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Message-ID: <19981210132249.S315@acheron.middleboro.ma.us>
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1998 13:22:49 -0500
From: Mason Loring Bliss <mason@acheron.middleboro.ma.us>
To: Herb Peyerl <hpeyerl@beer.org>, "Chris G. Demetriou" <cgd@netbsd.org>
Cc: netbsd-advocacy@netbsd.org
Subject: Re: Something I noticed on the Yahoo site
References: <199812101548.IAA26642@beer.org>
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In-Reply-To: <199812101548.IAA26642@beer.org>; from Herb Peyerl on Thu, Dec 10, 1998 at 08:48:46AM -0700

On Thu, Dec 10, 1998 at 08:48:46AM -0700, Herb Peyerl wrote:

> CD sales, but when you have nothing to sell, it doesn't make sense for
> me to spend my own money to setup a booth just so Mason can get a warm
> fuzzy when he goes to the vendor booths.

While I would, indeed, have felt warm and fuzzy if I'd been able to hang
out at a NetBSD booth, that's really not the point. I already run NetBSD
on multiple systems at home, and I've convinced my employers to use NetBSD
for our "mission-critical" server systems. I've "preached the word" locally,
and set up two friends with NetBSD systems. I've got two more friends and
co-workers who will be installing NetBSD within the next few weeks for their
own use. With any luck, at least one of these folks will like NetBSD enough
to get someone else to install it.

So, a booth would really be more valuable for getting *new* folks interested.
*New* folks did have the OpenBSD booth to visit, however. I guess the
financial juggernaut that is OpenBSD simply has more resources than us.
Despite my personal feelings about the project, they certainly do seem to
exhibit more enthusiasm.

> So why don't I just press some more CD's so we can sell them?  I should
> spend all the time and money pressing another 500 1.3.2 CD's just so 400
> of them can be thrown away next week when 1.3.3 is released?

That would be fairly silly, I agree. Far more sparing of resources would be
a NetBSD system set up in the booth, with a CD burner attached, turning out
CDs on the fly. This would allow for some nice flexibility with regard to
what's on each CD, assuming some "best guess" images were set up in advance.

I don't own this hardware or have access to it for loan, by way of fore-
stalling the "hey, why didn't you show up with that stuff and do it"
argument.

Anyway, my personal goal is to get my coding up to snuff, so that I can
submit stuff to the project and have it used. The one thing I've submitted
so far has essentially been ignored, which makes me hesitate to submit
further work. (PR 6290) Even if my code isn't used, I'd love to know
why, and perhaps what I should do in future to go about submitting things
to the project. I'd also be willing and interested in learning enough about
CVS to be able to process bug fixes that people send in via PRs, whether
that involves doing it based on my own judgement or working with other
folks to take obvious or likely-looking fixes and commit them.

The impression I take away from all this is "Nah, we don't need you." If
this isn't the case, please enlighten me.

-- 
Mason Loring Bliss..mason@acheron.middleboro.ma.us...acheron.ddns.org/mason
"In the drowsy dark cave of the mind dreams build their nest with fragments
  dropped from day's caravan."--Rabindranath Tagore..awake ? sleep : dream;