FreeBSD State of the Union, 1999 | The FreeBSD Project

From Jordan Hubbard <jkh@FreeBSD.ORG>, Sunday January 10th, 1999.
Well, it’s another year behind us, folks, and probably high time for another state of the union report!
Ahem…​ I’m never quite sure how to word these things since I’m always reminded of a U.S. president sitting in front of fireplace, trying to sound down-home and folksy for the corn growing states, or perhaps England’s Queen on Christmas day, giving her usual somber-yet-hopeful address on how things went for Britannia during the previous year and what everyone should perhaps think about for the next. Neither one of those is really me, basically, so perhaps I’ll just cut to the chase and focus on the most pertinent lessons (and objectives) to come out of the year 1998 for me.
1998 was, of course, the year that the Internet got bigger (no surprise), various "internetpraneurs" (gag) got richer and FreeBSD’s user base, as measured by the ftp download stats grew at its usual 200-300% rate. More companies also entered the FreeBSD arena, either offering add-ons for or solutions incorporating FreeBSD, and our PR machine, as flimsy and low-key as it often is, managed to ratchet things up another notch. All in all, it was a very good year for FreeBSD and I don’t think that even the most paranoid of us could claim otherwise - Microsoft took one in the shorts, we got bigger and just a bit better known, life was good.
Well, mostly. Whipping off my rosy glasses for a second, I can also say that there were still a number of rocks in the road and unexpected bends that left us not always in the best of control there. While downloads have gone up, CD sales aren’t quite following suit since the whole CD market in general is suffering from increased Internet availability and its erosion of some of the CD’s fundamental advantages. We still did quite well, considering the market’s gradual implosion, but it would be foolish to continue to rely on a single CD product to provide the kinds of subsidies that have been steadily oiling the project’s gears (we more than doubled the size of the FreeBSD.org computing cluster, for example, and significantly enlarged our developer equipment grant program in 1998, all things which cost $$$). It’s fairly obvious that Walnut Creek CDROM will need to increase the number of products it offers if it wishes to remain an effective player in the FreeBSD game and we must continue, as a project, to be flexible in exploring all types of relationships with those who may now have a vested interest in FreeBSD’s success. Things are well past the point where we can do everything that needs to be done as a serious and "grown up" solution just on good will and volunteerism alone.
With that in mind, sites like the FreeBSD Mall have been set up to try and market a wider variety of FreeBSD-related products and we’ve also begun exploring relationships with various companies who can derive measurable value from any PR campaign that enhances FreeBSD’s reputation (translation: we want them to help pay for it :). As many people have somewhat bitterly pointed out by now, this business has become a 10% technology and 90% perception equation as far as the direction in which people stampede is concerned, and hate them for the mindless little sheep that they are, you still need to understand people’s tendencies and behavioral patterns when it comes to dealing with anything they don’t really understand. We’ve done a great job on the technology, we really have (and should be proud of that), but all too frequently we just throw up our hands over the perception issue and tell people to think whatever the hell they want to. Bad techies! Myopic techies! :-)
What can we do to change this in 1999? Well, I’ve also heard our advocate corps calling for logistical support ("Backup! We need some backup here!!") and I’ve listened to them, part of my project for the new years being to get more digital daemon imagery made available (which I have already commissioned), more glossies with various handy comparison charts on them ("FreeBSD and NT", "FreeBSD and Solaris", "FreeBSD and Linux", etc) and more newsletters for passing out to people. We can also produce more marketing periphenalia like buttons, stickers, new T-shirts, etc. to give people a wider array of stuff to proudly point to in support of the "emerging FreeBSD phenomenon." If we can manage to raise more money for PR, we can also perhaps buy some of these items in bulk to use as give-aways in various promotional deals. Other than that, I’m always open to suggestions. We need to do more effective PR, that much is inarguable, it’s only a question of picking our targets for maximum effect given a limited operating budget.
1998 also ended with a bit of a bang as far as FreeBSD’s project management was concerned, frustration with a mostly recumbent core team goading a couple of bearded Danish Vikings into staging a midnight raid on -current, ruthlessly culling the weak and the lame from the source tree. Unfortunately, some of those weak or lame bits of code were still in use at the time and, with no prior public warning having been given, it did not exactly leave the various followers of -current with the feeling that the event was going to be the highlight of their Christmas season. Their complaints led, in turn, to something of a constitutional crisis within core, the rival factions each accusing one another of either impeding progress or using cowboy tactics to achieve that progress, and each faction had its legitimate points just as it had its wholly unreasonable ones. Coming out of this, various suggestions were bandied about concerning how we might put together a "better core team" to which such things simply did not happen (or, if they did, would not be our fault since we’d all be long gone :-) and many of these suggested cures were eventually deemed, quite rightly, to be worse than the disease. So what did we learn from the exercise then?
First off, I think everyone is now pretty much in ag