[UFO Chicago] Re: Brian's Conversion from FreeBSD toDebianandQuestions on X

[Ian Bicking]

Scott Lockwood wrote:
>>>Wrong BSD. :-)
>>
>>You said "BSD's".  Plural.  OBSD is fair game. Had you said "FreeBSD" or
> 
> "NetBSD," I'd have not said anything.  ;-)
> 
>>Jesse Becker
>>GPG-fingerprint:  BD00 7AA4 4483 AFCC 82D0  2720 0083 0931 9A2B 06A2
> 
> 
> Ok - if you want to be pedantic, let's play that game.
> 
> Nut bags who make BSD look bad: 1 (Theo)
> 
> Nut bags who make Linux/OSS look bad: At least 2  off the top of my head -
> ESR, and RMS, and if I wanted to devote even a modicum of thought to it,
> I'll bet you I'd have NO difficulty giving you a MUCH longer list. True,
> those two in particular are the worst (in my VERY not so humble opinion) but
> they are not alone. The whole bitkeeper fiasco comes to mind.

Why do we get ESR?  We don't want him anymore than the BSD people want 
him.  Fetchmail isn't a GNU project.

Honestly it's hard to come up with BSD personalities at all.  There are 
many notable personalities in the Linux crowd that represent it well. 
So percentage wise... well, it's hard to even compare, because of BSD's 
obscure public-facing side.

> We seem to have this annoying tendency (as a 'group' or 'movement') to pick
> up zealots. Zealotry is bad, and prevents social progress, any way you slice
> it. It's amazing how, when I've talked to people looking for assistance with
> FreeBSD (back when I was new to it) I didn't get "STFU n00b, RTFM Hahaha!
> LOL OMG!" like I do 99% of the time in IRC from people who have been using
> Linux for far less time than I have. Some of them, I wonder if they have
> been alive as long as I've been using Linux! 

Zealots -- or at least the fertile ideological ground that makes 
zealotry possible -- is the lifeblood of Linux.  Otherwise we'd be a 
bunch of nerdy engineers, deathly boring and unworthy of community.

> I really miss how it was back in 1994, when a good friend of mine was quite
> patient, helpful, and willing to come over to my house and help me get
> Slackware running on my spiffy beefed up 486DX66 with 16 megs of RAM. It was
> worth having to flip all those floppies, just to get Peter Anvin in my
> living room to explain things. This was the exact opposite of what happens
> most of the time these days when you go into, oh say Gentoo's official
> support IRC channel, and get abused by kids who act like they're still 13.

Donor fatigue, the negative side of success -- no one with the 
experience is willing to do that kind of support anymore.  BSDs deal 
with that by being somewhat inaccessible and downplaying marketing. 
Linux has dealt with it largely through the complete dissipation of the 
"Linux" community into smaller communities (the Linux kernel community 
being one such community, which is much more niche than the Linux 
community used to be).  The destructive nature of success on community 
is definitely a hard problem.

Similarly, there is no "Windows" community.  It isn't a good or bad 
community, it simply doesn't exist.


-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org