Date: Fri, 18 Apr 1997 17:58:59 -0300 (ADT) From: The Hermit Hacker <scrappy@hub.org> To: dennis <dennis@etinc.com> Cc: "John S. Dyson" <toor@dyson.iquest.net>, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Price of FreeBSD (was On Holy Wars...) Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.96.970418174436.4592j-100000@thelab.hub.org> In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19970418154140.00a1eb38@etinc.com>
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On Fri, 18 Apr 1997, dennis wrote:
> At 02:02 PM 4/18/97 -0500, John S. Dyson wrote:
> >>
> >> Freebsd is *not* a commercial company and there is no benefit to secrecy.
> >> Why does a "free" OS have secrets? And this is not about fixing bugs,
> >> believe me I understand about bugs, its about having to reengineer
> >> freebsd based systems every couple of months.....
> >>
> >
> >Sorry, but we ARE dealing with VERY VERY VERY big commercial companies.
> >Much bigger than etinc... Doesn't mean that etinc isn't valuable, but
> >there IS stuff going on...
> >
> Ah, so FreeBSD is not as much of a Free O/S as we are led to believe? What
> we, as the public, see is the by-product of special projects for these
> "companies".
> NOW, I understand....the motivation has little to do with good of the
> general user
> base....
No, you don't understand, but we all knew that *messages* ago...
I realize that this continued attempt to make you understand is about
as good as reading /dev/null, but let's try again...
FreeBSD is the operating system...follow so far? Okay, good...now,
its *free* and is worked on by several hundred ppl, all contributing bits
and pieces to the whole, which is one of the many reasons its *free*
Now, along comes, for arguments sake, Intel and they talk to the
core team and say "hey, we'll dedicate some of our resources towards helping
to improve your SMP support" and they dedicate both manhours and hardware
resources towards the effort.
For political reasons (Dept A is offering the resources while Dept
B is heavily into Linux and wants nothing to do with FreeBSD), Intel wants
this kept as quiet as possible so that Dept B doesn't start raising a stink.
In 3 months, we have rock solid SMP support because of that aid, at
which time FreeBSD, Inc can announce 'thanks to the help of...'...
Now, IMHO, keeping *that* a secret for 3mos and then dropping it
into our laps seems to be 'for the good of the general user base', since if
they didn't agree to keep it secret, we wouldn't have that aid...
I believe such a think generally falls under an NDA, where they have
to sign a silly piece of legally binding piece of paper in return for something,
and is pretty standard operating procedures for large (and small) companies...
This argument works for both hardware (DPT RAID controllers?) and
software (StarOffice?)
Of course, Dennis, if you don't like how the core team is running
things, there is OpenBSD and NetBSD out there...but I would think that for
various of their projects, there are similar NDAs in effect *shrug*
Marc G. Fournier
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: scrappy@hub.org secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org
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