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Date:      Mon, 09 Jul 2001 16:26:54 -0700
From:      Jordan Hubbard <jkh@osd.bsdi.com>
To:        tlambert2@mindspring.com
Cc:        jkh@osd.bsdi.com, shannon@widomaker.com, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD Mall now BSDCentral
Message-ID:  <20010709162654L.jkh@osd.bsdi.com>
In-Reply-To: <3B49F8D5.2C9BFA73@mindspring.com>
References:  <20010707002340.B16071@widomaker.com> <20010707004731V.jkh@osd.bsdi.com> <3B49F8D5.2C9BFA73@mindspring.com>

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From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
Subject: Re: FreeBSD Mall now BSDCentral
Date: Mon, 09 Jul 2001 11:32:53 -0700

> Except that he who controls the trademark is he who gets
> to bless the distributions with its use -- or to deny its
> use.

Only if they chose to do so.  I would like to think that the
foundation is more enlightened than that, but you'll just have to
trust them.

> Historically, you've always held that the CDROM must boot
> to sysinstall.  As the software's daddy, I can see why
> you'd want that; but your baby is ugly.

I never said a "CDROM must boot to sysinstall" and I challenge you to
find a quote to that effect.  What both Nik and I said was that it
must be an OPTION to do so, somehow, or you haven't provided a stock
FreeBSD experience and people are potentially going to be confused as
to what "FreeBSD" means.  This holds especially true if you haven't
provided source code to your wizzy installer and they have no way of
figuring out how or why it's even misbehaving, which you can bet it
will since nobody ever writes perfect software.

I certainly don't see you answering questions on the freebsd-questions
mailing list or you'd know that anything which creates confusion as to
what a user is doing during the installation or general usage of
FreeBSD only makes tech support that much more of a challenge.  I'm
not "defending sysinstall because it's my baby", I'm defending the
right to have "FreeBSD" mean something as definitive as possible in
the cradle-to-grave experience.  If you want to write a much better
installer and donate it so that we can make it the new default, so
much the better and POLA will still be obeyed from a tech support
perspective.

And please, don't insult our intelligence by saying that tech support
won't be an issue because you're going to putt a 1-800 number on your
wizzy installer or something.  People either won't call it or won't
notice it, but they will go to www.freebsd.org and they'll eventually
find their way onto IRC or the various mailing lists and ask why the
pulsating red button never does the right thing when they push it.
You, of course, will be nowhere to be found there and everyone else
will be looking around and shaking their heads at this crazy person
who's just wandered into the forum talking about a button that, from
their perspective, doesn't exist.

- Jordan

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