Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 13:27:25 +0100 From: Ladavac Marino <mladavac@metropolitan.at> To: 'Emmanuel DELOGET' <pixel@DotCom.FR>, chuckr@mat.net Cc: jkh@zippy.cdrom.com, toasty@home.dragondata.com, hasty@rah.star-gate.com, dm@globalserve.net, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: NFS - Will it ever be fixed? Message-ID: <97A8CA5BF490D211A94F0000F6C2E55D09756B@s-lmh-wi-900.corpnet.at>
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Emmanuel DELOGET [SMTP:pixel@DotCom.FR]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 1999 12:40 PM
> To: chuckr@mat.net
> Cc: jkh@zippy.cdrom.com; toasty@home.dragondata.com;
> hasty@rah.star-gate.com; dm@globalserve.net; hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
> Subject: Re: NFS - Will it ever be fixed?
>
> Hey... I think I'm dreaming. You'd pay to have this NFS stuff
> fixed ?!?!!? I don't think this fits very well with the spirit
> of a free OS. Perhaps I'm wrong, but, if you pay someone (even
> McKusick) to do this work, you may enter in a new land, where
> committers would want to be paid to fix up little things. This
> is crazy. Perhaps we'll have a 'letter to FreeBSD hobbyists' in
> some days that woul say :
[ML] Please, take off those pink colored glasses--that's better
now.
> "Some poeple spend hard time to work on this really great
> piece of software. These poeple cannot work for nothing,
> that's why you must buy FreeBSD. If you do not pay FreeBSD,
> you just steal hours of hard and expensive work."
[ML] This does not apply to FreeBSD, but it does apply to any
piece of software that is being sold as such.
The reason why this does not apply to FreeBSD is at least
twofold: there are two major sources of new development for a system
that is as freely given away as FreeBSD--academia, and individuals who
are hoping to improve their market position as consultants or add-on
software vendors by having a stable platform to build upon.
You will notice that the people from academia are usually
full-time paid by taxpayer money, and are required by law to release
their work to general public. This is the source of new development,
because research is extremely high-skilled labor intensive and hence
expensive. However, it is somewhat illusory to expect that someone on
academic payroll will be allowed to work on snow from yesteryear (well,
previous decade is more like it) such as NFS fixes. If you can get your
Minister of Science and Education to fund such a project, then you have
way better connections than I do to mine.
This is where the interested individuals come into picture:
they are willing to invest time and money (well, both are equivalent,
time being money) in order to fix things that either they find
personally interesting or are likely to generate more revenue than the
amount invested.
Now, NFS has some pretty impressive dragons in hiding, and it
takes some time to expunge them all, even for a highly skilled dragon
slayer--and a person needs to pay the bills in the meantime, not to
mention eat. Then, there come the material costs for machine farm
needed for testing (it does not really help if FreeBSD-to-FreeBSD NFS is
absolutely stable while at the same time FreeBSD-to-<OS-of-your-choice>
doesn't work at all--agreed, not likely but still possible outcome). I
cannot speak for the others, but I personally could only work on NFS in
my "copious free time" between building a house and working overtime in
order to afford a house in the first place--so, if you can wait another
five years, perhaps I will be finished with NFS by then. I have a hunch
that the others have similar problems.
And this leaves us with help for hire or something like
X-Consortium, a body formed by a number of interested companies willing
to gather funds for common development (and hire full-time employees).
Not pink, not very idealistic, but this is the way the world
seems to be from my perspective (YMMV:)
/Marino
> This sound like another old letter that a guy in Redmond (tm ?)
> wrote years ago.
>
> Do we have to add these lines to the FreeBSD licence ?
> --
> ____________________________________________________________________
> Emmanuel DELOGET [pixel] pixel@{dotcom.fr,epita.fr} ---- DotCom SA
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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