FreeBSD Project Launches New Website

UltimaGuy writes "The FreeBSD Project has launched a new website today. The new design was created by Emily Boyd, a student at Smith College that they had the pleasure of working with through Google's Summer of Code program. The old website is also still available."

Comments

Quite an improvement.

[St. Arbirix]

I must admit, it makes it look more like they're providing a serious product rather than something made by a group of hippies and slackers.

*dives under a table with his Powerbook*

Re:Quite an improvement.

[Alwin Henseler]

I must admit, it makes it look more like they're providing a serious product rather than something made by a group of hippies and slackers.

One might think it's weird how much the quality of some products seems to be judged based on the looks of the box it comes in. But wait - maybe these are related?

I can't help to think that any quality product needs 1 thing at least: not suck badly in any aspect. Meaning it doesn't need to shine in every aspect, but if it really sucks in any department, overal quality is affected.

Why? Because this signals bad attention to details. And it's exactly attention to details that makes great products. Many developers working for months on useability-features, bugfixes and performance improvements for a desktop OS? And then they fail to pick some nice-looking backdrop(s) and meaningful icons to finish it off? Or fail to properly document how it works? Says more about overal project quality than developers would like to admit, IMHO.

Lesson to be learned: if you have something great, make it look good as well. Get some HTML coders and graphic designers onboard, besides C coders and beta testers.

Re:Quite an improvement.

[aztektum]

You know if this story was about some start up who raised a buncha money in VC and had a slick website and was promising a unique product that would revolutionize the world and it turned out to be a battery operated hammer, I might agree with you. But the story is about FreeBSD, which isn't dead btw, and the majority of /. readers, whether they want to admit to it or not, recognize the quality of this product.

Could we be a little less cynical and jaded over something as trivial as FreeBSDs website redesign?

Re:Late 24 hours+

[wolf31o2]

I posted this yesterday
( " The New FreeBSD Website is UP Thursday October 06, @06:15AM Rejected" )
as news only to be rejected. I dont know why it was rejected so i cant complain i was treated unfairly. But when someone posts news and is rejected then the news appears a day later posted by someone else. It makes me wonder what the fsck is going on round here.

Well, with a multitude of editors and tons of people submitting articles, they simply just pick them at random. You might have been the first, you might have been the last. It doesn't matter. They simply pick one. This is also one of the main reasons for duplications. So many people post variations on the same thing, and with the multiple "editors" on the site, things simply get posted by more than one of them. The only real way I can see to improve this situation would be to get people that actually check the site for duplicates, and check the submission queue for duplicates, and pick the best submission for a topic. I think time constraints are probably the main reason this isn't done.

When Gentoo makes a new release, we submit a story to Slashdot. Since we know about our releases well ahead of any users, you would think that our submission would get used. It never has. We even go so far as to make sure our Slashdot submission is more of a teaser/summery, than a full-blown press release, as I could understand not wanting to post something that reads identical to the press release. Instead, hours and hours later, we usually get a posting that was submitted by a user, is chock full of false statements and half-truths, and doesn't point out anything that would actually be of interest to anyone.

What do we do about it?

Nothing. We understand that this is the nature of Slashdot, and we submit another story the next release.

I do think the new site looks awesome. Great job, FreeBSD and Emily!

Asking for legal trouble?

[Florian]

The new FreeBSD site boldly states: "Based on BSD Unix (r)". To my knowledge, the AT&T vs. Berkeley case was settled with (among others) the regulation that BSD may not be called Unix. The official Unix trademark FAQ states that Unix "must not be used as a generic term. It must not be used in connection with products, unless the product is licensed to use the mark".

I am not sure whether the new headline on the homepage is a very wise and professional move of the FreeBSD project.

Re:Bluecurve?

[Nimrangul]

Yeah, when I first saw the site I was expecting the to see phrases like, "using our optimal community user-base, FreeBSD intensely expands its marketecture through a synergy between private and public parties which desire optimum performance on the Intel architecture," or, "through the maturation of our dynamic enterprise system, FreeBSD has engineered the means for swift, clean and easy vulnerability handling, taking the worry away from end-users," and, "with FreeBSD's worldwide penetration of the enterprise server market, FreeBSD has become one of the most essential operating systems to have in your NOC.

You know what I mean? I thought we'd see; "In today's ever-shifting market one must dynamically synergize when the chance arises, in order to properly facilitate the introduction of vital new resources for the further progressive development of their intellectual property portfolio."

Or at least something more along the lines of, "here's where it all comes together in one operating system; Middleware, Applications and Management Tools."

Re:About time..

[Arandir]

Hopefully they will give the handbook a bit of a spring clean next...

Are you volunteering? The FreeBSD Documentation Project is always on the look out for new blood.