Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 11:19:45 +0000 From: Scott Mitchell <rsm@acm.org> To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Enough already! (was Re: Netscape browser) Message-ID: <19990323111945.51440@goatsucker.org> In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.32.19990322181857.03eb8d90@localhost>; from Brett Glass on Mon, Mar 22, 1999 at 06:20:49PM -0700 References: <4.2.0.32.19990322160933.00aaf6c0@localhost> <Pine.SV4.3.96.990322200342.15926B-100000@pegasus.cc.ucf.ed u> <4.2.0.32.19990322181857.03eb8d90@localhost>
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On Mon, Mar 22, 1999 at 06:20:49PM -0700, Brett Glass wrote: > It looks as if any attempt to spur advocacy for, or promotion of, FreeBSD > is doomed to failure in this group. No wonder FreeBSD is falling into > obscurity while Linux crushes everything in sight. One might argue that "FreeBSD is falling into obscurity" because we all -- with a few notable exceptions -- sit around here bitching about it rather than doing anything to remedy the situation. And Brett, you're as guilty of all talk, no action as anybody; witness the amount of effort you've put into this thread, repeating the same arguments a million times. Nik Clayton summed it up perfectly: if you really believe that a FreeBSD emulator is a worthwhile endeavour then you don't need my, Jordan's or anyone else's permission to go do it. Just start the project, announce it in all the places Nik mentioned, try to get Debian on board, and take it from there. If people think it's a good idea, they'll flock to your banner and you can say "I told you so". If not, too bad, but at least you tried. Endless complaining on -advocacy that nobody supports your ideas is only going to induce people to not support your ideas... FWIW, I think your emulator idea has its merits, although I fail to see how any commercial vendor is going to switch to BSD on the basis of ~1/3 more users, 3/4 of whom would then be running their product under emulation. Especially when they can have all those users now, with 3/4 of them running it natively... You might be able to make it work if you could get Debian behind it -- they've already expressed interest in working with the BSDs. Better yet (I think Terry L. has suggested this already?) get FreeBSD emulation running on Solaris and a bunch of other commercial Unices...now *that* would get you market share. Anyway, you've got the ball on this, so how about running somewhere with it? Now, before you trot out your line about every offer you make getting rejected by some evil cabal at the heart of the project, that is, frankly, a load of crap. Although you do seem to have a talent for getting people mad at you no matter what you say. I've gone so far as to accuse the entire core team of (and I quote) "not giving a shit about laptop support", and succeeded only in getting elected point man on the laptop support effort for my pains. Punishment enough, I guess :) I started work on a NIC driver a couple of months ago. Since then I've had offers of help (coding and testing) from about 40-50 people. People have provided network resources, web space, even a chance of some loaner hardware. I have every expectation that the driver will be committed to the FreeBSD tree as soon as it's done. Partly as a result of our efforts (and those evil Linux people) Xircom are relaxing their licensing policy with regard to specs and source code. Plus they now have FreeBSD on their map, and they think we're good people. All that just by being nice to people, and doing most of the work myself -- you should try it sometime. Maybe I'm being too harsh. I'm sure that you do believe in FreeBSD, that you're doing great work with your local user group, that you're producing lots of cool stuff that we don't know about, etc. We've just seen precious little evidence of that on this list. Anyway, I await the announcement of the FreeBSD emulator project with interest, but I'm not holding my breath. Scott PS. Please don't reply to me personally. I'm trying to put an end to this argument (I know, stupid idea), not start another one. -- =========================================================================== Scott Mitchell | PGP Key ID |"If I can't have my coffee, I'm just <scott@dcs.qmw.ac.uk> | 0x54B171B9 | like a dried up piece of roast goat" QMW College, London, UK | 0xAA775B8B | -- J. S. Bach. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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