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- Remove an out-of-date reference to the Halloween letter on the website's

Browse source 
advocacy page.
- Remove letter.sgml itself.
- Remove references to letter.sgml from the advocacy directory's Makefile.

Discussed with:	gavin
Approved by:	gabor (mentor)
This commit is contained in:
Isabell Long 2012-06-06 13:01:11 +00:00
parent 2a3e10557a
commit 95191bd88a
Notes: svn2git 2020-12-08 03:00:23 +00:00 
svn path=/head/; revision=38996
3 changed files with 0 additions and 255 deletions
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en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/advocacy/Makefile
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@ -11,6 +11,5 @@
DOCS= index.sgml DOCS= index.sgml
DOCS+= myths.sgml DOCS+= myths.sgml
DOCS+= letter.sgml
.include "${DOC_PREFIX}/share/mk/web.site.mk" .include "${DOC_PREFIX}/share/mk/web.site.mk"

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en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/advocacy/index.sgml
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@ -29,13 +29,6 @@
<p>Describes and debunks some of the myths that surround the *BSD <p>Describes and debunks some of the myths that surround the *BSD
projects.</p></li> projects.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="letter.html">On Advocating FreeBSD and the
Halloween memo</a></p>
<p>Jordan Hubbard's response to the infamous Halloween memo, posted to
the FreeBSD-Advocacy mailing list (and republished with his
permission).</p>
</li> </li>
<li><p><a href="&base;/news/press.html">FreeBSD in the Press</a></p> <li><p><a href="&base;/news/press.html">FreeBSD in the Press</a></p>

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en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/advocacy/letter.sgml
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@ -1,247 +0,0 @@
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//FreeBSD//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional-Based Extension//EN" [
<!ENTITY base CDATA "..">
<!ENTITY date "$FreeBSD$">
<!ENTITY title "FreeBSD Advocacy Project">
<!ENTITY % navinclude.about "INCLUDE">
]>
<html>
&header;
<p>On October 31st 1998 (Halloween) Eric Raymond posted a leaked memo from
Microsoft.</p>
<p>This prompted Jordan Hubbard to write the following response. This text
is unchanged, except for the HTML formatting.</p>
<table class="tblbasic">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td align="right"><b><small>To</small>:</b></td>
<td>advocacy@FreeBSD.org<br></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="right"><b><small>Subject</small>:</b></td>
<td>On advocating FreeBSD and the Halloween
memo...<br></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="right"><b><small>Date</small>:</b></td>
<td>Tue, 03 Nov 1998 08:21:56 -0800<br></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="right"><b><small>Message-Id</small>:</b></td>
<td>&lt;709.910110116@time.cdrom.com&gt;<br></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<blockquote><p>[ caution - this is a bit long. Lots of points here I've been
wanting to cover for awhile and now seems as good a time as any.. ]</p>
<p>OK, so we've all seen this latest bit of Linux leaping about and
shouting from the rooftops and some of us have even gone "agh!" and
run around a bit ourselves, but now that we've all hopefully calmed
down again I'd like to say a few words about this and the state of
FreeBSD advocacy in general.</p>
<p>First off, just to cover the Halloween memo in brief, yes it appears
to be genuinely from Microsoft and yes, it appears to be genuinely
full of statements culled from various Linux evangelists who feel no
pangs at making blatantly false pronouncements like "Linux is the only
OS experiencing growth" or "Linux is the only contender for the x86
platform." These types of statements are pure hooey, of course, and
FreeBSD is currently doing better than it has at any previous point in
its history. Our releases are starting to finally hit their stride,
it seems (and try to remember back to the days when it was more like:
"My god! We did it! A release!"), and our rate of innovation and
self- improvement hasn't been higher since the 2.0 days - it's very
encouraging to see that we can spur ourselves to such heights of
productivity *without* legal injunctions staring us in the face! :-)</p>
<p>Second, we have to keep sight of the fact that none of this is
particularly new or even interesting. We know that Linux is the
current poster child of the press and we also know about the press's
irritating predilection for focusing on one and only one champion
rather than looking more in depth at the situation. We can yell and
scream all we like, but we're not going to change the fact that for
many journalists investigating "Open Source", Linux is the first and
possibly only thing they're going to look at. It simply has the right
sized hype-bubble surrounding it where we do not.
