> Jordan has no doubt already figured this out for himself a long time ago.
> I would hazard to guess that's why he's invested so much of his time and
> efford into making FreeBSD so newbie-friendly.  A certain percentage of

You hazard entirely correctly.

Though I'd also like to point out that the business of attracting
users also goes much deeper than that, and I would even go somewhat
out a limb here in suggesting that an *overall attitude* which
encourages new users is a pretty serious prerequisite.

I'm not saying that NetBSD entirely lacks such an attitude, but on the
occasions where I've tried to talk to various NetBSD core team members
about it, I get a "hey, we do this for fun!" response back.  I finally
stopped sending Chris and others friendly little suggestions about
advertising, installation features or bounce-buffer support, they
seemed to be so ill-received.

We do FreeBSD for fun too, but that doesn't mean we have to hide our
heads in the sand about what it takes to really get users involved.  A
big presence in USENET is a real plus, as is a perceived
responsiveness to user problems (like the bounce-buffering that
started this whole discussion).  Getting the ported software
collection put together was another big step, as was trying to get
some sort of (ANY sort of) multimedia support into the system.  On the
advertising front, I send out hundreds of press packs a year and try
to write articles or give presentations that further increase the
visibility of the system (re: December BYTE article).

And I'm not even a marketing dweeb - mine is a purely engineering
background.  I just saw a need and did my best to fill it.

I think people need to start putting egos or `this is my pet project'
attitudes aside if they really want to see their OS perservere into
the late 90's.  Sure, we're all just fine right now and still gaining
user share, but how long can we keep it up?  Are we *really* serious
about being here in 5 years time?  These are the questions that both
users and core teams alike (in both groups) need to ask.  Not asking
the question at all, or avoiding it on the grounds that it's not an
engineering issue, is purest (IMNSHO) folly.

My recommendation to the NetBSD users here is that if they want
greater exposure for their OS, it's time for them to take it to the
streets.  Start writing articles for Unix Review, expounding the
features of your wonderful OS and how many platforms it runs on.
Write letters to the editor of PC Magazine asking why there are no
NetBSD (or any other sort of BSD) articles.  Work on improving the
content of your web pages.  Get your DNS space in order so that people
in different countries only have to remember `ftp.<dom>.netbsd.org'
(or www.<dom>.netbsd.org / sup.<dom>.netbsd.org) in order to get to
the nearest server.  We've done and continue to do all of those things
for FreeBSD and I don't see how a corresponding NetBSD effort to do
the same things can have anything but a positive effect on *BSD's
reputation.  As Ken says: The answer to the question "why aren't you
running *BSD?" isn't usually "I tried both and I prefer Linux", it's
"What's *BSD?"

					Jordan