nik, why did you use to preface the "from the --- dept." tag line with "NP"?
NP == Now Playing. It was whatever xmms happened to be playing at the time. I'm doing more Slashdot stuff away from my home 'net recently, so it's not been appropriate.
The decision to make this section only was mine. After reading the article, I figured that it's not really a great advance on "NetBSD is different to Linux, but a competant Unix admin can handle it easily enough."
Had this been a more in-depth technical analysis of the differences between the two (disk handling, memory management, networking,...) then it would have made the front page. And if any of you have any pointers to that sort of article then please submit it.
So there's no confusion, all I meant was that BSDI are doubtless spending some of their money on more advertising, talking to the press, and so on. The recent upswing in positive BSD publicity is a testament to that. I didn't mean that BSDI forked over some cash to someone to get this article written and/or printed.
I first submitted this story early Wed. morning (EST) and it was only posted this evening. Wow, thats FAST. If linux 2.4 had been released, we would have had a story within 5 minutes. But then, Malda's personal opinion is that he doesnt give a flying flip about supporting anything open source but linux unless you submit a story. I know, I've swapped a few emails with him over the issue.
As a FreeBSD committer, you can rest assured that I knew about the release long before you did.
We had lots of submissions about this, most of them about the fact that the RELENG_4 tag had gone down on the source. Of course, this is next to useless for most people, because it's still not released and available on the FTP site.
We (or, more precisely, me) waited until I had confirmed that JKH had rolled the release, and that binaries had been picked up by a few mirrors. You can rest assured that there is no "pressure from above" to hold off on BSD stories, and that if there was, I'd be the first to talk about it.
In case you didn't know, "nik" is an employee of Walnut Creek CD. He lives in the UK and recieves payments from a company in California. He is paid to post articles favorable to Walnut Creek CD and FreeBSD. If you want to write to "nik" his true email address is nik@freebsd.org
Not quite true. In the interests of getting the facts right:
I'm an employee of C.R.F. Consulting in the UK ("C.R.F." == "Clayton's Retirement Fund", but not a lot of people know that).
Yes, I live in the UK.
My company provides services to Andover.net, one of which is the editorial for the BSD section. Yes, my company is paid for this work. I am not (directly), although, ultimately, Andover.net do fund part of my salary. I also have Andover options.
Those editorial services are not restricted to either Walnut Creek, or FreeBSD. I've posted (and will continue to post) stories about BSD, whatever the flavour. I also occasionally post other submissions to the front page as well.
I'm not (and nor are any companies I'm connected with) retained or paid by Walnut Creek. The closest I've come to that was not having to pay the registration fee for last years FreeBSD Convention. That's not specific to me, as I understand that everybody who presented at the conference did not have to pay for registration.
If you want to write to me (and it's about Slashdot), I'd prefer you use the nik@slashdot.org address. If it's about FreeBSD in general, or the Documentation Project, I'd prefer you used nik@freebsd.org. And if you'd like to use C.R.F. Consulting's services, and you're a company in or around London in the UK, I'd prefer you wrote to nik@crf-consulting.co.uk:-)
FWIW, there don't seem to be many other "Nik Clayton"s on the 'net, so going to Google and doing an ego search for my name will turn up links to pretty much everything I've ever written online in the past eight years. I'm sure you'll enjoy it.
Now, could we get back to the regular Natalie Portman discussions? Thanks.
p>Sometimes the most difficult thing about posting a story is coming up with the witty "From the... dept." thing. So I've resurrected an old (very old) FidoNet habit of doing "NP:..." where "..." is whatever I happen to be listening to when I post the story.
It could just as easily have been "NR: Bagumbo snuffbox":-)
There's not a lot of detail in the story as is at the moment. SMP support isn't in OpenBSD yet, all that's happened is a CVS branch has been created in preparation for the work. Unless I'm mistaken, it's little more than a statement of intent at the moment. Similarly, the NetBSD work is very prelimenary.
If these were first forays in to new areas in general (like, say, USB would have been a year or more back) then this would have been front page material (IMHO). As it is, however, various other OSs, commercial and open source already have SMP support, so I didn't think it was as important.
Keep in mind that the front page has room for about 15 stories at a time, and one of the reasons for the creation of the BSD (and other sections) is so that stories that shouldn't make the front page still get an airing.
Of course, at the end of the day it's just one person's judgement. I'm not going to get it right all the time. So I rely on feedback like this to let me know what sort of job I'm doing.
