If a company owns two subsidiaries and shuts one down because the other is more profitable, that is not a conspiracy.
If you could show that GM managed to strangle a competitors trams, OK, you might have something... but you might not: you might just have normal competition in that case too.
I was agreeing with everything you said till you got to
lots of decent stories out there getting rejected, just look at k5, it's pretty decent
kurroshin fuckin' sux. it is the most boring, pedantic, bombastic, navel gazing drivel imaginable. 100% philosophizing, 0% news. Yes, sometimes slashdot runs out of interesting things so they run some Katzian bullshit or some BeOS bullshit, ok: but don't compare it to kurofuckingboremetodeath. Who are you, signal 11?
it's hard to hear, but this expression is "you have another think coming"
and, I agree with your point that it's hard for exchange to substitute for *nix email, and impossible for *nix email to do all the things that Exchange does. I would add on to that, though, that Exchange does not play well with others either, though it does a great job for all of the Exchange/Outlook people.
Moderate this up. Flatpack is certainly a "troll," looking back on his previous posts. Go ahead, click on Flatpack's info,
he posts to get people to react.
thanks for the support!:)
unfortunately, my long term points will be forever lost to the karma cap...
For more infomation, start reading about risk premiums. You'll find it enlightening.
dude, I have an MBA, from a top-5 school, one of the quantitative ones, and I concentrated in finance. If I wanted to write a long post and quibble a lot, I could:
it has to do with the fact that equities are riskier, and riskier
investments pay higher returns.
Check your books again... diversifiable risk is not compensated in the form of higher returns.
My statements were correct and were designed to combat a common misconception, that investing is gambling. What makes the two activities different is absolutely and solely the productivity of the underlying assets. As you point out, the risky nature is something they have in common, though as I've pointed out, you didn't get it right.
BBC is very high quality, though not an order of magnitude better than NPR as it has its own provincial worldview. Yes, their persistent interview questionning is a pleasure, but they also just about say "ooga booga" and wink at each other after a segment about the third world.
NPR does provide a lot of news not available elsewhere, and at a fairly intellectual level.
I listen to it a lot: a good feed is available at wbur.org
That said, it is tirelessly leftwing and relentlessly bobo (bourgeois bohemian). Given that I already subsidize their politics as a taxpayer, I wouldn't ever dream of sending them an extra nickel.
Well, that's life. One day you win, the next you lose.
That's false, in this particular context. The stock market is not a coin flip, it is based on the productivity of industry. On average it very much goes up. If your investments on average do not go up, you are doing something wrong and should either learn more or turn your money over to a manager who knows more about how to do it. I'm not talking about getting rich, I'm talking about 10 or 15 percent a year gains.
The answer is not as simple as you make it sound. The question is whether etrade has a questionnaire that it gives to other people in deals other than this RedHat one. That would indicate whether it was the Friends and Family who were singled out, or the open sourcers who were, or if there are always two classes.
the market for Sparc Linux isn't big enough... Even cheapbytes haven't found the market big enough to justify pressing CDs
well, at the moment the market for IBM mainframe linux is even smaller, zero... or is it one. Cheapbytes? Organizations that buy and deploy $parc$ don't buy off-brand discs from copmanies called "cheap". If they wanted to go anywhere near that route, they'd use their big fat pipes anyway.
IBM is backing linux strategically. They see it as another way to shake up rivals who are market leaders in the markets IBM has lost, Microsoft and Sun. The developments necessary to grow the mainframe linux market will also make linux a more compelling alternative to Slolaris.
isn't there a trick to it? you push in from the sides to get the collapse going, loosely speaking to get off of the unstable equilibrium of a "perfect" cylinder.
If the debate is silly, why do you keep engaging in it?
Because I have multiple years of experience working at....
Right, which was my point, it's not a silly debate, and you were wrong to state it was:P
almost no relevance to website
performance spikes
It is you who indicates you know nothing of statistics, and it may be why the people you work for just keep throwing more hardware at problems:
you probably naively believe that capacity grows linearly with number of servers. Anyway, disparaging my mentioning spikes when you are the one who brought them up in the first place indicates that you are a Troll, posting to get a rise out of people, rather than attempting to contribute to a rational discussion.
