## FreeBSD Advocacy ## Jim Mock As as subscriber to the freebsd-advocacy mailing list, I see a lot of good (and IMO) some bad ideas on how to get FreeBSD more market share. The rest of this article isn't going to get into the details on why one form of advocacy is good or bad, it will get into some of the things that you, as a FreeBSD user, can do to help the cause. 1) Convert your friends Converting friends from Linux, Win9x, etc., is one of the best ways to get new users into the FreeBSD camp. 2) Convert your boss Show your boss what FreeBSD can do. I'm not sure why anyone would spend tons of money of NT licenses for a slow and unstable OS when they can get a very fast and high quality one for free that does the job better, unless they like wasting their own or the company's money. Convince the boss to let you set up a FreeBSD box and run it next to an NT box doing the same job. It'll only be a matter of time before he sees the benefits. 3) Write an article Write an article for one of the FreeBSD publications (this one, Daemon News, FreeBSD Rocks). Help us spread the word while helping others at the same time. While you're at it, write an article and submit it to other publications (CNet, ZDNet, etc.) and pester the editors to publish it instead of all the Linux drivel that's currently published. 4) Start a FreeBSD Users Group in your area Starting a FreeBSD Users Group in your area is one of the best ways to help others get into FreeBSD. Hold Install-A-Thons where people can bring in their systems and folks from the Users Group help them get FreeBSD installed. 5) Buy a FreeBSD t-shirt Since Beastie (or Chuck as some of you prefer to call him) is such a cute mascot, buy yourself a FreeBSD t-shirt and wear it out. People will either a) stare at you wondering why you have a cute little "devil" on your shirt, or b) wonder enough to actually ask you what FreeBSD is. Once they do, it's your job to sell them on it =) These are just some of the things that can be done to help FreeBSD get noticed. It seems to me that most journalists like to group all free unices as "Linux". What we as FreeBSD users and lovers need to do, is make them take notice of us, the fact that FreeBSD is NOT Linux, and give the OS we love the recognition it deserves. - Jim $Id: editor.txt,v 1.1 2000/02/16 08:07:49 jim Exp $