Curt Sampson wrote
> 
> 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.)
>

Taking your estimates it would cost of < $20,000 to get the job
done. This would mean that you have to sell about 200-600 packages
to break even pending on pricing. 

> 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.

There may be a small number of customers which will enquire about a
product for their platform, but the vast majority will not. Hence
your suggestions will not come to fruition. This user group needs a
mouth piece which can voice their needs to the industry. For our
platform this could be the NetBSD Foundation. 

> 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.
> 

AFAIK this is in place already. Just visit the
http://www.netbsd.org/commercial.html ;)


cheerio Berndt
-- 
Name	: Berndt Josef Wulf
E-Mail	: wulf@ping.net.au
Sysinfo	: DEC AXPpci33+, NetBSD-1.2