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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!paladin.american.edu!gatech!news.mathworks.com!tank.news.pipex.net!pipex!oleane!jussieu.fr!math.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!lll-winken.llnl.gov!fnnews.fnal.gov!unixhub!news.Stanford.EDU!andrsn.stanford.edu!andrsn From: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Look, this is depressing! I'm outta here, folks! Date: Thu, 27 Jun 1996 23:33:50 -0700 Organization: Stanford University Lines: 72 Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960627230821.1988D-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu> References: <31C6A7A0.7DE14518@FreeBSD.org> <4qan42$g3@anorak.coverform.lan> <4qt4jm$dkd@symiserver2.symantec.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: andrsn.stanford.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII In-Reply-To: <4qt4jm$dkd@symiserver2.symantec.com> On 27 Jun 1996 tedm@agora.rdrop.com wrote: > In <4qan42$g3@anorak.coverform.lan>, brian@awfulhak.demon.co.uk (Brian Somers) writes: > >Jordan K. Hubbard (jkh@FreeBSD.org) wrote: > >: I'm going to stop reading USENET again, I think. It does bad things for > >: my blood pressure. Sorry, folks.. > > > > [some deleted] > > [more deleted] Ted Mittelstaed wrote: > > What we are starting to see is the inevitable result of success in the computer > industry. If you look at the history of PC's it always starts out with a small > dedicated group of hackers who really only care about the hardware/software > project, and do great things with it. Then, the project gets really good, and > more and more people climb on board. > > Eventually, all the dedicated people in the industry that would be interested > in the project are involved in some way or other, and more and more people > who aren't really dedicated start climbing on board, wanting to take advantage > of the fruits of the labor of the dedicated people. > [more deleted] > Now, in the past the usual result of this is that eventually the project gets taken > commercial. This is already happening with Linux, for example, it also happened > with the original SYSV and BSD source code. The many people that > want to climb on board and take advantage of a good thing expect that, > of course. > > The problem in this instance is that the FreeBSD core team is completely > uninterested in taking the project commercial, at least so far they have > shown that they are. The folks that are climbing on board and wanting to take > advantage of the fruits of the FreeBSD group's labor cannot understand this. > These people are used to dealing with a commercial organization where they > can call them up and threaten to "take my business elsewhere" to get the > organization to fix a bug, etc. It's possible to commercialize the support independently of the operating system itself. Walnut Creek, or the FreeBSD project itself, could offer contracts for some kind of retainer plus hourly fee, and have a list of people long enough that someone would surely be available to handle a problem. Most of this can be done by remote log-in. Then large organizations that need "instant" help could be ensured of getting it, and the responsible computer managers would feel more comfortable adopting FreeBSD knowing that they were not depending for help entirely on the kindness of strangers. > I think what we are seeing in the FreeBSD newsgroups is a lot of people who > see something really cool, figure out some way to get it dragged into their > commercial place of business, and then after the newness has worn off are > starting to look at it like a commercial product, in other words if they > have a problem rather than spending their valuable time on figuring it > out they attempt to leverage everyone else's time to do so. They might be willing to pay for someone else's valuable time--it may not just be a cynical attempt to leverage. > Speaking from experience, good software documentation is very difficult to get > written. This is because of two reasons, first there are few people that can do > it properly, and second because it takes a lot of time to do it right. Sure does. Annelise