*BSD News Article 18986


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: BSD/386 Commercial Product
Message-ID: <haley.743896646@husc.harvard.edu>
From: haley@husc10.harvard.edu (Elizabeth Haley)
Date: 28 Jul 93 21:57:26 GMT
References: <1778.2C53F9EF@mechanic.fidonet.org> <23136o$aa6@pdq.coe.montana.edu>   
 <1993Jul27.053721.6646@spcvxb.spc.edu> <1993Jul28.035328.2892@fcom.cc.utah.edu> <1993Jul28.025606.6655@spcvxb.spc.edu>
Nntp-Posting-Host: husc10.harvard.edu
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terry@spcvxb.spc.edu (Terry Kennedy, Operations Mgr.) writes:

>  I'm sure this is very interesting, particularly in a development environ-
>ment. What benefits would these give me in an application development (or
>deployment) environment?

O.K. Say you have a printer you want to sell that uses an interface in
a much different manner than the usual, and therefore requires a new
driver to run at it's best. With most systems, you'd have to convince
the OSes kernel hacker to add in yer code, but with LKM, you'd just
write and include it with compilation and attachment instructions...
Your Net/Free/386bsd customers would think you were a hip dude and buy
more stuff from you...

Or, let's say you are in charge of evaluating board for installation
on other Unix boxes... you could quickyly test the boards on *BSD with
LKM, which would let you know if the boards themselves worked
somewhere, and you could go on from there...

>  But I have already configured my kernel with lp support, even though I don't
>have a parallel printer on it (though I might in the future).

>  Please don't misunderstand - I'm perfectly willing to be convinced. I just
>don't "get it" from the examples you cite. Currently, if I were developing a
>new filesystem, I'd do it on a test machine (probably accompanied by frequent
>crashes 8-) and when I had something solid (or at least Jello-like) I'd plop
>it into a "light duty" production system.

That's the thing though, How many machines do you have? I have 1.

>  I don't. However, don't dismiss BSD/386 just because it's commercial. [This
>is directed at the general audience, not anybody in particular, by the way]

I think they are alright, since they distribute the code. (Do they
distribute all of it?) It is good for people to be able to get
supported products with someone to say "Fix this" to. On the
comp.os.386bsd.* It's about 50% likely that someone saying "This is
broken" will be answered "Fix it then!" (Fortunately many of the
people saying the former can do the latter)

But then again, $1000 is about how much my hardware cost.
--
If you love your fun...
|[{(<=--=>)}]|David Charles Todd, tHE mAN wITH tHREE fIRST nAMES|[{(<=--=>)}]|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||hacksaw@headcheese.daa.uc.edu||||||||||||||||||||||||
                                                                ...Die for it!