[ On Monday, October 29, 2001 at 15:55:18 (+0900), Matt Doughty wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Embedded NetBSD? [was Re: CVS commit: basesrc]
>
> Well, in alot of cases coporate policy may prevent the developement 
> department from choosing what platform they want to work on.

Those are exactly the kinds of cases where the sanity of the shop's
management needs to be questioned.  Clearly they do not have the best
interests of their workers and their own purpose in mind.

>  I have
> worked at a number of shops where individual departments can't choose
> their workstation OS. Are you really going to deprive these groups locked
> out of *BSD usage because of issues they may have no control over?

Nobody says you have to give up your desktop workstation just to be able
to do development hosted on any *BSD platform.  I know lots of people
who, depsite my contrary advice, still use M$-based workstations to
connect to their *BSD and even Linux servers.

> What was the principle again exactly. Oh I see, I don't like there OS so I want
> punish them for trying to use NetBSD.  

That's B.S.  You're not "punishing" some lame-brained antiquated OS for
not being able to easily and directly host development of a more modern
and more capable system.

> And if you would just let them in the door to look around, they might just
> realize the potential of NetBSD as developement, and make the move to NetBSD
> as developement platform.  You have to look at price of entry, and realize
> that requiring a shop to change OSes to use something is a price that most
> executives will not be willing to sign off on, and honestly they shouldn't
> have to.

Well if you want to talk about price of entry then you have to also look
at total cost of ownership.  Obviously anything that requires a modern
M$ OS and related proprietary tools for hosting development will have a
higher overall cost of ownership.  In this case you don't even need
_any_ other tools to host development of a NetBSD-based embedded system
on a NetBSD host development system!

> There really isn't a good reason to prevent people from gradually
> switching developement platforms. Isn't it exactly this kind of attempt to
> force people to use their OS in order to use their SDKs that M$ is often
> ridiculed for? Think about.

No, it's absolutely not the same thing.  Your argument is F.U.D.  NetBSD
embedded systems development could be hosted on any other semi-modern
Unix based system (eg. Linux, Solaris, MacOS-X, etc., etc., etc.).

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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