I haven't found a single web page that's actually fully compliment, with the exception of the pages on the iCab site.
http://www.freebsd.org/ passes with flying colours. Of course, I did have a hand or two in that. . .:-)
If I get some copious free time in the near future I'm going to whack my slashdot.org hat on and take a look at the Slash code, to see if I can assist on that front.
Wes Peters who offered this story to Slashdot knows the truth because he participated in the freebsd mailing list discussion on this very topic. In fact he was told personally by Intel employees that Intel buys these units from an OEM.
For the record, I picked up the link from DaemonNews, and from Wes' posting to the FreeBSD mailing lists. He didn't submit the story to Slashdot. His name is in the intro because that's where I got the original pointer.
If Wes had submitted it, the intro would read something like "Wes Peters writes..."
I'd appreciate if you'd provide links back to the mailing list discussion in which Intel engineers contributed.
From these facts alone it would be quite a stretch to claim that FreeBSD is Intel's "OS of choice"
The story is about their Storage Station, and in particular, despite Intel's investment in Be, Linux, Aix, SCO, and NT (whether direct financial investment, or another kind) they didn't choose any of these when they wanted a reliable solution. They chose FreeBSD.
Why do you even bother pretending that the reason this was posted was because it was about BSD?
Because that's the reason I posted it. My bias is quite definitely BSD,:-), and you'll note that in the extended commentary I pretty much ignore the MS bashing, concentrating on why they choose FreeBSD over the other possible contenders, which, IMHO, is a more interesting sideline to explore. So far, it's what everyone else has been exploring as well (without degenerating in to a BSD vs. GPL namecalling-fest, which is nice -- perhaps the usual suspects didn't have the smarts to realise that this might be a GPL issue after all).
You'll read what you want to read. If you expect Slashdot to post only anti-MS articles then you'll try and see anti-MS in every article posted.
N
PS: About the colours. Shocked the hell out of me as well. I thought I'd screwed something up bigtime:-)
Interesting point. As the poster, the text you're seeing in the story is pretty much what was submitted. I've got a choice of either using that text as is, and keeping the submitters words, or changing it completely. and starting with something like "Nicedream sent in this link to..." instead. Wherever possible I try and retain the submitter's text, since that's the core of Slashdot after all.
What I don't want to do is start reviewing or commenting on the links in the summary -- some of the stuff that gets posted will have that, but it will be from the "Read more" link if at all. In fact, there's a good example of that coming up in about 4 hours time.
moving the freebsd news off to this section. it's not helping I don't think! If the main page reports on mostly useless crap (and you know it is), why can't useful news like this be put up on the main page. sad.
BSD stuff will (and is) still be posted to the front page. At the moment it's basically my call as to whether a story will appear on the front page, or whether it will just appear in the BSD section.
At the moment, I'm going on gut instinct. This will be refined over the coming weeks as we post more stories. Doubtless I'll get people saying "Why did that story make the front page? It should have only been posted to the BSD section!" as well.
For the time being, if you think I should have posted a story to the front page (or not, as the case may be) please tell me -- nik@slashdot.org.
[I'm still trying to live within the limitations of not having an init.d directory in FreeBSD to allow easy stop/start of subsystems without rebooting... yeow, it seems mighty regressive not to have it!]
/usr/local/etc/rc.d. Also, see the archives for the -arch mailing list, where this is discussed.
The *BSD fans have been made well-aware by many/. users that we have few friends here...
That's lamentably true. I hope that the new BSD section will help turn that around by increasing the number of BSD articles that make it to/., which will increase their awareness of the BSDs, and what they can do.
Obviously, time will tell. However, I can say that based on my time on the slashdot-authors mailing list it's recognized that/. is still perceived as being Linux only, and that we're all working to try and shift that perception. But it won't happen overnight.
The easiest way to speed it up is to start submitting good BSD stories, the more the merrier.
And to reply to NovaX's point: yes, this story was also mentioned on Daemon News -- however, I didn't need to copy it from there, as an OpenBSD advocate had submitted it here as well.
Well, that was the tone, IMO. That doesn't mean my interpritation was correct, of course. I'm refering to the email in which you announced Slashdot would have a BSD section, which came as advocacy was chatting about the loss of the FreeBSD advocacy pages, the new 3rd party advocacy page, the start of Daemon Daily News, and OS Online's BSD section. I don't have your message anymore, but that was how I precieved it.
(Not a link, because I think the posting code will truncate it, use cut-n-paste as necessary).
