At 02:35 PM 10/27/98 -0500, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
>On Tue, Oct 27, 1998 at 12:48:02PM -0500, Dennis wrote:
>> At 11:49 AM 10/27/98 -0500, you wrote:
>> To paraphrase your own words back:
>> 
>> >No, but you are demonstrating your lack of understanding, as are most of
>> >the other people in your vendor camp.  Any OS that tries to make
>> >everyone use it regardless of their requirements doesn't have a
>> >marketing plan worth implementing.  If you can do without a complete;
>> >extremely portable; highly interoperable; well designed, stable, and
>> >fast; freely available and redistributable; highly standards compliant;
>> >UNIX-like operating system then you aren't a candidate to use our
>> >product. 
>> 
>> But they can, because they can use FreeBSD, which fits your
>> description, at least in the i386 world which is all that matters to us.
>> 
>> >> Most of our customer base are BSD/OS and NetBSD convertees. 
>> >
>> >That's odd.  One of the products I know that incorporates support for
>> >your products is based on BSD/OS and you seem to continue to advertise
>> >BSD/OS compatability on your web page....  Why yould you support BSD/OS
>> >and then try to convince BSD/OS users to use FreeBSD?
>> 
>> Because we are not supporting BSD/OS 4.0 and beyond.. Most of the
convertees
>> converted because they saw no reason to pay for BSDI when they could get 
>> the same functionality with FreeBSD. Not our doing, but a natural
migration.
>> 
>> Clearly your words indicate that you are not interested in having a widely 
>> popular OS, which certainly is a major criteria for a vendor.
>
>Now, that's kind of obnoxious.  I mean, "clearly your words indicate that you
>are not interested in having widely popluar hardware, which certainly is a
>major criterion for an operating system project trying to come to an
>understanding of some type with you, a hardware vendor."

his words were "if you dont buy into our philosophy we dont want you", which
seems pretty clear to me. We are not *just* a hardware vendor, so that
is accurate. Selling hardware at almost no profit is only profitable if you
are selling many thousands of units a month (ie adaptec, intel, dec, etc)
which we will not be doing nor do we want to do.

db