Mirrors Primary (US) Issues April 2002 April 2002 Get BSD Contact Us Search BSD FAQ New to BSD? DN Print Magazine BSD News BSD Mall BSD Support Source Wars Join Us T H I S M O N T H ' S F E A T U R E S From the Editor Review: FreeBSD Services Limited's 4.5-RELEASE DVD Editorial by Sam Smith by Chris Coleman Building a self-funded If this was just a review of FreeBSD 4.5, and I just company is difficult in any mentioned that it comes on DVD, then the review would economy, and more have missed the point. There is a significant difference, especially so in the current when it comes to using the discs, between the CD and DVD one. Its a backhanded distributions... Read More blessing, however. One the one hand, you are protected from the "dot com" syndrome, where you burn A Tour Through The NetBSD Source Tree: Part II - though money faster than Libraries investors can throw it at by Hubert Feyrer you. But on the other hand, you can't get money if you In Unix(-like operating systems), commonly used routines wanted to, investors, loans that can be accessed from many programs are grouped or otherwise. within so-called libraries and that can be used from application programs. The src/lib directory contains the Get BSD Stuff libraries that come with NetBSD, and there's quite a number of them. Let's have a look! Read More DOSSIER and the Meta Project (Part 3) by Rich Morin Meta is an exploration into integrating system metadata and documentation. It can be described as a distributed mechanism to facilitate access to information on Free and Search Open Source software. Meta servers provide access to documentation, metadata, rules, and even source code, by Monthly Ezine extracting information from a variety of system file Search formats, making it available in a consistent, easily accessible manner. Read More Daily Daemon News R E G U L A R C O L U M N S KDE 3.0 out for FreeBSD FreeBSD/sparc64 boots SMP Trawling the Ports Collection Need A Light? by Greg Lehey Geek Dating "It has Excel and Word" Our newest column is a slow saunter through the ports tree. NetBSD on Microsoft Only when moving slowly can the wild beauty of X-Box individual ports truly be appreciated. Herein we present you Microsoft/Unisys with information gathered while walking through and Anti-Unix Site Runs Unix playing with the ports tree. This month: bash, bash prompts, Review of The Complete and xtset. Read More FreeBSD BSD Support Forum The Answer Man by Gary Kline, Dirk Myers, and David Leonard Problem with Daemonnews FreeBSD 4.5 Set This month we bring you a column on tuning your BSD Can I use 4.4 Release CD system to best suit your needs and wants. Obviously, to install package on 4.5 because everyone has different requirements, there may Stable? well be myriad different ways to tweak your system. If you Star Office installation run more than one machine you may wish to tune each from CD differently. Read More CVSup Finished Successfully? Digital Cameras ? Where in rc.i386? The Daemon's Advocate Cron problem by Greg Lehey Can't get PCMCIA card to work How have project management practices influenced BSD in the past? How will they be needed in the future, as the BSD Source Wars projects grow larger and more internally diverse? Here are some history, predictions, and questions about what is to Week 22 come. Read More BSDMall FreeBSD 4.5 Now Shipping FreeBSD Training in New York City! Internet and Network Security Training in St. Louis Sangoma T1 controller with Integrated CSU/DSU Daemon Xing Clothes etc. FreeBSD in a Box Just $79! Darwin -The Core of the MAC OS X - $30 Borderware Mail Gateway $960 Need Reseller Pricing - Go to Cylogistics! Miscellaneous Credits The hard-working crew Tarball Download a tar.gz version of this issue PDF Download a PDF version of this issue Copyright © 1998-2002 DæmonNews. All Rights Reserved. Building a BSD Company Chris Coleman <[email protected]> Building a self-funded company is difficult in any economy, and especially so in the current one. Its a backhanded blessing, however. One the one hand, you are protected from the "dot com" syndrome, where you burn though money faster than investors can throw it at you. But on the other hand, you can't get money if you want to, investors, loans or otherwise. A few months back, Wes Peters and I attended a "Money Connections" seminar with the intention of looking for a bit of seed capital to expand the BSDmall side of Daemon News. (Most of Daemon News is volunteer, and the rest is subsidized by BSDmall, especially the print magazine.) However, the group of local investors basically told us that we didn't want investor money and they wouldn't give it to us if we asked. Of course they mixed that in with a few good business tips like "buy low, sell high" to make us think we were still getting our moneys worth. From that experience, we learned that we didn't want just anyone's money. If we did accept money, it would have to come from the BSD community, from people with a vested interest in seeing a BSD company thrive so it could promote BSD. (Nice little circle. ;-) We also learned that there was more we could do to buckle down and grow at the rate the BSD community was expanding. We are partnered with Cylogistics, a BSD distributor that helps resellers get access to BSD merchandise. They helped fund us during the times when we were running things on a shoe string budget, so much so, we were actually sharing an office with them. Soon however, the Cylogistics staff began working more hours for BSDmall than for Cylogistics. This was mostly because we were growing, but also because the office wasn't optimized for the kind of business we were doing. Retail has lots of small transactions and wholesale does a few large ones; we weren't prepared for the kind of volume it takes to make any money, so we weren't making much. It soon became clear that we had outgrown that situation. Cylogistics was growing and needed its staff back to continue promoting BSD in the reseller channel and we needed more staff than we were borrowing from them. The worst part is that our customer service started to slide. We had always had a great customer service policy, and any amount of customer neglect was unacceptable. Yet, suddenly, it seemed we didn't have enough manpower to live up to our expectations. Orders that were easily filled, went out quickly and the customers were very happy, but anything out of the ordinary and the customers occasionally got lost in the system. We needed a new system. As a customer I hate having my order lost, and worse not being able to get ahold of someone to fix the problem. We quickly realized things needed to change and started taking corrective action. We needed to grow, but that first step is always the hardest and takes lots of planning. We also had to admit that open source couldn't do everything, at least not within our other restraints. We switched the BSDmall shopping cart system from an open source system to a Yahoo! Store. Even though the Y! store was more expensive, we didn't have the time or resources to continue developing on the open source project. However, the open source shopping cart worked fine to start with and we wouldn't have an online store now if it wasn't for it. It just didn't scale fast enough to meet our needs. The next thing we did was route all of our customer e-mail into a trouble-ticket management system so customers who emailed us wouldn't get lost or ignored. The new store went online in November and the trouble-ticket system online in December. However, this didn't solve all our problems. I was still trying to remotely manage the understaffed office we shared with Cylogistics in California while holding down a day job here in Utah. I also happened to be handling most of the customer support e-mail, without being able to see what was going on in the shipping office. Something had to change, which was the reason Wes and I were at the money seminar a few months back. Having learned that we didn't want their money and knowing that we couldn't get it if we wanted it, it was very difficult to figure out how to resolve things. With much help from my wife, we decided to move the Daemon News/BSDmall operations here to Utah and I would work full time in the office. Betting your livelihood on a small company can be quite unnerving! The biggest benefit of the move has been to our customers. I was able to re-arrange some of our operating costs and hire a customer service rep. Now, if you have a problem, it will get handled and in a reasonable amount of time. Our phones are staffed, so you can always reach someone during our business hours. Our product shipping is a much more efficient process as well. We have always had a policy to stand behind what we sell, but we now have the manpower to make that possible.