Rereading it, I can see how you got that impression. I was caught between a bit of a rock and a hard place. Robin Miller (Roblimo) had contacted me at the end of August, which was the first I knew that/. was going to cover BSD in more detail. I equated that as contact from Andover, rather than/., although with hindsight there's not much difference where/. is concerned (certainly, Robin's doesn't come across as a 'suit' trying to exploit the community).
About a week after we started talking about this, the thread in -advocacy started up bemoaning the lack of news sites, the loss of the advocacy.freebsd.org site, how/. was tossing all the BSD stories that were being submitted, and so on. I had to bite my tongue at this point, because I knew that, while many of these comments may have been valid (I know I've submitted stories to/. in the past which haven't been posted) there was going to be this new BSD section that was going to address the concerns that people were raising.
We just couldn't say anything about it yet -- we didn't have a definite date for it to start, for one thing. This is my fault, the past month or so has been somewhat hectic for me (moving house, preparing for FreeBSDCon, co-authoring a book) which meant that I couldn't give a definite start date.
In the end we decided that rather than run with a new 'article' to start the BSD section we'd begin with a good news article. Bill's FreeBSD Con one seemed to be the best to use, so we did.
Had I had an extra week between now and the Con we'd probably have started by posting an article to solicit contributions especially, and then I'd be picking and choosing from those. But sometimes things don't work out quite the way we'd like:-(
I'll have my laptop at the Con, and assuming I can get hold of some IP connectivity (I refuse to call it IP 'tone') I'm more than happy to do a guided tour of BackSlash (the Slashdot administration system) for people that want to see the sort of stories that get submitted, what happens to them, and so on.
When Nik told FreeBSD advocacy a few weeks ago about/.'s new section, even then there was a tone of 'sorry for all your work on Daemon News, FreeBSD advocacy, etc.. but your dead. We're covering it now.'
There was? That must have been in private e-mail that never made it to me. I've never intimated that, and quite frankly, it's not true.
IMHO, the BSD 'market' is large enough to support multiple 'sources' for news like this. What may well distinguish the sites from one another is not the news that's posted so much as the quality of the discussion that's generated from it. Of course, that's something that's completely out of my hands.
Andover, when Nik told advocacy, was the one who requested the BSD section because they saw the market. This was not Rob, etc. Andover sees the market, which means money.
I'm not at my home computer at the moment, which means I can't check the original e-mail from Robin (which I wouldn't quote directly in public anyway). However, that's not the impression I've had. It was much more the case that/. has been thinking about running a BSD section for some time, but didn't have the manpower to do it internally.
I was contacted about this completely out of the blue and asked if I wanted to do it. This (presumably) means that Rob and Jeff (and behind them Robin, and the rest of Andover) didn't want to just throw money at the first person who came along and volunteered, but wanted to get the 'right' person. Time will tell if I'm the 'right' person or not, but it's nice to get the chance:-)
So just understand thi: many BSD users don't see the increased number of articles as a great thing, its nice. The way slashdot has treated them in the past, none are rejoicing. I think many will continue to support Daemon News, some OS Online, and other sites with pride.. and support/. BSD because for publicity.. we may have to.
It's interesting that no one in this thread has mentioned FreeBSD Rocks yet. This has been running for a year or so, and is very/. like in terms of interface and what gets posted. Yet it's also been very quiet in terms of the number of articles posted.
As I say, I'd support all of them with pride. The eventual differentiator will be the quality of the discussion, and that's firmly in your hands.
Nikc, could you please explain the rationalization in having a completely seperate section for BSD related articles?
Just to be absolutely clear about this. BSD articles will still appear on the front page of/.
This new section is just to allow posting of more stories that, by themselves, wouldn't make it on to the front page, or, if they did, would have occured as quickies.
It's also one of the first to be split off (along with YRO and Apache), this does not mean it will be the last. KDE, Gnome, BeOS, Amiga, even Linux could all end up with their own sections.
Or not.
It's really far too early to tell. The success of the BSD section (and the Apache section, and others) will determine what happens in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
It's bootable. We used one of the DVDs at Usenix to boot someone's laptop who wanted to get away from Linux.
Of course, you still need BIOS support in order to boot from the DVD in the first place.
N
Cock up rather than conspiracy. Now fixed.
N
NP == Now Playing. It was whatever xmms happened to be playing at the time. I'm doing more Slashdot stuff away from my home 'net recently, so it's not been appropriate.
