In message <199909271559.LAA10427@ghost.whirlpool.com>, Andrew Gillham writes:
>I wouldn't want any of my hard-earned cash going to BSDI/FreeBSD/OpenBSD
>if I had signed up for a "NetBSD sponsored" credit card.

>How many people would be willing to sign up for a credit card where
>50% went to NetBSD and 50% to Micro$oft? (or any to M$ for that matter)

I might.

What if MS users were signing up too?

I'd rather have MS get ten cents for every NetBSD user, and TNF get ten cents
for every MS user, than have no such deal; it's better for us than it is for
them.  ;-)

>Sure, NetBSD would benefit, but at what cost? :-)

I would argue, "no cost".

>Please explain how FreeBSD is "to a large degree" keeping NetBSD alive?
>Is this some sort of private information that the "unwashed masses" of
>NetBSD users doesn't have access to, or is this smoke?

Well, I do know we get users from them occasionally (especially non-i386
users; I've got a friend nearly convinced to just give up and migrate
his alpha over).  We also certainly *COULD* steal code if we wanted to, and
I think we should; their CAM system is, by all accounts, one of the nicer
SCSI interfaces out there, and it has support for a large variety of
controllers we currently can't support.

The only problem is an infestation of programmers who say "NIH!".

-s