I implore the moderators to mod your posts down whereever they appear in this discussion.
If the debate is silly, why do you keep engaging in it?
If your website is busy enough that the performance issues between IIS and Apache actually matter,
then your website gets serious traffic, and you should be way overcompensating on servers in the racks
just to catch access spikes and unexpected server downtimes.
this is just false. Your website may be busy enough that it matters only during those performance spikes, and that's not a rare case at all if you consider basic statistical assumptions (normal distributions, poisson processes, etc.) And if you are going to fill racks, the question still remains as to what to fill them with.
You may not like the results. Most of the enterprise -ready database products for linux are still nowhere
near the performance of even their NT brethren, let alone Solaris.
Other people shouldn't test things both because they won't like the outcomes and because you already know the results, and the whole debate is silly? Please. Some people are interested in discussing the design of tests and the limitations. You have some things to say about it, but you should do so more constructively, IMHO.
Could the start of this thread be modded "overrated" once or twice, please? It doesn't have to get pounded all the way down, but it's emotional and tangential to the topic. I came in hoping to read about the issue, not the meta issue.
yeah, and you know why that post got modded down? It was Funny, and someone, afraid the next version of Slashcode will be delayed more, modded it to oblivion to make sure we wouldn't find it and respond to it... aw shit!
I don't care if he is a "doctor"; he needs to take a remedial English class.
do you care if he's German? and, he speaks English and German and geek better than you. Actually, I think his English is very good: the subtle nuance that he's a little bitchy comes through loud and clear. I think he and his site do a terrific job, though.
You got what I said completely wrong. Just completely and utterly wrong. And, along the way, you managed to convince me that you have a low IQ, are poorly educated, and have no social skills.
I am not advocating adopting RedHat. I would like to see more choices in the OS market. I would like to see OpenBSD succeed and be one of those choices. I took the time to write something to help shed light, to help OpenBSD to be better at competing effectively.
I used RedHat as my example because they are the market leader and in marketing you always keep your eye on the market leader. I don't love RedHat just like I don't love Amazon, or United, or Microsoft, or General Motors... but we study them to see what makes them successful. Since you have trouble grasping this, let me point out for the record that ("show me what you've done!") not only is RedHat's website too secure for you to hack, you don't know how to hack Debian's, SUSE's, FreeBSD's or NetBSD's sites either, and not Netscape's nor Sun's. You couldn't even hack Microsoft's, the most insecure OS of them all!
This is why when OpenBSD supporters say "security", very few people heed the call. People do believe that OpenBSD is more secure, yes. But most people don't feel that they need more security than RedHat et al offer.
See? I'm not insulting OpenBSD: I'm giving it credit for its features. I'm trying to direct your attention at customer needs; not needs you wish people have, but the needs that they think they have.
But, you think like a jealous schoolgirl: anything I say about your rival that even hints at positive is deeply insulting to you. Guess what, sweetie: yes, that dress does make you look fat.And "insult on OpenBSD... In your criteria..."? It's "insult to" and "by your criteria", unless you're some kind of hillbilly, shitkicking, schoolgirl.
If you think ALL USERS want easy to configure/install distro that do not require technical skills, think again. Most of the users are still technical people and they choose distros for technical reasons.
Like you said, "if I think that"... but I don't. Once again, you are doubly wrong. No, you're triply wrong:
All else being equal, easier is always better. I think what you meant to say was that you are not willing to sacrifice certain other benefits for ease of use, like power, flexibility and transparency. You don't care about ease of use? tell me your passwords are all really long, totally random strings... hah! liar!
anyway, it doesn't even matter whether all users want something: if a sufficiently large number want it, it can crowd out what the minority wants. OpenBSD is available today for people who like it, yes, just as blacksmiths are available for people with horses. But those people would benefit from more people adopting their choice. More eyes would at least make the bugs shallower, right? <spoonfeeding> And, no! I did not just compare OpenBSD to horses. That's not how analogies work. OpenBSD is completely modern. But finding a sysadmin familiar with it can be difficult, just as finding a blacksmith is, okay? and in the future, it might become part of history. </spoonfeeding> Do you see any benefits to the widespread adoption of your choice? That's all I said about RedHat so now you can kiss my ass.
defining the market as "technical" does not change the desirability of a needs/features/benefits analysis. The needs will be different, yes, but so what? Stampede didn't market itself in a way that fostered developers adopting it either. BTW, they did tout ease of use, so why don't you flame them, and not me?