N
The decision to make this section only was mine. After reading the article, I figured that it's not really a great advance on "NetBSD is different to Linux, but a competant Unix admin can handle it easily enough."
Had this been a more in-depth technical analysis of the differences between the two (disk handling, memory management, networking, ...) then it would have made the front page. And if any of you have any pointers to that sort of article then please submit it.
N
So there's no confusion, all I meant was that BSDI are doubtless spending some of their money on more advertising, talking to the press, and so on. The recent upswing in positive BSD publicity is a testament to that. I didn't mean that BSDI forked over some cash to someone to get this article written and/or printed.
OK?
N
AC wrote:
As a FreeBSD committer, you can rest assured that I knew about the release long before you did.
We had lots of submissions about this, most of them about the fact that the RELENG_4 tag had gone down on the source. Of course, this is next to useless for most people, because it's still not released and available on the FTP site.
We (or, more precisely, me) waited until I had confirmed that JKH had rolled the release, and that binaries had been picked up by a few mirrors. You can rest assured that there is no "pressure from above" to hold off on BSD stories, and that if there was, I'd be the first to talk about it.
N (nik@{freebsd,slashdot}.org)
AC wrote:
Not quite true. In the interests of getting the facts right:
I'm an employee of C.R.F. Consulting in the UK ("C.R.F." == "Clayton's Retirement Fund", but not a lot of people know that).
Yes, I live in the UK.
My company provides services to Andover.net, one of which is the editorial for the BSD section. Yes, my company is paid for this work. I am not (directly), although, ultimately, Andover.net do fund part of my salary. I also have Andover options.
Those editorial services are not restricted to either Walnut Creek, or FreeBSD. I've posted (and will continue to post) stories about BSD, whatever the flavour. I also occasionally post other submissions to the front page as well.
I'm not (and nor are any companies I'm connected with) retained or paid by Walnut Creek. The closest I've come to that was not having to pay the registration fee for last years FreeBSD Convention. That's not specific to me, as I understand that everybody who presented at the conference did not have to pay for registration.
If you want to write to me (and it's about Slashdot), I'd prefer you use the nik@slashdot.org address. If it's about FreeBSD in general, or the Documentation Project, I'd prefer you used nik@freebsd.org. And if you'd like to use C.R.F. Consulting's services, and you're a company in or around London in the UK, I'd prefer you wrote to nik@crf-consulting.co.uk :-)
FWIW, there don't seem to be many other "Nik Clayton"s on the 'net, so going to Google and doing an ego search for my name will turn up links to pretty much everything I've ever written online in the past eight years. I'm sure you'll enjoy it.
Now, could we get back to the regular Natalie Portman discussions? Thanks.
N
Re: the linuxes disappearing from cdrom.com
S'OK, so has FreeBSD... WC sold the cdrom.com domain sometime ago. The new domain is (I think) freesoftware.com. WC can still be found at wccdrom.com.
N
It could just as easily have been "NR: Bagumbo snuffbox" :-)
N
It was my call.
There's not a lot of detail in the story as is at the moment. SMP support isn't in OpenBSD yet, all that's happened is a CVS branch has been created in preparation for the work. Unless I'm mistaken, it's little more than a statement of intent at the moment. Similarly, the NetBSD work is very prelimenary.
If these were first forays in to new areas in general (like, say, USB would have been a year or more back) then this would have been front page material (IMHO). As it is, however, various other OSs, commercial and open source already have SMP support, so I didn't think it was as important.
Keep in mind that the front page has room for about 15 stories at a time, and one of the reasons for the creation of the BSD (and other sections) is so that stories that shouldn't make the front page still get an airing.
Of course, at the end of the day it's just one person's judgement. I'm not going to get it right all the time. So I rely on feedback like this to let me know what sort of job I'm doing.
N/p
znu wrote:
http://www.freebsd.org/ passes with flying colours. Of course, I did have a hand or two in that. . . :-)
If I get some copious free time in the near future I'm going to whack my slashdot.org hat on and take a look at the Slash code, to see if I can assist on that front.
N
nik@{freebsd,slashdot}.org
AC wrote:
This is great. I laugh every time I see it. But do you think you could get it down to 4 lines so I can use it as a sig file?
Thanks
N
nik@[freebsd,slashdot].org
And then he followe d up to his own message, explaining that OpenBSD was vulnerable...
