Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 00:01:31 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "David Johnson" <djohnson@acuson.com>, <freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Windriver, Slackware and FreeBSD Message-ID: <006701c0c7d5$65e45c40$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <3ADCDCA7.A01F5F40@acuson.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
In every corporate acquisition there's always bits that don't fit and eventually get cut off. This is a natural part of this process. The fact is that it's illegal to buy and sell people like cattle, and while you can buy and sell products all you want, your never guarenteed that just because you buy a product that all the employees are going to choose to go to work for you. This is a difficult problem for software companies particularly, since most of the company's value is in the butts of the people warming the chairs in the cubicles, not in the end results of those folks. I think that you can't fault Windriver for this, because their only legal option was to sell the Slackware product to someone, presuming that the employees would follow along. But, can you imagine how difficult this would be, who would buy it? And even if they did, it's still the buyer's option to offer automatic employment to all prior employees of a purchased product, and there's no guarentee that would have happened either. The layoff was really the best way to do it because now any CDROM distributor that wants to add a Linux distribution to their collection can pick up Slackware for free, and offer jobs to the people cut from Windriver/BSDi/Walnut Creek. If Slackware was profitable as you state, then there's going to be a number of them that are going to want to pick this up, and if it was profitable, then why hamstring it by tying it to a BSD company? Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com >-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of David Johnson >Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2001 5:16 PM >To: freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: Windriver, Slackware and FreeBSD > > >Today's announcement of the abandonment of Slackware caught me by >surprise. All Slackware employees laid off. Slackware was *profitable* >for Walnut Creek and BSDi. I think they've lost more in good will than >they will gain. That, plus some blatant GPL baiting, makes Windriver >pretty slimy. > >So, how is FreeBSD going to fare? Will they be canned as well? Will they >try to distance themselves from Windriver? I think it would serve >Windriver right if Slackware, FreeBSD and the ftp.freesoftware.com >people upped, left, and started over with their own company. > >David > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?006701c0c7d5$65e45c40$1401a8c0>