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From: Todd Whitesel <toddpw@best.com>
Message-Id: <199812101202.EAA06426@shell17.ba.best.com>
Subject: Re: Something I noticed on the Yahoo site
In-Reply-To: <366F505E.161A19C8@causality.com> from "Neil A. Carson" at "Dec 9, 98 08:38:54 pm"
To: neil@causality.com (Neil A. Carson)
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1998 04:02:12 -0800 (PST)
Cc: netbsd-advocacy@NetBSD.ORG
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> Why do we believe in NetBSD?

_I_ believe in NetBSD because of superior code leverage. While I appreciate
the design cleanliness, it is not essential -- managed messes are occasionally
very useful. Commercial software products have succeeded with far worse, and
MUCH valuable field experience is gained before a full integration & cleanup
effort makes the decisions that will have to be lived with for a while.

> To users, what does it offer over and above the competition?
> Why should people choose NetBSD?

Right now, I have a hard time giving a pleasant answer to these, except to
say that when Wintel finally starts to seriously crack, NetBSD would be the
best choice to enable a hugely competitive hardware market, by giving
software vendors a superior middle-ground O/S that performs well, runs
everywhere, and is very uniform across its ports.

I'm not assuming that this will happen on the desktop -- that actually seems
less likely as time goes on. However the mobile computing market is very
close to being an ideal arena for us, if we can figure out how to slim down
the X binaries. Every box that runs WinCE should in principle support NetBSD.
Perhaps we could position ourselves as the ideal laptop O/S as time goes on.

> I think if we can answer these, that would be a good start. Okay, on the
> web site we have 'Of course it runs NetBSD,' but that doesn't really
> help someone in the decision making process.

Well, there is a huge class of things that we could do to make it very easy
for people to get NetBSD a try -- last year when I saw the bootable Linux CD
ROM that lets you see how well it runs on your hardware without committing
any disk space or install time, I thought it was the coolest promotion idea
I'd ever seen. Sure it has lots of little niggly problems, but the principle
is sound and I don't see why it could not be done with NetBSD.

Also, just dumb things like passing information from autoconfig to the setup
scripts for various things (X, cdplayer, cdrecord, etc) would eliminate much
of the nervousness that people have when they are trying to set up a system
they don't feel they understand.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com