By Steve Litt

We've all met snarfs in our social life. The snarf is the guy without the guts or social skills necessary to meet a woman. So what does he do? He pretends to be real tight with his buddies, and comes to their parties, their card games, their homes. He finds little problems in their relationships, and makes his little statements designed to sew seeds of discontent in the buddy's relationship. And if a buddies relationship gets a little shaky, the snarf is the first to provide the girlfriend a shoulder to cry on, and oh my,  he's *such* a good listener. All the while letting her know she's too good for her boyfriend. And once in a while, the snarf succeeds in busting up a relationship.

Word gets out, and the snarf is excluded from the group. So the snarf drifts from group to group, anywhere he's unknown, and peddles his sugar covered excrement.

Kind of like that minority of BSD advocates that sweet talk their way onto Linux mailing lists, then try to recruit by putting down Linux. The snarf typically trots out those silly "quotes"  made by those once important in the computer world, such as Ken Thompson's gem:

• "I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft-a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less."

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Editor's Note: This quote can be found in a Ken Thompson interview at http://computer.org/computer/thompson.htm.

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• "Linux is something for Windows haters, BSD is something for Unix lovers" (attributed by some to Heike S., Febr. 98)
• "Beneath revolution (Linux) there's also evolution (*BSD)" (attributed by some to Andre Oppermann, Apr. 98)

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Editor's Note: AltaVista found only one instance of these preceding two "quotes", at http://toaster.sun4c.net/papers/quotes.html. Those quotes are where I believe the (possibly accurate, possibly not)  attributions come from. When I looked them up by attributed originator's name, I found a couple more.

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Snarf, here's the situation. We legitimate Linux and BSD advocates are locked in a death struggle with the remainder of the Windows empire. And you come along, barking your little bark and nipping at our heels. You will not long be tolerated. We'll throw you off our lists, tell you to get out of our meetings. And if you get us mad enough, we might just send a few hundred Linux advocates to your meetings and mailing lists with messages just as meaningless and silly as yours:

• "If you want to make money in the non-Microsoft world, you'd better switch to Linux". (Litt, S. 1999).
• "BSD works great in college, but you're in the real world now." (Litt, S. 1999)."
• "It's the license, stupid!" (Litt, S. 1999)."
• "Now are we talking OpenBSD, FreeBSD, BSD/OS, or NetBSD." (Litt, S. 1999).

And note the final "Litt quote". Imagine the flame wars Linux people could start (and then get out of the way) by pretending to advocate one BSD over the other. The snarf's knife has two edges.

Snarf, if you truly care for your OS and your user group, remember that Linux is a much better ally than enemy.

BSD and Linux are killer OS'es whose advocates are determined to replace the popular crash and burn operating system with stability. Once that's done, they will almost certainly coexist and interoperate with each other. In the end, the choice of BSD or Linux will be made on a per project or even per-host basis, according to which best fits the particular needs.

So all you snarfs out there. Get some guts and social skills, and help us replace the crash and burn OS with BSD and Linux .

Snarf:  Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Steve Litt
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