On Sat, 11 Mar 2000, Peter Seebach wrote:

# I think mostly marketshare and revenue.  That said, I'd expect that, if the
# NetBSD folks *WANTED* to get in on the "merged system" idea, there'd be happy
# feelings all around... I think the idea was to *start* by merging two systems
# that were known to have a minimal degree of "but they were rude to us four
# years ago".  :)

<wry>
Well, cool.  Let's rip o^H^H^H^H^Hborrow the OtherBSD security stuff and
consider ourselves to have a merged code base, and then get with BSD...
</wry>

I have a bone of contention with the way everyone and his brother seems
to want to mangle userland's layout.  The various Linuces don't agree on
it; Debian is the closest one to being sane.  The various BSDs don't agree
on it; NetBSD seems to be the only one to be sane, although the divergence
is much less than, say, the other _commercial_ Unices which are even more
diverse than the Linux userlands!  Am I making sense yet?  I mean,
Solaris seems to be the closest stock system to being "sane",  for svr4.
HP/UX, IRIX and the rest (modulo true svr4) are what they've always been:
Special Interest Unices who figure that they can establish their own
standards.  They _are_ big enough.  (Need I even mention AIX?)

Rude, that's all.

NetBSD just seems to me to be the one that has stuck to the guns of what
BSD probably should have turned out to look like.  Everything is in a
sensible place (my previous personal tweaks notwithstanding).  Never mind
that of (Bostic, McKusick, Karels, Quarterman), only Mike Karels seems to
have anything whatsoever to do with BSD development.  He may be a good
Systems Architect, but he could do with the courtesy to at least have
responded to the questions years ago regarding Bstreams so we weren't
sitting around wondering if there was going to be something real or if
we should go ahead and try to implement that technology ourselves.

Did Bstreams ever make it into BSDi?

Oh, sorry...

#undef RANT /* :-) */

Not trying to be incitive, nor insulting to any one person, but that
incident drops into my mind.  Mr. Karels is obviously brilliant in any
direction in which he applies himself, which is more credit than I can
give most people, myself included.

# -s


				--*greywolf;
--
BSD: What do you want to serve today?