I promised three corrections, actually, you're quadruply wrong!!!
Nothing I said in my original post indicated that I was talking about non-technical end-users selecting a desktop to run rather than, say, sysadmins choosing a server OS or developers choosing a platform to develop for. Know why? Because I wrote it that way on purpose because that's what I was thinking. Not only are you even stupider than you think you are, I'm even smarter.
Sucks to be wrong about everything, doesn't it? Bad enough that you are so bigoted that you can't think clearly, but your foul style makes you unpleasant to even be around.
Why is everything this guy say marked up?
Because I have high karma from saying many intelligent and funny things in the past. Karma automatically adds an extra point. That's how Slashdot works. Why don't you try reading the source instead of just staring at the screen and wondering like some clueless AOL luser. Ordinarily, I turn off the extra point, but I've been browsing with cookies turned off, and in that mode it's not an option. Maybe someday you'll get enough karma...:) nah, that's not a possibility.
finding projects you like to work on would be one thing... but creating a whole distro? if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. Stampede is competing with RedHat. There's no other word for it.
The goals for the project, listed on the about page, are RedHat's goals, the customers are potential RedHat customers. So, forgive me, I know you don't like to think of it as competing, but there's no other word for it: the markets overlap just about 100%
I did not advocate what you claim I did. I did not say "let's do" anything. However, ignoring that, I'll try to sharpen my argument to respond to the things you did say. But bear in mind that some of what I said is simply tautological: I was trying to clarify a useful definition of marketing.
Linux would not exist today if that argument mattered to any of the developers.
Linux was marketed to developers by offering benefits to them that the available alternatives did not: source code that you were free to modify. Since the widespread acceptance of RedHat Linux, several other camps have indicated to me that they care what the flies think. The "lesser" distributions of linux such as debian seem to want more people to adopt their platform, and some other unices (the BSD's, HURD, et al) seem to want more people to adopt theirs. I was offering them helpful tips to those people as to how to attract more users.
Users? Whether you define the market to be "lusers" or "developers" is important, but not to the point I was making. You think developers are all that matters. You may be right. But if that's true, My argument still holds, 100%: if a platform wishes to win among developers, it must do so by communicating to the developers in the language of benefits, not features. Think of of all the features that HURD has... why don't you use it? Because, what are its benefits, compared to the benefits offered by RedHat Linux? Till it has more benefits, its features will sit on the shelf (and not that many shelves, either).
I do understand your point. (a) I'm not sure if I buy it, and (b) I didn't make one of my points clearly enough.
The part I don't buy is, if the objective was learning and you succeeded, what is the disappointment and frustration that I and everyone else here detects in the resignation email? You'd feel good and rewarded if you acheived your goal, wouldn't you? Anyway, forgive me if I implied that you didn't achieve your personal goals, or that the project had failed to meet any of its planned goals: I was proposing that if Stampede had stampeded with users, I think the team would stay together, and I outlined where I think the marketing vision went wrong.
And this "marketing vision" brings me to the point that I didn't make clear. It's sort of the opposite of "we never really made any attempts at outward marketing." I was trying to present a more broadly encompassing view of
marketing as the entire interface between the organization and the user/customers.
It starts with
deciding what goes into the "product", and runs through
making it available and
informing people about it,
figuring out why people who hear about it don't download,
helping people who do download and have trouble, and
following up with people who try it and attempting to fix what they don't like.
By this definition, as soon as you put up a link that says "download", you're marketing. Now, I'm not trying to say that you expected to defeat RedHat... but, why not? If it took off, that would be a distinct possibility.
