Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2003 19:35:50 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: "Gary W. Swearingen" <swear@attbi.com> Cc: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr>, chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: GCC as a selling point for FreeBSD? (Not!) Message-ID: <3E2CC016.54BDBA5F@mindspring.com> References: <sj65sjr67h.5sj@localhost.localdomain> <20030120141556.E1857@papagena.rockefeller.edu> <20030120160000.F1857@papagena.rockefeller.edu> <hvadhvp7xi.dhv@localhost.localdomain>
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"Gary W. Swearingen" wrote: > Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> writes: > > Strange. Are you thinking of Matt Dillon? Though I see no > > resemblance: he doesn't troll lists about the GPL and has in fact made > > contributions to linux in the past. > > Nope, not Matt; I knew he's done a lot of work on it lately. It was a > fairly strong memory, but it appears I dreamed it up; I find nothing > by googling -chat and -questions for the last couple years I've been > a FreeBSD user. Sorry. I've found that Google loses a lot of its relevent indexing, and has recently cut back on a lot of things that it used to index, but (apparently, from the search results) no longer does. It's quality has decliend significantly, since they started charging for placement (IMO). I believe the person you are thinking of is actually John Dyson; John Dyson is vehemently anti-GPL, and he was FreeBSD's VM guru for a very long time. It took Matt more than a little a while to grow into that role. John did the initial unified VM and buffer cache architecture, and contributed in other areas of FreeBSD. He left the project for personal and medical reasons, both. In any case, I believe Brett Glass has contributed considerably to the FreeBSD project. His letters to editors, as well as his written columns, have contributed significantly, IMO, to the visibility of FreeBSD, and, I would argue, are one of the reasons that FreeBSD is not in the same position as NetBSD, marketwise. A marketing perspective is needed; good code, good product, "a better mouse trap", etc., are all nice, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not you get market share. That said, a lot of what he wants is unreasonable, in the context of the project, as it sits. For him to effect his idea of the right approach, he would have to effect the systems that have grown up around the FreeBSD project itself, so as to result in different emergent properties. This is unlikely in the extreme: the systems are hair-trigger and defensive. That's why I recommended to him that he start a separate project to get TenDRA (or Princeton, or whatever) "ready for prime time", rather than trying to make it part of the maintenance responsibility of the FreeBSD project, itself. You goal begets your communications begets your systems begets your legal begets your product. The systems of the FreeBSD project are effective, and they are effective in some ways because they ignore Brett's advice. It's often hard from someone to move from communications, down the line towards the production of the product. FreeBSD is all about the emergent properties of the established systems, and not about doing any self-examination which might end up in changed to those systems. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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