We also have to accept the fact that ISVs are going to target their
products at the much more obvious Linux market and try to strike deals
with it, going "FreeBSD? What's that?" when asked about a native
port. The same goes for investment, selling shares in Red Hat, Inc.,
etc. Money always goes after the visible markets first.</p>
<p>What you have to ask yourselves, looking at the dynamics of this
situation as dispassionately as possible, is whether all of this is
necessarily as bad a thing as some of the gloom-n-doomers would have
us believe. Looking at only the superficial indicators, it's easy to
say that "Linux is winning and we're losing", pointing to the stacks
of Linux books and magazines in the bookstores, the Clinton
transcripts where he mentions Linux, the Goodyear blimp circling
overhead with Linus's smiling face shining from it, etc etc. It's
especially easy to say that when you hold Linux and FreeBSD in your
mind as equivalent products, started at the same time and with the
same overall development mentality.</p>
<p>The fact of the matter is that Linux and FreeBSD are NOT equivalent
products with identical user and developer communities surrounding
them, however. We've *always* been lower key about things, preferring
to quietly focus on the business of steadily turning out quality
products to only moderate fanfare. It's no use screaming for teams of
FreeBSD fan dancers to come out and start singing the praises of
FreeBSD in full 4-part hyperbole with some grinning, cigar-chomping
promoter standing in the background - that's just not us. The
nay-sayers will also say that "this not being us" will surely be our
downfall since you gotta sing and dance now if you want to be noticed,
but I'm really not so sure about that. To my way of thinking, we have
our style and we have our niche and they're both respectable in their
own way. Not everyone buys toilet paper because a team of singing
rabbits (to paraphrase the great Rod Serling) suggested it on
television, and some people DO react positively to the somewhat less
superficial attributes of quality, consistency and a focus on the
technology rather than on standing in front of the cameras and saying
things like "open source validates the concept of a basic human
sociological tropism towards cooperation and the free and open
exchange of .." to some vapid blond on Technology Week.</p>
<p>That kind of approach might also get all the sound bites this week,
but remember the old "15 minutes of fame" effect and the fact that the
press is going to get bored with Linux eventually and go off in search
of other things they don't understand to dissect. When that
inevitably happens, it's going to be back to quality and those groups
who remained true to their basic operating principles and didn't get
sucked in and destroyed by excessive growth or hype. The
opportunities for wandering off and getting lost in the woods in
pursuit of some bright and shiny object have never been higher than
they are now, and somebody's bound to panic and go off and do
something stupid in an effort to differentiate themselves. I don't
think we have any need to panic at all and should simply keep doing
what we're doing and try to do it as best we can.</p>
<p>I'm not saying that there's no room for improvement, and some
alliances *are* being made with various artist/marketing types whom we
think can help us get the attention we deserve, but it's not the same
as saying that we're going to drop everything and go play Linux's game
now. That would be the wrong move and I can only point to the history
of BSD itself when searching for good examples of technologies which
have remained viable long after "losing" a war to a competitor. BSD
"lost" to SYSV over a decade ago, but did that kill it? Quite
apparently not and it appears to be doing better today than it ever
did even back in its heyday, when it ran on a large collection of
VAXes but hardly any of the commodity (68K) hardware at all (you had
to buy an obscure 32016 based machine if you wanted to run BSD at home :-).
The situation today is vastly improved by comparison and most people
don't even stop to think about that.</p>
<p>In any case, I didn't mean this posting as a fluffy "we're fine!"
sorta thing, though I do think that people sometimes lose sight of our
own growth rate and notable successes when furrowing their brows over
the latest Linux PR victory, I do have a summary of points I think we
can and should improve:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Keep pushing the magazine articles out. These seem to be easier for
people than books and I've largely given up on trying to incite a
FreeBSD book to happen - I guess that will just occur in its own
good time. Walnut Creek CDROM is still paying a bounty for magazine
articles (matching funds for your fee) and has enabled more than one
person to buy a new machine for the price of one weekend's writing
for a good cause. Pick a target publication and go for it, folks!