So, while the group did engage in a number of marketing activities, it ignored some that are extremely important, and I think hurt itself. Don't get me wrong, there's no shame in any of this. Heck, putting together a distro that works is quite an accomplishment: kudos! But other people and organizations have made some of the same mistakes before and I thought it would be worthwhile to point out how this situation appears to the MBA mind: believe it or not, all of this stuff gets classified as "marketing." I wanted to throw it up here for Slashdotters to know how the "enemy" (in the form of VCs, for example) thinks, and in hopes that it might help some project out there better to succeed at its goals.
The breakup of the Stampede team was inevitable, and due to their marketing failures.
Before I go any further, let me mention that I have zero inside knowledge, of this situation. I can, however, pass along a "suit's" perspective on why this happened. This is how this case would be analyzed in a business school strategy class.
Take a look at About Stampede. The most useful/workable definition of "marketing" is "meeting customer needs". What customer needs does Stampede address? I don't see one. They may have one, but they have not communicated it.
What they do communicate is a laundry list of features. Common mistake techies make: customers do not want features; customers want benefits. So, for example "optimized for Pentium." Who cares? "Ten percent faster"? OK, that would be something... but they only make that claim buried deep inside a bullet point, and the reader is tempted not to believe it. If the benefit of this system is that it is 10-30% faster (not faster than unoptimized, but faster than RedHat), put that at the top of the front page, and demonstrate significant support for the claim. Customers look for a reason to download, and to convince them you have to demonstrate that you believe it. And believe me, if it's really 10-30% faster, people would download it. So, I could go on in detail about all of the other features, but that would be another techie mistake...:) Gotta stay on-message.
RedHat is the de facto linux, and linux is the de facto "free-nix". I'm not defending the wisdom of that, just observing it. Take note, BSD, Stampede, et al: This situation will never change till your platform/technology/distribution-channel convinces customers that it offers benefits that overwhelm the benefit of using the one that everybody else does. And saying, for example a la OpenBSD, "we're more security conscious and therefore more secure" is not enough. Because RedHat+linux+GNU is pretty darn secure anyway. There are tons of em out there, and they're not all hacked every day: they're secure enough. A "customer benefit" must be something (a) unique to a product and (b) that fills a "customer need", i.e. in the case of security, customers need to need more security in order for the feature to be a benefit.
Then, the rest is just noise. Open/free source developers work for the psychic benefit. Where's the fun in working on something that nobody's using? In this atmosphere, normal disagreements are going to explode into "I quit" disagreements because there is nothing else holding the team together. Except the friendship that they've vowed to keep.
Meeting customer needs, this is key. Everything else revolves around marketing.
Stock market capitalizations are not the only things inflated by the internet boom: windy opinions, too, have soared! That article this whole thread is based on is soooooo looooong and it adds so little new. And Netpliance wants to meet with him?
mattdm (the slashdotter I'm responding to) hits the nail on the head when he points out it's the fact that it was so darn cheap, that's all. All the other verbiage in this discussion simply keeps redescribing the network computer, a la Larry Elison. Larry spent too much time describing it all on his own: do we need to rehash it more?
Netpliance used an LCD screen -- that's hot technology that's what made the cheap seem extra cheap -- in a small form factor box. There was nothing "linux" about the hack. On that original hack site, they demoed Windows running also. Netpliance used industry standard architecture... so what? who wouldn't?
Slashdot Mirror
won't the postscript version use a *lot* of paper?
