Why the FreeBSD license will not be changing
Peter Ross
Peter.Ross at alumni.tu-berlin.de
Thu Jan 10 20:53:09 PST 2008
Hi all,
I hate to pollute the list with the policy/licence "flood". So I am happy
to send it to -chat too and continue there if you do not mind.
I do not think FreeBSD has a license issue.
It has a visibility issue, maybe.
By change I speak German so I could read the original BSDforen.de thread.
Many think of FreeBSD in terms of a "vanilla" Intel/AMD desktop OS only,
and while it's not that popular here (and has some shortcomings there -
most are related to missing or outdated drivers for consumer hardware or
things like Flashplugin etc.), they consider FreeBSD as fading.
I think it would be good to raise awareness of the widespread usage of
FreeBSD and *BSD based/derived products where the code works silently
under the hood, at Juniper, Cisco, Apple, ISPs etc.
I think it is in the interest of the stakeholders to advocate FreeBSD.
FreeBSD needs to look "cool" and alive to attract developers.
There are many ways dependent on the stakeholder in question. A Mac that
shows for a second a small FreeBSD mascot while booting, a Juniper that
has it on the administration login.. (ask for it if you are working
there;-)
.. and a place obvious and easy to spot on the FreeBSD main page. (E.g. a
title bar with small icons of them "... proudly using FreeBSD" or
whatever)
Even a lot of IT folk I am work with do not know how widely used FreeBSD
is, and the media adds a fair share.
E.g. I remember an article in a computer magazine about NAS appliances
sub-titled "Windows or Linux" where only the fineprint in the table
comparing 10 products showed that half of the "Linux" solutions were based
on FreeBSD.
Just my 2 Cents.
Peter
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