Sticks and Stones

by Brett Taylor brett@daemonnews.org

In the past week, Tucows announced that they were dropping the BSD section from their site. The original page describing the reasons for their taking the section down has now been replaced, but the original wording said (in part):

When Tucows periodically gets something "wrong" on the BSD site, we receive a barrage of angry user comments. Paradoxically, when we use this advice to make adjustments we receive an equally prolific battering from other BSD factions indicating that we had it correct to begin with. Any attempt to provide a middle ground only results in hostility from all sides.

The new page currently restates their position:

Contrary to much of the rhetoric we've been hearing since the announcement of our decision to discontinue hosting Tucows BSD, this choice was indeed the result of growing frustration over our seeming inability to provide excellence in content to all factions of the BSD user group.

So now it seems that they are closing because they can't satisfy all of the people all the time. Isn't that true for every single business, news agency, etc? Those who saw the Tucows BSD site and were BSD users were probably uniformly dismayed by the section being called "BSD." If Tucows had trouble with people sending emails correcting their errors, there was ample justification.

• Under the "Flavors" section they listed the 3 free BSDs. They talked briefly about each and had links to the respetive projects. At least they appeared to. FreeBSD was linked to a review of an X-based network monitor, while the OpenBSD link pointed to FreeBSD.
• All of the BSDs were listed as being distributed under the GPL.
• The "News" section of the BSD site was not actual news items, but instead editorials. These usually quickly denigrated into "well, BSD can do this, but I like Linux better so go try the LDOTW (Linux Distribution of the Week)."

In terms of the errors, those can certainly be forgiven. The problem was not that Tucows made some errors, but that they made no effort to correct them. From the time I first heard about the Tucows "Flavors" page and the errors within (January 5th) until the last time I saw that page, about a week before the site closed, the errors had not been corrected.

In terms of the News section, the open letter now on the BSD Tucows page states:

Also, to provide a clear explanation of purpose, the BSD News section is not intended to be a resource for hard news. Rather, it is an editorial forum.

If it's not a news site, why call it news? (Jeremy Reed's story over at BSDToday has links to some of these editorials.)

Regardless of these complaints of mine, what can we learn from this? I'm certain that Tucows got lots of email about their site. I'm sure that not all of these were calm, polite, "you have a few errors, here's the correct information" emails.

I think it's clear that Tucows did not have a good idea of what the BSD community was, how we work, what the community desired, or how they could provide a useful service to the BSD community. What I do know is that we lost a potential advocacy site that could have grabbed the attention of some of Tucows' users. This angle certainly got played up in the Slashdot comment flamefest when this was posted there. How can we prevent this same process from happening again?

• If you see a web page, news article or other piece of information that has errors about BSD, send a polite email pointing out the error and where the correct information can be found.
• Volunteer some of your own time to write or otherwise inform people about BSD. Spread the word, but do it by playing on BSD's strengths, not how "this other OS s*^$ks, use BSD!"
• Did I mention be polite? :-)

Remember, sticks and stones may break my bones and flaming emails could ruin an advocacy opportunity.

If you have comments, please feel free to email me <brett@daemonnews.org>.