TheRaven64's Journal: Open Source Press Relations

In my copious free time, I pretend to be a journalist. Aside from ranting on Slashdot, I have a couple of weekly-ish columns that I fill with opinions. In the last six months, I have tried to write articles about the BSD family. In preparation for these, I emailed members of the projects with some questions. The differences in the replies were quite surprising:

• OpenBSD: The team gave me some really good feedback. Not everyone replied, but those who did gave some very interesting material.
• NetBSD: I'd not used NetBSD much (a bit on some old SPARC32 machines), so I needed a lot of input here. The people I contacted forwarded my questions on to others, collected replies and gave me a huge amount to work with.
• FreeBSD: This was my major disappointment. I've used FreeBSD for ages, and was looking forward to writing the article. I sent a message to their release engineering mailing list saying I would be interested in writing an article about the next release, and asking for input. It was ignored for a month, then I got one reply suggesting some people to contact. The only one of these to reply did so with a flame. I cancelled the idea of a FreeBSD article as a result, since I wasn't in the right frame of mind to write anything good about the project afterwards.
• DragonFly BSD The only person I bothered contacting was Matt Dillon, since DragonFly is really his baby. Matt responded promptly with incredibly detailed answers. I'm still in the middle of writing the DragonFly article, but it's a lot of fun to do.

The NetBSD and OpenBSD articles got between 15-30K unique readers in the first seven days. I don't have figures for after that. I've been contacted by a few people who said they started using NetBSD as a result of the article. The moral of this story? If you want free publicity, try being polite.