If you could show that GM managed to strangle a competitors trams, OK, you might have something... but you might not: you might just have normal competition in that case too.
lots of decent stories out there getting rejected, just look at k5, it's pretty decent
kurroshin fuckin' sux. it is the most boring, pedantic, bombastic, navel gazing drivel imaginable. 100% philosophizing, 0% news. Yes, sometimes slashdot runs out of interesting things so they run some Katzian bullshit or some BeOS bullshit, ok: but don't compare it to kurofuckingboremetodeath. Who are you, signal 11?
it's hard to hear, but this expression is "you have another think coming"
and, I agree with your point that it's hard for exchange to substitute for *nix email, and impossible for *nix email to do all the things that Exchange does. I would add on to that, though, that Exchange does not play well with others either, though it does a great job for all of the Exchange/Outlook people.
thanks for the support! :)
unfortunately, my long term points will be forever lost to the karma cap ...
dude, I have an MBA, from a top-5 school, one of the quantitative ones, and I concentrated in finance. If I wanted to write a long post and quibble a lot, I could:
it has to do with the fact that equities are riskier, and riskier investments pay higher returns.
Check your books again... diversifiable risk is not compensated in the form of higher returns.
My statements were correct and were designed to combat a common misconception, that investing is gambling. What makes the two activities different is absolutely and solely the productivity of the underlying assets. As you point out, the risky nature is something they have in common, though as I've pointed out, you didn't get it right.
No we don't. We still don't know where Trolls come from... do we, Troll?
BBC is very high quality, though not an order of magnitude better than NPR as it has its own provincial worldview. Yes, their persistent interview questionning is a pleasure, but they also just about say "ooga booga" and wink at each other after a segment about the third world.
That said, it is tirelessly leftwing and relentlessly bobo (bourgeois bohemian). Given that I already subsidize their politics as a taxpayer, I wouldn't ever dream of sending them an extra nickel.
That's false, in this particular context. The stock market is not a coin flip, it is based on the productivity of industry. On average it very much goes up. If your investments on average do not go up, you are doing something wrong and should either learn more or turn your money over to a manager who knows more about how to do it. I'm not talking about getting rich, I'm talking about 10 or 15 percent a year gains.
The answer is not as simple as you make it sound. The question is whether etrade has a questionnaire that it gives to other people in deals other than this RedHat one. That would indicate whether it was the Friends and Family who were singled out, or the open sourcers who were, or if there are always two classes.
the market for Sparc Linux isn't big enough ... Even cheapbytes haven't found the market big enough to justify pressing CDs
well, at the moment the market for IBM mainframe linux is even smaller, zero... or is it one. Cheapbytes? Organizations that buy and deploy $parc$ don't buy off-brand discs from copmanies called "cheap". If they wanted to go anywhere near that route, they'd use their big fat pipes anyway.
IBM is backing linux strategically. They see it as another way to shake up rivals who are market leaders in the markets IBM has lost, Microsoft and Sun. The developments necessary to grow the mainframe linux market will also make linux a more compelling alternative to Slolaris.
isn't there a trick to it? you push in from the sides to get the collapse going, loosely speaking to get off of the unstable equilibrium of a "perfect" cylinder.
Right, which was my point, it's not a silly debate, and you were wrong to state it was :P
almost no relevance to website performance spikes
It is you who indicates you know nothing of statistics, and it may be why the people you work for just keep throwing more hardware at problems: you probably naively believe that capacity grows linearly with number of servers. Anyway, disparaging my mentioning spikes when you are the one who brought them up in the first place indicates that you are a Troll, posting to get a rise out of people, rather than attempting to contribute to a rational discussion.
I implore the moderators to mod your posts down whereever they appear in this discussion.
If the debate is silly, why do you keep engaging in it?
If your website is busy enough that the performance issues between IIS and Apache actually matter, then your website gets serious traffic, and you should be way overcompensating on servers in the racks just to catch access spikes and unexpected server downtimes.
this is just false. Your website may be busy enough that it matters only during those performance spikes, and that's not a rare case at all if you consider basic statistical assumptions (normal distributions, poisson processes, etc.) And if you are going to fill racks, the question still remains as to what to fill them with.
You may not like the results. Most of the enterprise -ready database products for linux are still nowhere near the performance of even their NT brethren, let alone Solaris.
Other people shouldn't test things both because they won't like the outcomes and because you already know the results, and the whole debate is silly? Please. Some people are interested in discussing the design of tests and the limitations. You have some things to say about it, but you should do so more constructively, IMHO.
