Re: DragonFly BSD marketing

[Chris Pressey <cpressey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 14 Aug 2005 14:18:31 -0400
"Bob Bagwill" <bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Marketing, a nine letter word ...
> 
> Not that I'm an expert, but I think it's important that Matt and his
> merry band make it clear what they want from the DragonFly project,
> and what prospective users/developers can expect.  Notice that I wrote
> "project" not "product".  In an open source project, there are a
> variety of goals/attitudes/philosophies [...]
> It would be nice if the website made it clear what the project goals
> are (not just technical milestones for the product). 

Hi Bob,

I agree strongly with your underlying theme, although I'd characterize
it slightly differently.  It's not just about marketing, which sounds
sort of frivolous and underhanded... it's actually about governance.

Having a social contract would put DragonFly head and shoulders above
the other BSD's organizationally, I think.  OpenBSD has had a decent,
but sort of chaotic, set of project goals for a while:

  http://www.openbsd.org/goals.html

NetBSD has also (more recently, I think?) presented a pretty decent (and
smaller and better organized) set of goals to represent themselves:

  http://www.netbsd.org/Goals/

FreeBSD's project goals, OTOH, are starting to show their age.  The seem
pretty vague, as they don't really name any deliverables:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/history.html#GOALS

DragonFly's lists several concrete technical goals, as you note, but it
is similarly a bit nebulous about its overarching objectives:

  http://www.dragonflybsd.org/goals/

I think this could be vastly improved... even just the addition of an
explicit vision statement (such as "The DragonFly Project's chief aim is
to produce the world's most scalable open-source operating system", or
whatever) would be a great start.

Unfortunately, this isn't exactly the sort of thing for which you can
just submit patches, as you're probably aware :)  AFAIK Matt has not
established a decision-making body, so only he is able to establish
official policy for the project.  Of course, he would probably be
quite willing to listen to concrete proposals, especially if there is
clear support from the user community for them.

-Chris