Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 09:47:13 -0500 (CDT) From: Licia <licia@o-o.org> To: Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com> Cc: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: application developers [ was Jordan the Confused (Was: Jordan The Evil!) ] Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9904160931480.26167-100000@o-o.org> In-Reply-To: <199904160601.XAA88836@rah.star-gate.com>
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On Thu, 15 Apr 1999, Amancio Hasty wrote:
> > No one is stoping you from writing the tools needed to make FreeBSD a
> > "desktop-oriented" system. Just as no one is stoping you from writing a
> > FreeBSD emulator for Linux which, if I remember right, was you last
> > obsession. If you feel that there are things missing from FreeBSD you need
> > to go and build them.
>
> Actually, a better question is why are people not writing applications?
> Is it because they lack the programming skills, inefficient tools, targetted
> goals, etc...
>
> Amancio
>
> --
>
> Amancio Hasty
> hasty@star-gate.com
(taking a break from catching up on everything she's 2 months behind on, this
is a pet peeve :) )
I think the primary reason is lack of support by the user community. FreeBSD,
being the completely free community it is, almost a pleasant anarchy, doesn't
give the 'emotional support' a lot of applications developers need. I also
tend to think that's why Linux has so -many- applications developers.
Whenever I've posted a question to the effect "would anyone be interested in
an application like (bbs, tcp terminal program, cross platform spam filter,
isp billing system, etc)?" I've usually simply not gotten a response from the
FreeBSD community.
I'm not saying people are wrong for not encouraging me, but it makes it
difficult to gauge wether there is enough interest in a project to justify
spending my limited time on it. Even a simple "I'm not interested but I think
others would be" or a clean "Sorry I don't think that would get used" would be
helpful. Not for the developer's ego, but as a way to help them decide what
projects to dump a lot of time and effort into. In contrast, for almost every
project I've mentioned, I've had a lot of people from the Linux camp offer me
support, including one gentleman who offered a shell account with as much
storage space, cpu time, etc as I needed to develop a project under Linux. He
wasn't so much interested in that particular application, as he was interested
in encouraging me to develop applications for Linux.
I think it's primarily just a difference in the user communities. The Linux
users will encourage a developer, help test, give feedback, -just- to get them
to develop for Linux. The FreeBSD community applies the old 'write it, and
if we like it, we'll use it but don't bother us until then' standard. Great
for people who talk about becoming involved with the FreeBSD project, bad bad
way to handle people considering writing applications for it. I'm about to
cancel one of my projects (bouncer) for example, simply because I have not
managed to get -any- serious alpha testers, or even any feedback on it and
it's either cancel it or move it to Linux, and I don't want to waste one of my
machines to install Linux on.
I started a FreeBSD Applications Developer's list to try to begin addressing
this issue, but I'm not a mailing list expert and don't know how to 'energize'
a list, draw in members, get conversations going, etc.
Anyway that's my view of it, sorry for rambling... I'll get back to work now
:)
[ licia@o-o.org ] [ http://www.o-o.org/~licia/ ] [ Alias : Ladywolf]
[ Telnet to o-o.org and log in as bbs ] [ ssh -l bbs -C o-o.org ]
[ A happy user of FreeBSD : http://www.freebsd.org/ ]
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