Date: Sun, 13 Apr 1997 16:27:53 -0700 From: Pedro Giffuni <pgiffuni@fps.biblos.unal.edu.co> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Commercial vendors registry Message-ID: <33516BF9.675@fps.biblos.unal.edu.co>
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dennis wrote:
>
> What does selling Freebsd-only products have to do with anything?
That the idea of a commercial registry :-), we are not going to register
products for other platforms we can't emulate, are we ?
> And who said anything about lowering costs. There are (at least) 2
> strategies for selling product...there's cheap wine and fine wine. If
> you are looking for vendors to sell cheap wine for freebsd, then you
> are correct.
>
It's a matter of simple economy, if the good wine has a very low price
it *might* sell better than both the cheapest (MS-like) or the finest
(SGI-like).
> >
> >Easy to say ....the hacker's list has always been available.
>
> Then perhaps there is a different reason that commercial vendors stay away
> from FreeBSD?
>
Well of course, but the tide changes. When I was introduced to the UNIX
under PC's I new something about SCO, and vaguely had heard about Linux.
In those days SCO was the best option because of their large hardware
compatibility list and their commercial support. (My Qvision graqhic
card, for example, is not supported yet by XFree86 but has always been
supported by SCO.) Linux was a useful toy OS.
Today I find more software available for Linux than for SCO, I can
freely consider SCO as about >80% shit (I did buy their "FreeUNIX" to
take their sharedlibs and perhaps some apps though).
Commercial vendors actually LIKE to have low costs unless they have
enough users to cover that costs. And they don't like having 500 emails
a day saying that an unrelated part of the OS screwed. We don't have the
users Linux has (which is a mixed blessing IMO), so we have to try to
balance this with a direct, but filtered, communication. The hackers
list is not suitable for this.
I mention Linux because:
1) It's definitely revolutionary (in non-technical terms).
2) In terms of the market an ignorant reader could consider FreeBSD as
just another Linux distribution ("A FreeOS that runs all this Linux
software...").
Technically superior options are rarely the big market, and we don't
want our fine wine to turn into vinegar...
Pedro.
> db
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