Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2000 14:10:34 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> To: Michael Bacarella <mbac@nyct.net> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Is FreeBSD dead ? Message-ID: <5726.952812634@zippy.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 11 Mar 2000 13:45:32 EST." <Pine.BSF.4.05.10003111329470.14049-100000@bsd1.nyct.net>
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> Corporations care only for their interests. Their stockholders will be > pissed if they act otherwise. Do you really think there's something wrong > with people who are scrutinizing this move? No, I only feel there's something wrong with those who are both scrutinizing it and jumping to a lot of premature conclusions about it. I expect scrutiny. I don't expect chicken-little running around and yelling about the sky falling. > Your view of this will obviously be different from ours since you actually > discussed this merger with BSDI --- Wait, JUST HOW LONG has this been > going on anyway? You've probably been discussing this for at least more Since around August of last year, and if you think that it would have been prudent for me to discuss something as sensitive (to BSDI) as a potential merger in this mailing list then you're completely off-base. All through our discussions, BSDI was terrified that word would get out prematurely, their customers would hear about it, and sales of BSD/OS would drop to zero as everyone waited to see what the next move was. Which could very well have been nothing. I've been involved in two merger attempts which collapsed just hours before signing (that being when the real issues tend to come up) and we honestly weren't sure there WOULD be a merger until last Friday. BSDI requested our discretion on this until it was done-deal and we understood why. Now that said, we DID have some sensitivity to this taking people by surprise and that's why the entire core team also met with BSDI upper management last October and set some of the framework in place. We also sent out an announcement to everyone in -committers (the ostensible developers of FreeBSD), and that's over 150 people, last year when it looked like this might even be a serious prospect. Just getting BSDI to agree to let us do that was like pulling teeth, the "leak" prospects from over 150 people in-the-know being pretty big. If you think I could have just blythly discussed this in -hackers without shooting the whole deal dead in the process (BSDI would have considered that an irrevokable breach of trust) then there's certainly someone being stupid in this discussion, but it's not me. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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