Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 03:09:04 -0700 (PDT) From: Rick Hamell <hamellr@hamell.hpc1.com> To: MICHAEL_HEITMEIER@HP-Germany-om12.om.hp.com Cc: FreeBSD-Newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: basic info on freebsd needed... Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.990803023856.20511B-100000@heorot.hamell.hpc1.com> In-Reply-To: <H0000d7d05cb71d1@MHS>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> Well, I did not intend this to be a complaint, so cool your jets. Of > course you are correct, if anybody who wanted a particular feature would > get their act together and wrote it then Windows would be dead by now. Unluckily it was not meant to be a complaint either...:) Merely playing devils advocate to a certain point. I would love to see Microsoft dead, not because I see it as a bad product, but because I do not agree with the ethics of the company and Mr. Bill. > hobby/niche area. Funny then how much official FreeBSD communication > (Web/newsletter) is spent on 'advocacy'. If it was truly just a hobby, > then why try to convince other people of its merits? To get other people into the hobby. It's a ego thing. If other people are using and enjoying your work then wouldn't that make you feel good too? If they can in addition sell it with a nice book then turn the profits back into the hobby itself, wouldn't that be even better in the long run. You would then have the money to really do those things you wanted to do but couldn't afford to do out of pocket before. I.e. the current incarnation of ftp.cdrom.com Which in turns gets the hobby out to still more people who would enjoy it and stroke your ego. > If you expect me to pay (I have) and shut up (I won't) then I'm afraid > you're behaving like the proverbial Microsoft. The least I expect that > happens with my money is that it funds future development and therefore > buys me the right to give inputs. What else does it mean when 'Walnut > Creek passes part of the money paid back to the FreeBSD project' ? (thanks > for the quote, Adam) Do you think I just pay because I'm such a nice > person and it's oh so nice to fund these nice programmers with their nice > hobby? I give them my money to further their vision, as I agree with the direction they're taking it. They have the knowledge and time to do the really important stuff, like make the core parts of the system better and faster, add support for newer hardware architectures, etc, etc. In turn, my involvement in the project has been avocating it when I can. Helping others installing and getting things configured. Sitting down for long hours to figure out how something works, in detail, so that I better my knowledge of computers (and hopefully soon programming,) I've been working to get a Portland FreeBSD Users Group up and going so that the local community can support and advocate the project as a whole. But.... it is still nothing more then a hobby for me. I run FreeBSD at home almost exclusivly because I'm tired of trying to figure out why Windows crashed just because I clicked on one icon. I'm tired of trying to figure out why my registry is corrupted three days after a fresh install. I'm tired of constantly playing Microsoft's upgrade game. Oh, Office 2000? No thanks... I've got Office V.2, V.5, V.6, V.95 and V.97.... why would I want it? Oh... because not a single old version can read the new word format. So lets shell out another $150 or so for an upgrade, the only differance between it and the full install (and another $100) being a few lines of code that looks for the old installation. Windows resides on a small slice in my machine because I got into computers by playing games. I'm still a gamer at heart and love spending hours exploring the vision and imagination of others. I'm taking the time to explore FreeBSD in the same way, so that I too can someday contribute to the project in a meaningful way. So that I can add to my resume 'FreeBSD Committer,' or even more remotly possibly 'FreeBSD Core Team Member.' > Face it: FreeBSD has become a commercial product and you cannot have it > both ways. If you value the people who code that much higher than the > people who pay I'm afraid that thinking is stuck in pre-industrial times > where division of labour as a concept was still to be discovered. I just still don't agree with you on this. I dimly remeber Rod and Jordan discussing getting a 501C Non-profit whatyamacallit for the FreeBSD Project only a year or so ago. I don't know what came of that, but how does a commercial (make money for profit,) make money with a non-profit status? As for who I value, I still value those who contribute to the project, wether it be money from buying the manual and the 4 CD set, to the core team members itself, to the guy who downloaded it off the ftp site, installed once had no problems and helps others on the mailing list or tells others about it. I do not value the person who sits around a says 'FreeBSD must have this feature or it will be dead within a year.' (Not that I'm saying you do that, again just trying to play devils advocate to a certain point here. :) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.BSF.3.96.990803023856.20511B-100000>