N
AC wrote:
For the record, I picked up the link from DaemonNews, and from Wes' posting to the FreeBSD mailing lists. He didn't submit the story to Slashdot. His name is in the intro because that's where I got the original pointer.
If Wes had submitted it, the intro would read something like "Wes Peters writes..."
I'd appreciate if you'd provide links back to the mailing list discussion in which Intel engineers contributed.
The story is about their Storage Station, and in particular, despite Intel's investment in Be, Linux, Aix, SCO, and NT (whether direct financial investment, or another kind) they didn't choose any of these when they wanted a reliable solution. They chose FreeBSD.
N
mistalinux wrote:
It is, that's why it's got the BSD section colours.
N
AC wrote
Hey Nik, why didn't you post the cool OpenSSH article I submitted?
Do you mean this one?
N
Why do you even bother pretending that the reason this was posted was because it was about BSD?
Because that's the reason I posted it. My bias is quite definitely BSD, :-), and you'll note that in the extended commentary I pretty much ignore the MS bashing, concentrating on why they choose FreeBSD over the other possible contenders, which, IMHO, is a more interesting sideline to explore. So far, it's what everyone else has been exploring as well (without degenerating in to a BSD vs. GPL namecalling-fest, which is nice -- perhaps the usual suspects didn't have the smarts to realise that this might be a GPL issue after all).
You'll read what you want to read. If you expect Slashdot to post only anti-MS articles then you'll try and see anti-MS in every article posted.
N
PS: About the colours. Shocked the hell out of me as well. I thought I'd screwed something up bigtime :-)
In btw: Why is the icon featuring Chuck. Chuck is the FreeBSD mascot. The OpenBSD one does not wear running shoes...
It's currently the only BSD icon on Slashdot, and yes, it's more suited to FreeBSD than NetBSD or OpenBSD. If anyone wants to
(a) Draw up icon sized logos for NetBSD and OpenBSD
(b) Run them past the appropriate people on both groups
(c) E-mail me a URL where I can download them from
then I'll be more than happy to use them in the future.
N
This review was anything but thourough!
Interesting point. As the poster, the text you're seeing in the story is pretty much what was submitted. I've got a choice of either using that text as is, and keeping the submitters words, or changing it completely. and starting with something like "Nicedream sent in this link to..." instead. Wherever possible I try and retain the submitter's text, since that's the core of Slashdot after all.
What I don't want to do is start reviewing or commenting on the links in the summary -- some of the stuff that gets posted will have that, but it will be from the "Read more" link if at all. In fact, there's a good example of that coming up in about 4 hours time.
N
AC wrote:
moving the freebsd news off to this section. it's not helping I don't think! If the main page reports on mostly useless crap (and you know it is), why can't useful news like this be put up on the main page. sad.
BSD stuff will (and is) still be posted to the front page. At the moment it's basically my call as to whether a story will appear on the front page, or whether it will just appear in the BSD section.
At the moment, I'm going on gut instinct. This will be refined over the coming weeks as we post more stories. Doubtless I'll get people saying "Why did that story make the front page? It should have only been posted to the BSD section!" as well.
For the time being, if you think I should have posted a story to the front page (or not, as the case may be) please tell me -- nik@slashdot.org.
N
Morgaine wrote:
[I'm still trying to live within the limitations of not having an init.d directory in FreeBSD to allow easy stop/start of subsystems without rebooting ... yeow, it seems mighty regressive not to have it!]
/usr/local/etc/rc.d. Also, see the archives for the -arch mailing list, where this is discussed.
N
Nonesuch wrote:
The *BSD fans have been made well-aware by many /. users that we have few friends here...
That's lamentably true. I hope that the new BSD section will help turn that around by increasing the number of BSD articles that make it to /., which will increase their awareness of the BSDs, and what they can do.
Obviously, time will tell. However, I can say that based on my time on the slashdot-authors mailing list it's recognized that /. is still perceived as being Linux only, and that we're all working to try and shift that perception. But it won't happen overnight.
The easiest way to speed it up is to start submitting good BSD stories, the more the merrier.
And to reply to NovaX's point: yes, this story was also mentioned on Daemon News -- however, I didn't need to copy it from there, as an OpenBSD advocate had submitted it here as well.
N
NovaX wrote
Well, that was the tone, IMO. That doesn't mean my interpritation was correct, of course. I'm refering to the email in which you announced Slashdot would have a BSD section, which came as advocacy was chatting about the loss of the FreeBSD advocacy pages, the new 3rd party advocacy page, the start of Daemon Daily News, and OS Online's BSD section. I don't have your message anymore, but that was how I precieved it.