Could the start of this thread be modded "overrated" once or twice, please? It doesn't have to get pounded all the way down, but it's emotional and tangential to the topic. I came in hoping to read about the issue, not the meta issue.
yeah, and you know why that post got modded down? It was Funny, and someone, afraid the next version of Slashcode will be delayed more, modded it to oblivion to make sure we wouldn't find it and respond to it... aw shit!
do you care if he's German? and, he speaks English and German and geek better than you. Actually, I think his English is very good: the subtle nuance that he's a little bitchy comes through loud and clear. I think he and his site do a terrific job, though.
I am not advocating adopting RedHat.
I would like to see more choices in the OS market.
I would like to see OpenBSD succeed and be one of those choices. I took the time to write something to help shed light, to help OpenBSD to be better at competing effectively.
I used RedHat as my example because they are the market leader and in marketing you always keep your eye on the market leader. I don't love RedHat just like I don't love Amazon, or United, or Microsoft, or General Motors... but we study them to see what makes them successful. Since you have trouble grasping this, let me point out for the record that ("show me what you've done!") not only is RedHat's website too secure for you to hack, you don't know how to hack Debian's, SUSE's, FreeBSD's or NetBSD's sites either, and not Netscape's nor Sun's. You couldn't even hack Microsoft's, the most insecure OS of them all!
This is why when OpenBSD supporters say "security", very few people heed the call. People do believe that OpenBSD is more secure, yes. But most people don't feel that they need more security than RedHat et al offer.
See? I'm not insulting OpenBSD: I'm giving it credit for its features. I'm trying to direct your attention at customer needs; not needs you wish people have, but the needs that they think they have.
But, you think like a jealous schoolgirl: anything I say about your rival that even hints at positive is deeply insulting to you. Guess what, sweetie: yes, that dress does make you look fat.And "insult on OpenBSD... In your criteria..."? It's "insult to" and "by your criteria", unless you're some kind of hillbilly, shitkicking, schoolgirl.
If you think ALL USERS want easy to configure/install distro that do not require technical skills, think again. Most of the users are still technical people and they choose distros for technical reasons.
Like you said, "if I think that"... but I don't. Once again, you are doubly wrong. No, you're triply wrong:
I promised three corrections, actually, you're quadruply wrong!!!
Sucks to be wrong about everything, doesn't it? Bad enough that you are so bigoted that you can't think clearly, but your foul style makes you unpleasant to even be around.
Why is everything this guy say marked up?
Because I have high karma from saying many intelligent and funny things in the past. Karma automatically adds an extra point. That's how Slashdot works. Why don't you try reading the source instead of just staring at the screen and wondering like some clueless AOL luser. Ordinarily, I turn off the extra point, but I've been browsing with cookies turned off, and in that mode it's not an option. Maybe someday you'll get enough karma... :) nah, that's not a possibility.
The goals for the project, listed on the about page, are RedHat's goals, the customers are potential RedHat customers. So, forgive me, I know you don't like to think of it as competing, but there's no other word for it: the markets overlap just about 100%
Peace. And good luck in your next endeavor!
Linux would not exist today if that argument mattered to any of the developers.
Linux was marketed to developers by offering benefits to them that the available alternatives did not: source code that you were free to modify. Since the widespread acceptance of RedHat Linux, several other camps have indicated to me that they care what the flies think. The "lesser" distributions of linux such as debian seem to want more people to adopt their platform, and some other unices (the BSD's, HURD, et al) seem to want more people to adopt theirs. I was offering them helpful tips to those people as to how to attract more users.
Users? Whether you define the market to be "lusers" or "developers" is important, but not to the point I was making. You think developers are all that matters. You may be right. But if that's true, My argument still holds, 100%: if a platform wishes to win among developers, it must do so by communicating to the developers in the language of benefits, not features. Think of of all the features that HURD has... why don't you use it? Because, what are its benefits, compared to the benefits offered by RedHat Linux? Till it has more benefits, its features will sit on the shelf (and not that many shelves, either).
