up their image by asking their 
employee grunts to come up with a new logo to present to the public.  I 
mean, what can a professionally paid service do that a bunch of 
bike-shedders can't?

Please.

FreeBSD, Linux, most of open source...they're controlled chaos.  The 
fact this stuff has worked is utterly amazing to the suits...the right 
personality types reign in control and keep the cats...er, 
programmers...for the most part in line, with little or no promise of 
payment.  By conventional wisdom the open source model has worked, and 
it shouldn't have.  Now people are talking about polishing up the image 
to get it into the corporate world to "sell" it as if it were a 
finished product...it's like someone found the project and wants to 
shoehorn it into the conventional sales and development model.  Tech 
people have been sneaking BSD, Linux, and assorted projects into the 
corporate realm all on their own, and it's been growing in areas where 
you'd expect low cost back-ends would be a boon for the 
technology-savvy (private web sites, home servers, "geek" projects...). 
  People made a profit with these projects by creating their own 
companies with their own logos to customize projects or tweak them and 
offer their own support for their distros.  Never has there been a 
"Linux" company...but there has been a Red Hat, or a SuSE, to fill the 
niche.  The projects stood alone.

All the bickering and attempts to polish BSD for some imaginary 
marketing department is like watching kids on a playground make a 
better sand castle.  The guys doing real marketing and polishing?  
Apple, with Darwin.  And that's only partially based on BSD.

People telling others to just "fork" and "do their own project" for 
control...how about starting an actual company, like Red Hat did, to 
market and build off of and give back to the project?  Why must FreeBSD 
become political and have an attempt to become "the" company?  Let it 
go on it's own and let others pick up the mantle to create a company to 
offer service and support.  Let the geeks work with FreeBSD and let the 
users and marketers use a company-packaged version if that's their 
liking.

> b - I think that sharing a common daemon logo/mascot with the other 
> BSDs is a good thing. Linux has done well with the various penguin 
> effects. Don't worry too much about this.  Just accept what users 
> already have adopted.

Sharing the logo/mascot was a traditional thing.  It's a reference to a 
shared history...it's there for a reason.

And please stop with the top posting.  Not that anyone will listen, of 
course...