You probably mean this message:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=5722 +10037+/usr/local/www/db/text/1999/free bsd-advocacy/19990926.freebsd-advocacy
(Not a link, because I think the posting code will truncate it, use cut-n-paste as necessary).
Rereading it, I can see how you got that impression. I was caught between a bit of a rock and a hard place. Robin Miller (Roblimo) had contacted me at the end of August, which was the first I knew that /. was going to cover BSD in more detail. I equated that as contact from Andover, rather than /., although with hindsight there's not much difference where /. is concerned (certainly, Robin's doesn't come across as a 'suit' trying to exploit the community).
About a week after we started talking about this, the thread in -advocacy started up bemoaning the lack of news sites, the loss of the advocacy.freebsd.org site, how /. was tossing all the BSD stories that were being submitted, and so on. I had to bite my tongue at this point, because I knew that, while many of these comments may have been valid (I know I've submitted stories to /. in the past which haven't been posted) there was going to be this new BSD section that was going to address the concerns that people were raising.
We just couldn't say anything about it yet -- we didn't have a definite date for it to start, for one thing. This is my fault, the past month or so has been somewhat hectic for me (moving house, preparing for FreeBSDCon, co-authoring a book) which meant that I couldn't give a definite start date.
In the end we decided that rather than run with a new 'article' to start the BSD section we'd begin with a good news article. Bill's FreeBSD Con one seemed to be the best to use, so we did.
Had I had an extra week between now and the Con we'd probably have started by posting an article to solicit contributions especially, and then I'd be picking and choosing from those. But sometimes things don't work out quite the way we'd like :-(
I'll have my laptop at the Con, and assuming I can get hold of some IP connectivity (I refuse to call it IP 'tone') I'm more than happy to do a guided tour of BackSlash (the Slashdot administration system) for people that want to see the sort of stories that get submitted, what happens to them, and so on.
N
NovaX wrote:
When Nik told FreeBSD advocacy a few weeks ago about /.'s new section, even then there was a tone of 'sorry for all your work on Daemon News, FreeBSD advocacy, etc.. but your dead. We're covering it now.'
There was? That must have been in private e-mail that never made it to me. I've never intimated that, and quite frankly, it's not true.
IMHO, the BSD 'market' is large enough to support multiple 'sources' for news like this. What may well distinguish the sites from one another is not the news that's posted so much as the quality of the discussion that's generated from it. Of course, that's something that's completely out of my hands.
Andover, when Nik told advocacy, was the one who requested the BSD section because they saw the market. This was not Rob, etc. Andover sees the market, which means money.
I'm not at my home computer at the moment, which means I can't check the original e-mail from Robin (which I wouldn't quote directly in public anyway). However, that's not the impression I've had. It was much more the case that /. has been thinking about running a BSD section for some time, but didn't have the manpower to do it internally.
I was contacted about this completely out of the blue and asked if I wanted to do it. This (presumably) means that Rob and Jeff (and behind them Robin, and the rest of Andover) didn't want to just throw money at the first person who came along and volunteered, but wanted to get the 'right' person. Time will tell if I'm the 'right' person or not, but it's nice to get the chance :-)
So just understand thi: many BSD users don't see the increased number of articles as a great thing, its nice. The way slashdot has treated them in the past, none are rejoicing. I think many will continue to support Daemon News, some OS Online, and other sites with pride.. and support /. BSD because for publicity.. we may have to.
It's interesting that no one in this thread has mentioned FreeBSD Rocks yet. This has been running for a year or so, and is very /. like in terms of interface and what gets posted. Yet it's also been very quiet in terms of the number of articles posted.
As I say, I'd support all of them with pride. The eventual differentiator will be the quality of the discussion, and that's firmly in your hands.
N
phypor wrote:
Nikc, could you please explain the rationalization in having a completely seperate section for BSD related articles?
Just to be absolutely clear about this. BSD articles will still appear on the front page of /.
This new section is just to allow posting of more stories that, by themselves, wouldn't make it on to the front page, or, if they did, would have occured as quickies.
It's also one of the first to be split off (along with YRO and Apache), this does not mean it will be the last. KDE, Gnome, BeOS, Amiga, even Linux could all end up with their own sections.
Or not.
It's really far too early to tell. The success of the BSD section (and the Apache section, and others) will determine what happens in the future.
OK?
N