The part I don't buy is, if the objective was learning and you succeeded, what is the disappointment and frustration that I and everyone else here detects in the resignation email? You'd feel good and rewarded if you acheived your goal, wouldn't you? Anyway, forgive me if I implied that you didn't achieve your personal goals, or that the project had failed to meet any of its planned goals: I was proposing that if Stampede had stampeded with users, I think the team would stay together, and I outlined where I think the marketing vision went wrong.
And this "marketing vision" brings me to the point that I didn't make clear. It's sort of the opposite of "we never really made any attempts at outward marketing." I was trying to present a more broadly encompassing view of
It starts with- deciding what goes into the "product", and runs through
- making it available and
- informing people about it,
- figuring out why people who hear about it don't download,
- helping people who do download and have trouble, and
- following up with people who try it and attempting to fix what they don't like.
By this definition, as soon as you put up a link that says "download", you're marketing. Now, I'm not trying to say that you expected to defeat RedHat... but, why not? If it took off, that would be a distinct possibility.So, while the group did engage in a number of marketing activities, it ignored some that are extremely important, and I think hurt itself. Don't get me wrong, there's no shame in any of this. Heck, putting together a distro that works is quite an accomplishment: kudos! But other people and organizations have made some of the same mistakes before and I thought it would be worthwhile to point out how this situation appears to the MBA mind: believe it or not, all of this stuff gets classified as "marketing." I wanted to throw it up here for Slashdotters to know how the "enemy" (in the form of VCs, for example) thinks, and in hopes that it might help some project out there better to succeed at its goals.
Before I go any further, let me mention that I have zero inside knowledge, of this situation. I can, however, pass along a "suit's" perspective on why this happened. This is how this case would be analyzed in a business school strategy class.
Take a look at About Stampede. The most useful/workable definition of "marketing" is "meeting customer needs". What customer needs does Stampede address? I don't see one. They may have one, but they have not communicated it.
What they do communicate is a laundry list of features. Common mistake techies make: customers do not want features; customers want benefits. So, for example "optimized for Pentium." Who cares? "Ten percent faster"? OK, that would be something... but they only make that claim buried deep inside a bullet point, and the reader is tempted not to believe it. If the benefit of this system is that it is 10-30% faster (not faster than unoptimized, but faster than RedHat), put that at the top of the front page, and demonstrate significant support for the claim. Customers look for a reason to download, and to convince them you have to demonstrate that you believe it. And believe me, if it's really 10-30% faster, people would download it. So, I could go on in detail about all of the other features, but that would be another techie mistake... :) Gotta stay on-message.
RedHat is the de facto linux, and linux is the de facto "free-nix". I'm not defending the wisdom of that, just observing it. Take note, BSD, Stampede, et al: This situation will never change till your platform/technology/distribution-channel convinces customers that it offers benefits that overwhelm the benefit of using the one that everybody else does. And saying, for example a la OpenBSD, "we're more security conscious and therefore more secure" is not enough. Because RedHat+linux+GNU is pretty darn secure anyway. There are tons of em out there, and they're not all hacked every day: they're secure enough. A "customer benefit" must be something (a) unique to a product and (b) that fills a "customer need", i.e. in the case of security, customers need to need more security in order for the feature to be a benefit.
Then, the rest is just noise. Open/free source developers work for the psychic benefit. Where's the fun in working on something that nobody's using? In this atmosphere, normal disagreements are going to explode into "I quit" disagreements because there is nothing else holding the team together. Except the friendship that they've vowed to keep.
Meeting customer needs, this is key. Everything else revolves around marketing.
mattdm (the slashdotter I'm responding to) hits the nail on the head when he points out it's the fact that it was so darn cheap, that's all. All the other verbiage in this discussion simply keeps redescribing the network computer, a la Larry Elison. Larry spent too much time describing it all on his own: do we need to rehash it more?
Netpliance used an LCD screen -- that's hot technology that's what made the cheap seem extra cheap -- in a small form factor box. There was nothing "linux" about the hack. On that original hack site, they demoed Windows running also. Netpliance used industry standard architecture... so what? who wouldn't?
thanks for the sobriety, mattdm.