I've done about 3 of these so far (maybe more, I forget :) and can
say that it's not that hard. You generate a simple article outline and
you submit it to the editor along with your proposal for what
you're trying to accomplish with the article (just a paragraph or
two of text, not a thesis). If they're interested, they'll send you
back details on how long they want the article to be (generally
500-1000 words) and how much they're willing to pay. When they
pay, send us a photocopy/FAX of your royalty check and we'll pay
too. It's that simple, and it good for FreeBSD to appear in print
like this since it reaches outside the somewhat closed audience of
the mailing lists.</p></li>
<li><p>Look at Linux as a door opener, not a threat. I mean this,
folks, even you rabid Linux haters out there. Consider very
carefully the fact that if customer A needs a PC to do server job B,
customer A is going to do one of four things:</p>
<ol>
<li>Buy NT</li>
<li>Buy a commercial Unix</li>
<li>Buy Linux</li>
<li>Buy *BSD</li>
</ol>
<p>Those really are about the only 4 options for building a
department fileserver or gateway box with cheap, commodity hardware
(we'll assume the people who don't want cheap buy Cisco gear, Suns
and NetApp filers anyway) and let's look at them in turn:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>If they buy NT, you can pretty much write them off. By the
time they realize what they've gotten themselves into, the
investment (or embarrassment) is generally too great to back out
of anyway and it's actually very few IS shops that seem to claw
their way back from NT and install a free OS instead. Sure, you
hear widely trumpeted stories whenever some large ISP does make
it back from NT, but its very rareness is what makes it
something to trumpet about. NT is Darth Vader here and we must
fear his control of the dark side (marketing) and the fact that
"everybody knows NT" when the issue of personnel comes up with
most pointy-haired managers.</p></li>
<li><p>Is a much better option since at least the customer has
accepted Unix as their savior and can potentially be won over at
some point by OSS, but the fact that they chose a commercial
Unix probably also means that they have deep-seated needs for
tech support or inter-operability with other parts of the IS
shop and you'll probably have to work on them for awhile to win
them over.</p></li>
<li><p>Here now we've at least accomplished two things: We've got
the customer admitting that they want Unix and that they want a
free Unix. Furthermore, they've chosen a solution which we think
we can beat in all the taste tests if we can just get the CD in
front of their faces. All in all, this has got to be the
easiest conversion of the three and a definite win if their only
other options were A or B.</p></li>
<li><p>Yay! Of course we like this one, but if it's not FreeBSD
then we still have a bit of a conversion job to do and it might
even require something like a SPARC port to be able to offer the
same cross-platform inter-operability that the user has chosen
the other *BSD for. It's something to think about, and
certainly no better than the Linux scenario in some ways (again,
if you're just thinking about this from the pure, mercenary "how
do we get more FreeBSD users" perspective).</p></li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><p>Hold your advocacy to a higher standard, and by this I mean that
if we're to weather this whole PR blitz period with our reputation
for being "the calm and level-headed ones" intact, we can't stoop
to the level of some Linux advocates when trying to make short-term
gains against their PR blitzes. Sometimes you just have to be
Gandi.</p>
<p>When the press have gone away, believe me, people will remember
which groups stuck to their guns and didn't compromise their
identities or ideals and which went sort of nuts and participated
in a few raping and pillaging sessions. I'd far rather be the
group still standing there when the smoke clears going "Yup, we're
still here and still doing good software without the fanfare or
fancy costumes. Have a look!"</p>
<p>To put it another way: If FreeBSD were a respected musical
entertainer, I would want her to be the one who stuck to doing
the kind of music she liked and always did it well rather than
horrifying us during the disco years by suddenly putting on spandex
pants and lip-syncing to formulaic, song-factory material or
shrieking out heavy-metal lyrics in heavy makeup with Axel Rose 10
years later. :-) Sometimes the price of "success" is too
high.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>- Jordan</p>
</blockquote>
&footer;
</body>
</html>