Subject: Re: your mail
To: Jonathan Stone <jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU>
From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
List: netbsd-advocacy
Date: 04/20/1999 11:52:55
On Monday, 19 April 1999 at 17:44:22 -0700, Jonathan Stone wrote:
>
>
>> Maybe we need to consider a bit of marketing ourselves and advertise
>> ourselves as "Free-NetBSD" or "Open-NetBSD".  "Multi-platform-FreeBSD"
>> probably wouldn't set to well with our FreeBSD brothers, but it seems to
>
> I've had a couple of people (friends, colleagues) assert that they
> were running FreeBSD code on their Alphas, mips boxes, or
> what-have-you, Going back 3 or 4 years.  Even when I asked cautiously
> if they didn't mean NetBSD, they said, no, they were running FreeBSD.

I don't know of anybody running FreeBSD on MIPS.  There's a port under
way, but I think it's nowhere near release yet.  There *is* an alpha
port, however.

> Makes me think is if the world knows about Linux, and FreeBSD, and
> that's it.

:-)  On the FreeBSD-advocacy list, they say the same thing, but omit
FreeBSD.

> But it gets kinda weird when people extoll the virtues of
> Linux on vaxes. (NB: Linux doesn't run on vaxes; NetBSD again).
>
> The take-home lesson seems to be that NetBSD's brand-name recognition
> is way, way below most people's radar horizons (One might say that's a
> failing of Core, but then it doesn't seem to have been a real
> priority).  But since NetBSD is not _known_, it doesn't get mentioned
> (or gets incorreclty identified). Which becomes a vicious circle.

I think there's a lot of merit in a *BSD effort.  We're doing some of
that in Daemon News, but the advocacy efforts keep very much to
themselves.  I don't have a real good idea how to change that, but I
would be very happy if somebody would.  Possibly the USENIX release of
CDs for FreeBSD, Linux, NetBSD and OpenBSD (alphabetical order, in
case anybody cares) would be a good starting point.

Greg
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