thus Juan RP spake:
> On Sun, 03 Sep 2006 11:31:26 +0200
> Timo Schoeler <timo.schoeler@riscworks.net> wrote:
> 
>> wrt Charles M. Hannums email, the awakening it caused by shattering the 
>> NetBSD developers universe, and the discussion about blobs, i'd like to 
>> draw some conclucsions.
>>
>> i) in stanza three in 'About the NetBSD Project' there's stated 'One of 
>> the primary focuses of the NetBSD project has been to make the base OS 
>> extremely portable.' [0].
>>
>> due to the acceptance of blobs (there's no opinion on the majority of 
>> developers on this, some developers like to use blobs if it suits their 
>> needs, and a few deny them completely) this is no longer true. either 
>> it's no longer a 'primary goal' or a lie that's spoken out deliberately.
>>
>> both is not acceptable, at least if one (as an individuum or a project) 
>> uses to have ideals and, if necessary, 'fight' for them.
>>
>> it is very important wrt to blobs to be aware of the preferences of the 
>> project as developer, user or afficinado. as it's in the state between 
>> not quite told and half-official that NetBSD /will/ use blobs, NetBSD no 
>> longer is acceptable for people that really do open source. Linux e.g. 
>> is also no choice (besides multiple technical, philosophical and other 
>> problems), because it uses blobs.
>>
>> open source inherits (among other things) equality. this is no longer 
>> given; furthermore, open source can be seen as one way out of slavery 
>> (that's what most really mean if they state 'hey, turning away now means 
>> Bill Gates wins!'), but this means to escape from hardware vendors' 
>> slavery. there are vendors giving away good documentation of their 
>> products, those are the ones to deal with. not the ones delivierung 
>> black box blobs and equal hardware that only runs on x86.
>>
>> that is why NetBSDs 'One of the primary focuses of the NetBSD project 
>> has been to make the base OS extremely portable.' no longer is true.
>>
>> TNF behaves like a vegetarian eating burgers, shouting 'hey, look, i'm a 
>> vegetarian!'.
>>
>> ii) the discussion with and among developers shed a clearing light, or 
>> enlightenment wrt the situation of the project. acceptance of 
>> non-BSD-licensed code in the base system seems to be the way to go for 
>> NetBSD. lack of leadership seems to be the way to go. lack of 
>> organization seems to be the way to go (how many port maintainers are 
>> not contactable? one? six? a dozen?).
>>
>> iii) entanglement between TNF/TNP and commercial companies in a very 
>> double-edged manner. there were cases were employees of this company 
>> mailed back that the PR that was just filed is fixed in their internal 
>> branch/fork, without the will to fix it for the public -- even if it was 
>> just a five line patch. the main thing was to tell everybody that they 
>> don't suffer from this bug. very childish.
>>
>> so consequences are, as there's no solution in the near future to most 
>> or all of the problems that exist neither the demonstration of will to 
>> change this, to have a look at both the personal or corporate 'moral' or 
>> 'moral obligation' or ideals wrt open source and NetBSDs goals -- and 
>> what survives in reality.
>>
>> personally, i came to the conclusion that there's (a huge) imbalance. 
>> after a conference on this weekend we decided to drop NetBSD for 
>> internal use, external (customer) use and development. starting monday 
>> we will migrate a few dozen customers away from NetBSD (most of them 
>> running servers, and a few early appliances). our internal services 
>> moved to other major BSDs or commercial UNIX months ago (as if it was 
>> clear that something like this supernova happens and shows the status of 
>> NetBSD). our soon to be released appliances, which were luckily 
>> developed on two different BSDs, one of them being NetBSD, won't be 
>> shipping based on NetBSD.
> 
> And who cares about all you said? because I don't care.

and who cares about your email? i don't care.

> NetBSD developers will continue improving the system with or without
> "gurus" and with or without blobs.
> 
>> i'm a vegetarian, i don't eat burgers. it's as simple as that.
> 
> Good for you, but I'm not vegetarian.

is there the possibility that consuming too many corpses causes 
blindness for analogies? :)