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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.ysu.edu!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!agate!reason.cdrom.com!usenet From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.system,comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy Subject: Re: Historic Opportunity facing Free Unix (was Re: The Lai/Baker paper, benchmarks, and the world of free UNIX) Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996 16:30:09 -0700 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 68 Message-ID: <3176D081.794BDF32@FreeBSD.org> References: <NELSON.96Apr15010553@ns.crynwr.com> <4l2fl2$7hk@sidhe.memra.com> <NELSON.96Apr17101252@ns.crynwr.com> <3175DBD4.167EB0E7@FreeBSD.org> <4l5f31$ijv@solaria.cc.gatech.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0b2 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-CURRENT i386) To: Byron A Jeff <byron@cc.gatech.edu> Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.development.system:21888 comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc:732 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:3373 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:3214 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:17786 comp.os.linux.advocacy:46481 Byron A Jeff wrote: > (like over ;-) his core premise is sound. We cannot concede the desktop. Well, I've read the rest of your posting and all I can really say in general response to this is that some people, yourself plainly among them, do not see a future in which UNIX has ceded the desktop as a very pleasant one. I can understand this, believe me. I don't care for Microsoft's domination of that market any more than the next man, and I also happen to HATE Windows' interface. But please, do at least give me some reasonable degree of credit for the experience I've gained in working on FreeBSD these last 3 years and in the free software world in general for quite some time before that. If one fact stands out more clearly than any other, it's that we've got extremely limited resources to work with. Even the Linux camp, with its large and enthusiastic user community (coupled with the likes of Caldera licensing Looking Glass from Visix and adding Novell interoperability), is on a comparatively shoe-string budget. That's why I react so strongly when I see these various posts saying "hey, all we have to do is sit down and IMPLEMENT a THIS and a THAT and before you know it we'll have Bill down on his knees, begging for mercy." It makes me fairly want to scream "WHO?! Just WHO is going to do this? YOU? Can you spend 50 hours a week on it? For a minimum of 12 weeks? Will you MANAGE it?" [by "you" I also don't mean you, Jeff, I simply mean the generic "you" who always seems to volunteer for the most work but never actually shows up on the appointed day. :-) It would be lovely if a Windows-beating desktop suddenly appeared, believe me (and Caldera really doesn't count since all they did was license a commercial product which the free software world can't HAVE), but all I'm saying is that I'm long past holding my breath for one. If we had it and If it looked like it might actually hold a chance against the Microsoft juggernaut and If it looked like it could survive even in the face of some move by Microsoft to, say, simply start giving Windows away for free with every PC, then I might well be jumping up and down with you guys yelling "ding, dong, the witch is dead!" But faced with a serious lack of resources (on either side of the OS fence) and very little in the way of people truly committed to writing things like Looking Glass desktops for free, I'm going to focus on the network since that IS where people seem to be putting lots of effort (Apache et al). Look, perhaps it's time for all the desktop adherants here to simply prove me wrong (or right). Form an OS-independant (so as to attract the greatest number of bodies) subproject *right now* who's stated goal is to take on Microsoft head-on in the desktop arena. Find someone who'll be a strong and steady manager, tirelessly whipping up the troops (with a balanced hand, of course) every time their enthusiasm for the task flags a little and making the hard decisions about which sub-tasks get which development priorities. Get a web page up describing the project's goals and, as progress is made, sample screenshots of the environment you're putting together. Make periodic annoucements and put stuff up for anonymous FTP. Above all, DO NOT STOP FOR A MOMENT until you're essentially done and ready to field the completed project. Anything less will simply give Microsoft time to dash ahead and move the goalposts on you, or will cause attendance to fall off as all the developers conclude that this is just another well-intentioned but sadly doomed vaporware project. In other words, let's stop talking about it and see the desktop devotees actually DO IT. If you can't galvanize that kind of energy behind such a project and see it through to the bitter end, however that might go, then this conversation is entirely moot anyway! -- - Jordan Hubbard President, FreeBSD Project