*BSD News Article 41686


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From: plocher@Sun.COM (John Plocher (PADI AI-85274))
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: OpenBSD.  PLEASE PLEASE!
Date: 25 Jan 1995 20:39:49 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems Inc., Mountain View, CA
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Jordan K. Hubbard (jkh@violet.berkeley.edu) wrote:
: In article <D2wA13.JEr@indirect.com>, Barnacle Wes <wes@indirect.com> wrote:
: >I have an idea: if there are really that many people interested in "OpenBSD",
: >why don't they get togehter and form an OpenBSD core team? They could sup

: Well.  I floated this EXACT SAME idea at USENIX this year, and you'd be

I would turn pale too.  My Gawd, then there would be ***THREE***!  Arrgghh!

This started as just an observation - that instead of the large
duplication of effort going on in both the *BSD camps there could be
cooperation and a leveraging that would make the sum much greater than
the parts.  If nothing else, adoption of common interfaces and ABIs
(user *and* kernel) would make the question of "what's under the hood?"
moot.

As you (and many others) have pointed out, the 2 groups have made a
concious decision not to merge.  This condemms us, the users &
application developers, to forever struggle to support two different
systems, or to give up and adopt only one.  That one will always
be out of step with the other one, so drivers, utilities, distributions,
libraries, etc will always be difficult to depend on...

With the generals and armies of volunteers saying that they would
rather give up than merge, there is no hope that this problem can ever
be solved.  And that is a loss for all of us.

--
John Plocher | PADI  | "I've heard that television adds 10 pounds to
 @ Scuba.Net | DM/AI |  your usual body weight.  Why and where?