freebsd stable - Feb 2005 - FW: Save the Demon!

Mike Jakubik said:
> Oliver Fromme said:
> 
> >  > I'm not seeing a problem here. Beastie is not a religious
icon,
>
> > not is it intended to be one.
> >
> > Right -- but it looks like one.  And every now and then
> > there are people who are offended by it because of their religious
> > bias.
>
> Boo Hoo! Use Linux then, or is the Penguin sacrilege to your religion
> too? Religion has no place here. Lets not divide and make wars over
it,
> like in real life.
Or maybe the best approach would be to start a religion that fears wavy
colored squares.  I think that would work.

Actually, what I think is this:  People are irrational and are deeply
affected by marketing.  It used to be that the Neo-Classical Economic
assumption of a Rational Consumer was only a small fiction.  Now, since
information is a commodity to be bought and sold the same as grain or
pork bellies, this ideal omniscient consumer is even further from
reality.  There is no other way to explain why the market leader in
operating system is technologically thirty years behind its competition
(Windows 2000 finally implemented some features made modern in
MULTICS!).  I think, therefore, that rationally explaining to people
that Beastie has no religios import and that they shouldn't be offended
is not a viable solution.  Just like rationally explaining to people
that McDonalds' food is not really very good for you or that Nike
doesn't actually make the shoes it sells doesn't seem to make much
difference in peoples' buying patterns.  People will think what they
want to think and will make economic decisions (including the decision
not to spend money on an operating system) based on whose packaging has
more colors and who's got the slicker TV ad.  Saying "FreeBSD is a
better operating system" only gets you so far, no matter how true it is.

For my two cents, I am a Christian, I have my Beastie Amor window sitter
set to start automatically in my KDE profile because I like to see him
there (goddammit, he's cute), and I think this contest is a perfect
idea.

But I'd still pay tithes at the Church of Salvation From Evil Wavy
Colored Squares.

----
When I accidentally sent this directly to Mike instead of to the list,
he responded:

<quote>
  <snip/> I do agree with you though about marketing. Indeed FreeBSD 
  should have a nice logo, i just didnt like the fact that people were
  bringing religion in to the decision process.
</quote>

Which I thought was a sane rebuttal and ought to be made a part of my
comment.

On Thu, Feb 17, 2005 at 12:55:22PM -0600, Forsberg, Ben
wrote:
> Or maybe the best approach would be to start a religion that fears wavy
> colored squares.  I think that would work.
> 
> Actually, what I think is this:  People are irrational and are deeply
> affected by marketing.  It used to be that the Neo-Classical Economic
> assumption of a Rational Consumer was only a small fiction.  Now, since
> information is a commodity to be bought and sold the same as grain or
> pork bellies, this ideal omniscient consumer is even further from
> reality.  There is no other way to explain why the market leader in
> operating system is technologically thirty years behind its competition
> (Windows 2000 finally implemented some features made modern in
> MULTICS!).  I think, therefore, that rationally explaining to people
> that Beastie has no religios import and that they shouldn't be offended
> is not a viable solution.  Just like rationally explaining to people
> that McDonalds' food is not really very good for you or that Nike
> doesn't actually make the shoes it sells doesn't seem to make much
> difference in peoples' buying patterns.  People will think what they
> want to think and will make economic decisions (including the decision
> not to spend money on an operating system) based on whose packaging has
> more colors and who's got the slicker TV ad.  Saying "FreeBSD is a
> better operating system" only gets you so far, no matter how true it
is.
Just to go a little further. At begin of the month there were in Paris
some event similar to Linux Expo, called Solution Linux. The 3 BSD
were present, but people from OpenBSD come with nice t-shirts, posters
and some goodies to sell. It's been like this for 3 or 4 years. The
results is that OpenBSD is far more "visible" in France than the 3
others. The FreeBSD come last because of french book made by Emmanuel
Dreyfus on BSD admistration, in which he promote NetBSD ...

It may be sad for some, but promotion and merchandising have far more
effect than every good technical argument. If it wasn't that FreeBSD
should at the same place, even better, than linux today.

An other amusing consequence of the OpenBSD merchandising at Solution
Linux, was, 3 years ago, that second day of the meeting some (in fact
most) of the young and pretty girls that promote who was here to
promote company like Redhat or Mandrake, wear an OpenBSD t-shirt,
simply because they was the only one to sell girl sized t-shirt. The
effect was funny, to see someone selling you a Redhat with an OpenBSD
t-shirt, but it increase the popularity of OpenBSD far more than there
security oriented slogan.
> <quote>
>   <snip/> I do agree with you though about marketing. Indeed FreeBSD 
>   should have a nice logo, i just didnt like the fact that people were
>   bringing religion in to the decision process.
> </quote>
Despite the fact that I do love the little daemon, a real logo which
make visible the FreeBSD name in some way (just, when you see it you
know it's freebsd) should be a good thing. But I don't want to loose
the BSD family link, like OpenBSD that don't use the daemon any more
(in fact, on Solution Linux old t-shirt, espcialy the one with the
wired daemon sold better than new on with the blow fish ... )

My 2 cents ... and sorry for my poor english.

-- 
Burelle Marwan,
Equipe Bases de Donnees - LRI
http://www.cduce.org
(burelle@lri.fr | Marwan.Burelle@ens.fr)
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