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From: dawes@physics.su.oz.au (David Dawes)
Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.0 - a status report.
Message-ID: <CyL3K7.L4t@ucc.su.OZ.AU>
Sender: news@ucc.su.OZ.AU
Nntp-Posting-Host: physics.su.oz.au
Organization: School of Physics, University of Sydney, Australia
References: <38j31l$6nf@agate.berkeley.edu> <38puin$gp@masala.cc.uh.edu> <38to0m$k6d@fw.novatel.ca>
Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 10:24:06 GMT
Lines: 59
In article <38to0m$k6d@fw.novatel.ca>,
Herb Peyerl <hpeyerl@sidney.novatel.ca> wrote:
>Woody Jin (wjin@moocow.cs.uh.edu) wrote:
>: As far as I have seen, there were many problem reports regarding on
>: PCFS. But I have not seen the request for SCO binary support (or did I miss
>: it ?). Are you working on the PCFS or is it left as it was ?
>
>: I believe that if you have a to-do list, these (reliable PCFS and
>: Wine support) should be on top of the above SCO binary support,
>
>This attitude that people have completely boggles my mind. You people seem
>to think that we do this work to meet some sort of marketing niche or
>as a job.
>
>You are sadly mistaken. This work is actually done because we *want* to.
>And you can't make people do what they don't want to unless you're paying
>them.
>
>Let me give you a slight correction of the mental processes that people
>go through when they contribute to *BSD:
>
>WRONG: "Lets see, what's on the TODO list? hmm. the next thing is this
>ethernet card that I don't have and don't have any documentation for. Ok;
>I guess I'll do this".
>
>RIGHT: "Cool. I just found this nifty ethernet card in a box at work; I
>wonder how it works. Lets write a driver!".
>
>WRONG: "Lets see, the next thing on the TODO list is MSDOSFS support. Hmm.
>Now I have to buy a copy of DOS so I can make a partition. Hmm.. Now I
>have to repartition my disk which means reinstalling the whole thing. Hmm.
>I've never used DOS and now I have to learn it? ick."
>
>RIGHT: "Hmm.. I bet if I just wrote this small modification to kern_exec.c,
>I could probably load an ELF executable and run it. Hey cool; it works!
>Hey guys, guess what I did? Now I'll see if I can make shared libraries
>work."
>
>If something is broken, report it. If you can fix it yourself, do so.
>
>The concept of the TODO list is so other people can look at it and say
>"Hey, this looks kind of neat, maybe I'll try and do this."
Excellent examples! I'd say that the same applies to contributors to
most freeware projects. When people wonder why XFree86 doesn't support
their graphics board, they should stop and think about this for a minute.
It's OK for people to say what they'd like to see, but priorities are
going to be driven by those actually doing the contributing. If your
priorities are different, do something about it by contributing.
David
--
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David Dawes <dawes@physics.usyd.edu.au> DoD#210 | Phone: +61 2 351 2639
School of Physics, University of Sydney, Australia | Fax: +61 2 660 2903
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You feel there's no tomorrow, as you look into the water below.
It's only your reflection, and you still ain't got no place to go.
-- Deep Purple "Sail Away"