On Wed, Dec 08, 1999 at 03:57:21PM -0500, Charles M. Hannum wrote:
> David Maxwell <david@fundy.ca> writes:
> > No, but if we do this without discussing it with them, then we're a
> > bunch of assholes.
> 
> How, pray tell, does saying `Company Foo is shipping NetBSD on Product
> Bar' make us `assholes'??  That's utterly ludicrous.

Taken as you've presented it, it doesn't. Taken as this exchange

TNF: Hey ZZZ, We hear you're using NetBSD
ZZZ: Yes, but we're in the middle of a development cycle, and fighting
	internal politics that are kind of hard to explain in a short
	example exchange. We'd be happy to talk about this later.
TNF: HEY WORLD! ZZZ uses NETBSD!

It may.

My point is this - we don't want anyone to ever say "No way am I using
NetBSD, those developers are jerks." Part of avoiding that is being
patient, understanding, helpful, and tolerant. As long as it is approached
in a sensible manner, I have no problem with identifying users of the
code. I do think however that we get wayyyy more mileage
(kilometerage too) out of example B below, than example A.

A) Companies using NetBSD in their development of products:
	
		AAA Corp.
		MMM Inc.
		ZZZ International

B) Feedback from companies using NetBSD in their development of products:

	"Our development cycles have been greatly enhanced through the
	use of the quality NetBSD code base."
				 - B. Smith, VP Development, AAA Corp

	"Adaptec discontinued the only network card that would fit in
	our shipping product's space constraints. We were able to locate
	a replacement product from Compaq immediately, and even though
	it required a different driver, since we were using the highly
	portable NetBSD code, the new card worked with no delays
	in our production line."
				- J. Doe, Director of Service Development,
						MMM Inc.
...

Getting people in list B instead of A involves an exchange like:

TNF: Hi, we hear you're using NetBSD. We'd like to promote NetBSD to
our mutual benefit. Could we get a quote from one of your staff about
how using NetBSD has saved you time/money/energy/resources? Please
include a link to your (sales) web page where you provide more 
information about the product NetBSD contributed to.

> It strikes me that people are treating such an a statement as somehow
> unwantedly `tainting' the company.  It's amazingly similar to the
> stigma around `outing' someone as gay or bi...

Interesting comparison. There's nothing wrong with being gay or bi, but
you probably wouldn't want other people announcing it if you weren't
mentally prepared either right?

Marketing is a complicated matter I have no right to speak on, (so here
it goes ;-) there are important timing issues. If we make it to people's
advantage to be involved with NetBSD, they'll hurry to bring it up
without us asking. Until we do that properly, I suspect many of them
worry that such a statement promotes the question 'Why not Linux?'
- which marketing people don't have the technical expertiese to
explain. We know why 'not Linux', their developers know why, but the
people faced with the question probably don't. A useful document 
would be a marketer's version of 'what-is-netbsd'.

> NetBSD: We have no pride.

Not true here. I send lots of email to sites that don't list NetBSD
among other OS-OSs. My favorite story is from my last job though...

After 3 years of running NetBSD servers for our cable ISP, and
fighting the 'Why not NT?' question - my boss came to understand
that our mail server (NetBSD i386/Ppro200+128M), serving an order
of magnitude more addresses than the corporate mail server 
khad never crashed due to the mail software. (HD failures, Overheating,
UPS failures... are another matter) The Corporate NT server
(9-5 usage, many fewer accounts, running ONLY exchange, on NT on an
Alpha 4100?+256M ) was down for 5 days straight once (as in, died
and couldn't be brought online until 5 days later), and had at
least a couple hours outage per week.

We (My Boss, a co-worker and I ) went out to lunch with a Cisco
engineer and my boss said "I'd like to find some contractors for
our new project, and it should be PC-Unix based. Do you know
some people?"

The Cisco engineer said "Yes, I know some consulting groups who
could help you - heavily into Unix. They prefer the free Unix
versions."

I said "Just curious, which ones do they use?"

My boss and co-worker just about fell off their chairs when the
Cisco engineer replied "Well, the people I know all use NetBSD."
(And my grin stretched ear to ear :-)

-- 
David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net -->
Any sufficiently advanced Common Sense will seem like magic... 
					      - me