At 08:13 PM 10/26/98 -0500, you wrote:
>
>> Its chatter like this that drives vendors away from "Free" unices, you
know. 
>> Its the driver that makes the card, not the other way around.
>
>Sigh.  Dennis, I've heard about your cards for a long time.  Vixie
>Enterprises actually considered putting it into a product, but decided
>not to because of the driver issue.  Instead, we wrote and contributed
>the SDL driver.
>
>Vixie Enterprises needed to be running a specific kernel with our own
>modifications, and we couldn't have that be the kernel for which you
>offered support.  So we didn't even call you, because porting to the
>SDL board was easier.
>
>I'm not trying to beat you up about this - it's your software and your
>decision - but I don't see where your historical strategy has ever had
>much hope of success in the NetBSD market.  NetBSD users are
>interested in software that they can make work the way they want it -
>they don't expect the vendor to dictate what software they will run.
>If you want to be in this marketplace, you have to answer to that
>need.  It may be that the best choice for you is to just stay out of
>this market, much as we NetBSD users would prefer otherwise.

No, but you are demonstrating your lack of understanding, as are most
of the other people in this camp. Any company that tries to make every sale
to every potential customer regardless of their requirements doesnt have
a marketing plan worth implementing. If you can do without frame relay, 
bandwidth management, dont need higher density or load balancing or
a more powerful user interface, then you aren't a candidate to use our
product. We move on to the next customer. 

Even if we did supply source, you wouldnt pay my prices, so you'd still use
the inferior product. It comes down to whether or not we want to sell shopping
cards to winos and we dont...because they just steal them from the
supermarkets
anyway. We dont sell bare-bones products.

If we do sell a "low-end, source" product, we'll do it for Linux, because
the market
is 50X greater. Why deal with a piddly market like NetBSD at all?

>
>I just want to point out that this is not a function of "chatter like
>this" from NetBSD people.  We're not wrong.  We're addressing our own
>needs.  If your needs don't coincide with ours, and we can't find some
>common ground, then let us part as friends and wish each other well,
>rather than venting frustration over the fact that each others' needs
>are not what we would like them to be.

No, you are not wrong, but you are not doing much to expand your user base, 
because customers that need our products will simply switch to FreeBSD.
Most of our customer base are BSD/OS and NetBSD convertees. 

If your needs are basic products with source, then you have answered my 
question about porting to NetBSD. Clearly you dont
*need* what we have to offer, so we'll focus our efforts elsewhere. Its much
easier for use to support 1 or 2 O/Ss and convert people then it is to support
more.

Dennis