Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2000 12:18:57 -0400 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: Warner Losh <imp@village.org>, Doug Barton <DougB@gorean.org> Cc: papowell@astart.com, nik@FreeBSD.ORG, arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Bringing LPRng into FreeBSD? Message-ID: <v0421011ab57e80d31fb7@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <200006270725.BAA32822@harmony.village.org> References: <3958502D.DF9729BD@gorean.org> <200006242153.OAA01110@h4.private> <200006270615.AAA31842@harmony.village.org> <200006270725.BAA32822@harmony.village.org>
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At 1:25 AM -0600 6/27/00, Warner Losh wrote: >We have to ask ourselves the following sorts of questions: > 1) Is there a need? > 2) Will this fit the need? > 3) Is it better enough than what we have to kill what we have? > 4) a) Will the licensing restrictions cause someone to not use > FreeBSD? b) If so, do we care? > >1) and 2) are well known. The answer is clearly yes. Question 3 is >what we need to focus on, since it hasn't been answered due to the >licensing squabble. > >In answering question 4a, I ask myself what the alternatives are: > 1) Use NetBSD or OpenBSD and hack on lpr > 2) Use FreeBSD w/o lprng and hack on lpr from ports > 3) Use * and write your own printer queuing software > >If they choose (3) it doesn't matter what we have in FreeBSD since >otherwise they would have used an old copy of lpr, so the answer is >no. If they chose 2) then we answer 4a no again because they are >using FreeBSD. If their choice is (1), then it is strong evidence >that the license did matter. I would suspect that if they did do (1) >it would be for reasons other than the license on the default print >software in FreeBSD. So we wouldn't have won there anyway. > >So it looks like the answer to 4b is pretty close to "we don't care" >since none of the alternatives were impacted by the licensing of >FreeBSD default print queue software and that alone. I am not such a company, but I sorta act like one because I'm using freebsd's lpr on other systems. I think you move a bit too rapidly through your analysis. From the point of view of such a company, IF lpr is removed from the current system AND lprNG is brought into the current system, then that's a pretty clear indication that lpr is going to get even less attention than it does now. If the FreeBSD project doesn't want anything to do with lpr, then why am "I" (the company) going to sink my time into it? I would either switch to lpr under one of the other BSD's, or I *would* write my own from scratch. The point is that the decision to move lpr off into a port will influence my decisions. If I'm going to support it, I might as well start with a clean slate, or with an lpr that someone else is using. [btw, does Apple have it's own lpr for darwin? I know NeXTSTEP's print system has a number of features not in freebsd's, I wonder if Darwin/MacOS-10 still has those. I keep meaning to download the darwin sources to look through that] --- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or drosih@rpi.edu Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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