On Sat, 9 Nov 1996, Berndt Josef Wulf wrote:

> The problem I see here is that a request from an individual user will 
> not have a great chance of changing developers attitudes toward supporting
> a new platform. However chances of success would be drastically
> improved if lobbied by the netbsd.org management. So how about that?!

Speaking as someone who makes product decisions for a company, I
can't see how being lobbied by the NetBSD Foundation, or the core
team, or anybody but potential customers would help much, if at
all. After all, in the end you have to sell enough copies for a
new platform to pay for the porting costs and make at least a small
profit. Those costs may not be huge for NetBSD, but they're still
there.  (After all, at a minimum you need to add a bunch of drive
space to an existing machine and dedicate some staff time to
this--probably a good week for the initial port, and a day or two
with every update thereafter.)

When I'm considering a product, the thing I most want to see is
actual orders from customers. The next best thing would a lot of
potential customers saying that if the product existed, they would
buy it. (Sadly, in my experience, there are more people out there
who will say they will buy a product than will actually cough up
the cash when you plunk the product down in front of them.) Requests
from people who are not going to be buying the product (such as
the NetBSD Foundation, very likely) carry little weight.

The NetBSD Foundation could, however, provide encouragement in
other ways, such as by setting up a web page listing commerical
products for NetBSD, and linking to the appropriate page for the
company that manufactures each one.

cjs

Curt Sampson    cjs@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
Internet Portal Services, Inc.	
Vancouver, BC   (604) 257-9400		De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.