On Sun, 03 Sep 2006 11:31:26 +0200
Timo Schoeler <timo.schoeler@riscworks.net> wrote:

> wrt Charles M. Hannums email, the awakening it caused by shattering the 
> NetBSD developers universe, and the discussion about blobs, i'd like to 
> draw some conclucsions.
> 
> i) in stanza three in 'About the NetBSD Project' there's stated 'One of 
> the primary focuses of the NetBSD project has been to make the base OS 
> extremely portable.' [0].
> 
> due to the acceptance of blobs (there's no opinion on the majority of 
> developers on this, some developers like to use blobs if it suits their 
> needs, and a few deny them completely) this is no longer true. either 
> it's no longer a 'primary goal' or a lie that's spoken out deliberately.
> 
> both is not acceptable, at least if one (as an individuum or a project) 
> uses to have ideals and, if necessary, 'fight' for them.
> 
> it is very important wrt to blobs to be aware of the preferences of the 
> project as developer, user or afficinado. as it's in the state between 
> not quite told and half-official that NetBSD /will/ use blobs, NetBSD no 
> longer is acceptable for people that really do open source. Linux e.g. 
> is also no choice (besides multiple technical, philosophical and other 
> problems), because it uses blobs.
> 
> open source inherits (among other things) equality. this is no longer 
> given; furthermore, open source can be seen as one way out of slavery 
> (that's what most really mean if they state 'hey, turning away now means 
> Bill Gates wins!'), but this means to escape from hardware vendors' 
> slavery. there are vendors giving away good documentation of their 
> products, those are the ones to deal with. not the ones delivierung 
> black box blobs and equal hardware that only runs on x86.
> 
> that is why NetBSDs 'One of the primary focuses of the NetBSD project 
> has been to make the base OS extremely portable.' no longer is true.
> 
> TNF behaves like a vegetarian eating burgers, shouting 'hey, look, i'm a 
> vegetarian!'.
> 
> ii) the discussion with and among developers shed a clearing light, or 
> enlightenment wrt the situation of the project. acceptance of 
> non-BSD-licensed code in the base system seems to be the way to go for 
> NetBSD. lack of leadership seems to be the way to go. lack of 
> organization seems to be the way to go (how many port maintainers are 
> not contactable? one? six? a dozen?).
> 
> iii) entanglement between TNF/TNP and commercial companies in a very 
> double-edged manner. there were cases were employees of this company 
> mailed back that the PR that was just filed is fixed in their internal 
> branch/fork, without the will to fix it for the public -- even if it was 
> just a five line patch. the main thing was to tell everybody that they 
> don't suffer from this bug. very childish.
> 
> so consequences are, as there's no solution in the near future to most 
> or all of the problems that exist neither the demonstration of will to 
> change this, to have a look at both the personal or corporate 'moral' or 
> 'moral obligation' or ideals wrt open source and NetBSDs goals -- and 
> what survives in reality.
> 
> personally, i came to the conclusion that there's (a huge) imbalance. 
> after a conference on this weekend we decided to drop NetBSD for 
> internal use, external (customer) use and development. starting monday 
> we will migrate a few dozen customers away from NetBSD (most of them 
> running servers, and a few early appliances). our internal services 
> moved to other major BSDs or commercial UNIX months ago (as if it was 
> clear that something like this supernova happens and shows the status of 
> NetBSD). our soon to be released appliances, which were luckily 
> developed on two different BSDs, one of them being NetBSD, won't be 
> shipping based on NetBSD.

And who cares about all you said? because I don't care.

NetBSD developers will continue improving the system with or without
"gurus" and with or without blobs.

> i'm a vegetarian, i don't eat burgers. it's as simple as that.

Good for you, but I'm not vegetarian.