On Tue, Oct 27, 1998 at 11:00:11AM -0500, Dennis wrote:
> <...>
> 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. 

These types of arguments are exactly the reasons it makes sense to
support NetBSD, and the 'power-user' platforms, powerPC, Alpha...

> Even if we did supply source, you wouldnt pay my prices, so you'd still use

Who's "you"? You're speaking to a pretty wide-ranging audience here.
Why are you (Dennis) assuming someone wouldn't pay your prices?
You seem to be stating that you don't think that supplying source would
influence anyone to buy your card, "you'd still use the cheaper card
anyway", if you really believe that, I think you don't understand the
motivations we have, at a pretty basic level...

Iomega's relucance to release details for their parallel port devices
comes to mind, I bet every i386 Linux user would have an Iomega tape
drive on their machine, if they could be used. That's thousands of
sales for Iomega, lost.

> 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?

Why is 'source' inherently 'low-end'?

> >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. 

We are doing many things, Universally. (double-pun intended!)

> 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.

Au contrare. It's much easier to buy a card there is support for than to
reinstall to a different OS. Especially in a production environment. Again
here you're (Dennis) saying "you don't", but I don't know who the "you" is.
Also, I don't see how anything like the statement you (Dennis) follows
"clearly" from the discussions here. We (developers, and The NetBSD 
Foundation. (I'll loosely call myself one of the former :-) ) need to 
decide what benefit there is to NetBSD by helping support your wares, 
and how much, and what sort of work is involved for us. To do this, we
need to understand what it is you are selling, hardware, software,
or "solution".

-- 
David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net --> Mastery of UNIX, like
mastery of language, offers real freedom. The price of freedom is always dear,
but there's no substitute. Personally, I'd rather pay for my freedom than live
in a bitmapped, pop-up-happy dungeon like NT. - Thomas Scoville