Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2001 13:06:29 -0700 From: Jordan Hubbard <jkh@osd.bsdi.com> To: tedm@toybox.placo.com Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, wes@softweyr.com, ewayte@pegasus.cc.ucf.edu, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: FreeBSD Mall now BSDCentral Message-ID: <20010706130629R.jkh@osd.bsdi.com> In-Reply-To: <004901c10610$a37ff540$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> References: <20010706020341B.jkh@osd.bsdi.com> <004901c10610$a37ff540$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
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From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> Subject: RE: FreeBSD Mall now BSDCentral Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 04:41:47 -0700 > >Times have clearly changed, however, and Walnut Creek CDROM is long > >and sadly gone. > > Jordan, I agree with most of what you say except for this. You disagree with me that Walnut Creek CDROM is gone? How odd. Well, if you'd like to confirm this with Bob Bruce, be my guest! It's finished, toast, pushing up daisies, gone to its reward, shuffled off it mortal coil, met its maker. This is an ex-CDROM company! > Since the core team seems to not know what to do with me, throwing > the stones at them isn't going to make much difference now, and I'm > used to getting in trouble anyway. Erm, why would you throw stones at the core team over this in any case? You think they had anything to do with it? Ted... I can only suggest that you increase the medication - this is a seriously pointless rant you're engaging in here and I honestly don't see the aim of it. > I have always disliked senseless destruction - and now in hindsight it > appears that the destruction of WC due to this BSD merger mania is > both senseles and inadvertant. No matter how much you sugarcoat it - > BSDi screwed over FreeBSD by acquiring Walnut Creek. You all have to face > that even though you may have all worked for them and been the ones to > make the mistake. I think you're suffering from a serious lack of knowledge at what went on behind the scenes, to say nothing of business in general, if you somehow think that everybody went into the merger with the aim of killing off Walnut Creek CDROM. WC was already in the process of slow collapse when the merger took place because whether you're willing to admit it to yourself or not, THE CDROM PUBLISHING BUSINESS SUCKS. Take a look at the number of CDROM vendors in the market place 2 years ago and compare it to the number you see today. Go to CompUSA or Fry's and check out how many Linux distributions you even see on the shelves now. We could all see the writing on the wall even then, and it was for the best of reasons that we decided to combine what were at the time the two most visible "BSD vendors" in an effort to stop competing with one another and try to formulate some sort of hybrid strategy that would let both companies survive by getting into areas like services and custom engineering as well as publishing. Did we succeed? No, obviously not. Did a lot of people suffer a lot more than you or FreeBSD did in the process? Absolutely yes. We put a lot of work into trying to make it fly and when it hit the ground, it was a great disappointment to many people. There are no "culprits" here, at least not on the Walnut Creek CDROM side, just some folks trying to make the best of a bad situation. If you want to blame BSDi's upper management then be my guest, but they won't know or really care much about that so I don't see what you'd hope to accomplish. > I SEE NOTHING to prove that the conditions that created WC's involvement > don't exist for another CDROM vendor to take it's place. Feel free! You want to learn about the CDROM publishing business and have the moral authority to be this sanctimonious? Go create a distribution and hawk it on the street corner. My posting made it more than clear that this sort of thing will be encouraged and you're perfectly welcome to show how this business model can be profitably sustained. > Was WC financially failing? If so why would BSDi take on more debt, that is > completely stupid. There were a lot of things done in the late 90's which matched that description. We started the merger before the bubble burst and there was VC money raining from the sky. Walnut Creek CDROM had never shown itself to be adept at dealing with VCs and the BSDi top management folks claimed they could get money simply by walking outside and opening an umbrella, so we grasped at that particular straw because our other options looked even more bleak. Of course, the bubble did burst and the VC money we would have used to make up various shortfalls never materialized, but if you want to indict us for being stupid then you should also point your fingers in a lot of other directions because people a lot smarter than we were also bet (and lost) on the same market horse. > Plenty of other CD distributors WERN'T failing and the > CD distribution model is going great guns today. You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. > Do you really think that people would prefer to FTP the distribution > when they can pick up the phone, make an 800 call and have it > next-day shipped to them? And 3/4 of the time they just expense it > to their company so they pay nothing anyway? Now your talking about > FIVE ISO's, think of all the users that have problems getting even > ONE down. Not everyone out here has fast DSL and Cable - in fact > the majority don't. FINE. As I keep saying, put your money where your mouth all too visibly is and do something about it if you think it's so easy to set up this kind of infrastructure and run it properly. Your entire rant is full of half-baked assertions and a buttload of assumptions which are frankly as false as Tammy Faye Bakker's eyelashes. If I were less polite I'd make even more references to the scatological percentage of your various internal organs, but I won't go there. You have already been inflammatory enough in your own posting and, as Paul Vixie likes to say: "your bozo bit is set." > BSDi was run by morons when they bought WC and we know that's not > true. We do? :) - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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