Coffee Brewing at the NetBSD Foundation

[Tyarko Leander Rodney <youcanpoint%me.com@localhost>]

Subject: Coffee Brewing at the NetBSD Foundation
Good morning, 

No introduction, let's jump right in:


Elevator Pitch: NetBSD. The first Operating System to natively support the Internet of Things.


I first thought it might be a rather stupid idea, but in fact it does not seem to be at all!
I posted some portion of my idea as a joke in the freenode #netbsd chatroom, but I do not consider it as a joke anymore.
It arose from one of my thoughts on how to improve the NetBSD slogan. Nobody (in my opinion) asks the question: "Can it run NetBSD?" I never had the chance to tell somebody "of course it runs NetBSD", because to most people, that just isn't the question they're asking when it comes to the supposed quality (Marketing) of an operating system, despite of what they are using it for.

If the NetBSD Foundation says: "Well we do not want to approach anybody not being able to ask the question in order to understand the slogan", than that's fine.
But may I point to http://www.netbsd.org/donations/#how-to-donate and add the fact, that the entire /donation/ directory is disallowed in the robots.txt (<clear text>You can't figure out how much donations the NetBSD Foundation received in the past, or at least not it's evolution. You'd have to ask it and it might be lying (figuratively)… no web crawler...</clear text> ). I do not know the reason for the dissallowance, but I asked many, diverse people who donate alot but have no interest in understanding computer technology in-depth. They considered this "missing transparency" to be evidence of "something being fishy", thus not thinking about a donation at all, despite the fact that "fishiness" seemed to be a misconception.

Coffee or Tea?
I figured rather lately, that the WorldWideWeb Consortium extended the HTCPCP (Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol) to HTCPCP-TEA (Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol for Tea Efflux Appliances), which essentially now enables to brew… tea… Peppermint, Darjeeling and Earl-Grey as proposal.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7168

I observe an existing conflict in society between the promotion of love for organic materials and the promotion of efficient non-organic materials. The main Internet User-Base (I'd describe it as geeky, not nerdy, interested but passive in understanding) seems to have a strong connection to all the organic materials (stereotypically a "Geek"). Take Dropbox, Stumbleupon, Twitter, etc. They appear organic in appeal! It starts to be embedded into culture. Starbucks since the beginning of the supposed "movement", and even Mc'Donalds started to use "Organic" as an Identity (Take the change in company colors: Red to Green).

The extension by the WWWC solved the entire conflict (at least for me)!


A Foundation's Roadmap to Success || A Foundation of Successful Road-mapping:

1. Buy a coffee machine (or do a venture with a coffee machine vendor, which seems bogus till 11.)
2. Remove the Controller Board
3. Buy a Raspberry Pi/Beagle Board/Whatever board you may desire (+ eventual additional interface extension board)
4. Reverse Engineer the Sensors, Relays and  signal paths (+many more…)  of all necessary components to reconstruct the observed coffee brewing sequences originating from the original controller board
5. Install NetBSD onto the Raspberry Pi/BeagleBoard/etc.
6. Design and Implement Quick-n-Dirty Protocol to generate Coffee Brewing Sequences and to communicate with the coffee machines electrical components
7. Apply the Protocol to the observed coffee brewing sequences originating from the original controller board
8. Implement the HTCPCP and its TEA extension
9. Design a HTCPCP - HTTP scheme in order to send the commands via Port 80/443 without requiring too much authentication stuff (rather use the intended options of authentication provided by HTTP)
10. Connect a webcam and link a Capture-CGI to HTTP
11. Set up a fundraiser
12. Everybody donating will receive an unique authentication token as a "Thank You" with whom he can access the HTCPCP-TEA Implementation via HTTP and send a "BREW" request (the amount of "BREW"s depends on the donation amount). The webcam (which should also partially point at an active developer's workplace) tells him wether his BREW request can be accepted by a NetBSD developer/active contributor (If he is there or not). The donator decides on wether it's tea or coffee (hot water->heat->pour; hot water, beans->crunch beans->heat->pour), since the machine can only be accessed via HTCPCP and an authentication token. Still, it should be considered rude to decline the coffee/tea… The developer/active contributor might smile into the webcam and give a thumbs up. These snapshots could be collected in a Gallery accessible via netbsd.org: "# coffees/teas served. Thank you!"


Why all this?
To make larger masses appeal to the NetBSD Foundation, since its operating system would have "native support", for what many "unaware" consumers consider to be the "future": The Internet of Things! It can brew coffee! Therefore the slogan could be switched during the fundraiser to: "NetBSD. It even brews coffee." (No sense makes more sense) Facebook here, Twitter there, some Vine-ing here, some Reddit there, YouTube here, Wired.com there, TED Talk by some early NetBSD developer about:"How coffee brewing brings freedom." there, 5 Minutes FOX News Fame here (FreeBSD does not need a slogan to promote… FREEbsd + they have the Sony PlayStation "Geeks", which turn out to be MILLIONS, in order to, at least, be heard)… 

EVEN IF you consider it to be a fatal flop:
It is impossible to know, how many people are generally interested into whatever one considers appealing about NetBSD, so all Internet/Media/Other Channel Users must be considered (we also do not know who the Internet User is, so it might be 90% not interested/10% interested or 10% n.i/90% i.). Even if we calculated with a 0.01% cut-out out of all Internet users, which then donate only 1 dollar (which would be cheaper than a regular coffee nowadays), it should be no problem raising 60000$ in a year, which seems to be impossible at the moment...  

But it should happen rather quick. Most of the larger corporations are starting to use "The Internet of Things" as Self-Promotion, which makes it impossible to "stir up the masses" afterwards

And please: Try to be objective about the goal of finally being able to raise money with no effort. Most users at Wikipedia (I am an active contributor) are quite disoriented, since most discussions about articles end in a self-centered, subjective dispute that, in the end, alters the article ("1 month, till you read it: my opinion as the article; 1 month, till I read it: your opinion as the article"). It is an encyclopedia, which should be nothing but unambigious and objective. So I expect this background radiation to be existent throughout the NetBSD community as well. But, since I pointed out, that we all are humans and make mistakes: Let us focus on the objective: Keeping NetBSD alive and letting it grow at whatever pace it may choose. It deserves it.
Apple, Dell, Blackberry and many more: They all use NetBSD Foundation's software in commercial products, that generate profit. How come the foundation is "struggling"… financially?

If my perspective on that matter is wrong: Please, someone bugfix the donation site then and correct me! The Donation Progress Bar seems to be stuck… 

I think it's a little more than just: "Lets hack a coffee machine, and ignore everything else", as you probably figured by the length of my mail, but it is doable!

Thank you, for reading. This thought probably contributes to my already existing insomnia, so:

Good morning again and enjoy your weekend.

T.L. Rodney a.k.a. emdeelf

PS:
If anybody, working at Oracle, is reading this: YOU HAVE NOT READ THIS! This idea is NetBSDish…
If there is nobody interested at NetBSD: I am going to give it to Oracle, even if they do not need donations and they don't! <evillaughter>Muhahaha</evillaughter> So be nice.