Quoting Hubert Feyrer (hubert@feyrer.de):

> Yes.
> What do you plan to get it to the people not knowing NetBSD already?

I am not sure I want to. Poul Henning Kamp, of FreeBSD fame, once said
(freely interpreted) ''I would love to get only 1% of the Linux users,
provided it is the right 1%''. While I do not always agree with phk,
I must say there is some truth in this particular statement. 

I think, emphasis think, that there is correlation between that 
interesting 1% and those who researches the capabilities of an
operating system on their own. 

I spite of that, I try to do a fair bit of NetBSD advocacy when talking
to people. It almost always start by me dispelling some myths about 
the portability. This is not a bad thing per se. I know I often have
to address the folklore before being able to move to the interesting
subjects. But things like pkgsrc are tremendous to talk about when 
having to dispel the myth. 

I often start out with feeding people the strengths of pkgsrc. In 
contrast to most other systems I have seen, there are numerous ways
to utilize the pkgtools section, to maintain a system and this 
is commonly an appreciated feature. I usually cover pkg_comp as well,
because it lets system administrators create effective build-hosts,
even while the build host itself has other tasks to do. For small 
setups, this might be the only way. 

From there, I work through the system, if there is interest. Many times,
people just sod it off with: ''But it can't do feature X which is 
present in Y''. This is where it gets interesting, because many systems
have a certain way of doing things and to restructure others brains to
accept that it is done differently is hard. If the person I am talking
to is open-minded however, they might bu lured into trying NetBSD. And
I feel that the few people I get by doing this is much preferred over
the masses.


 

-- 
jlouis