> -----Original Message----- > From: Andrew L. Gould [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Friday, February 11, 2005 12:34 AM > To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org > Cc: Ted Mittelstaedt > Subject: Re: Please don't change Beastie to another crap logo > suchasNetBSD!!! >
> > Explain how this has nothing to do with money, please? > > > > Ted > > I thought it referred to FreeBSD driver support in retail products. > Sure, it means the companies will get more of my money because there > would be more compatible hardware that's easy to identify. It > does not > necessarily equate to money for FreeBSD developers, however. > I never said it did. But quite obviously if FreeBSD usage expands, the developers skills become more valuable, they are worth more, can command more money, you know the rest. However, I will say that I don't think the developers in favor of this are looking at that. I do think though that the ones in favor have had pressure from companies to dump beastie - not perhaps direct pressure, but indirect pressure. And so far the strongest reasons cited by the developers in favor of this have been because corporate groups have made an issue about Beastie. Why do these developers care what some corporate group thinks if money has nothing to do with it? This gets into the question of just who are we creating FreeBSD for - ourselves and other users of FreeBSD - or the rest of the world who isn't using FreeBSD, and our goal is to go try pushing it. FreeBSD's strength has always been precisely because the people creating and contributing and using it have not been interested in writing it how someone else wants it, but have been interested in writing it how THEY themeselves want it. What happens is developers and the users that help them in the development process (beta testing, user feedback, etc.) are only concerned with their own problems and so they spend all their time perfecting the software to fix their problems. Because of this focusing, the code really can become very close to perfection and ends up solving that problem very, very well. Then what happens is the rest of the world sees how good it works and starts thinking about ways that they can modify their own environment to take advantage of the FreeBSD way of doing things. Novell in it's heyday had a phrase for this: "Think Red" What this meant was that Novell understood one of the truisms in software: you can either do a few things very good, or a lot of things rather poorly. When Novell lost sight of this was when they came out with Netware 4, which was an attempt to satisfy a bunch of large customers. Instead of writing Netware to be even better at what it was doing, they tried to make it a kitchen sink that would fix everything for everybody. Since the result didn't fix anything for anybody well enough for production use, the large customers never materialized, and the smaller customers decided they had had enough of this shit, and all went to Microsoft. Ted _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
