On Wed, 5 Jun 2002, Andy Ball wrote:

> KH> Commendation     David A. Gatwood

Guys, please don't carbon folks at Apple about this.  Particularly, poor
Steve, who isn't the Steve you're thinking of.  Oh, man, I would -so- hate
to have that email address.  :-)

But seriously, it's a minor miracle I got someone to agree to this, but I
have a feeling that if too much of a big deal is made out of it, future
attempts to help out would get shot down faster than a Soviet MIG over
U.S. air space.

This is for two reasons.  First, not everybody in Apple is pro-open
source.  A lot of folks are, but others have to be dragged kicking and
screaming.  That's just the nature of a big company.  :-)

Second, there's the slashdot effect, only in the form of emails to Steve.

The goal is for anyone who needs this material to get it, but as few other
people as possible.  This isn't a public release, as it hasn't gone
through the usual validation that a doc goes through before a public
release.

There's an incredible amount of work involved in that, and it just isn't
worth it for the handful of developers who would need it.  Even the
process of sanitizing it (removing names, email addresses, and phone
numbers, mostly) for seeding to you guys is a pain.  It's just somewhat
less of a pain.  :-)

From my conversation with one of our legal folks, I get the impression
that we'd appreciate this being treated as need-to-know. In other words,
seed it to whichever developers in the *BSD/Linux camp are working on (or
are planning to seriously work on) floppy support, but don't just spread
it around more than needed.

I'm willing to do what I can as far as getting permission to get docs to
people about legacy hardware, but I would ask for discretion.  This means:

1.  Please DON'T email non-Darwin people at Apple.
2.  Please, please DON'T put any of this on a web page.  (The person
I spoke to in Legal specifically asked me to request that this remain
paper only.)
3.  For the love of God, NO Slashdot.  :-)
4.  Please DO get in touch with appropriate people in the OpenBSD and
Linux mac68k teams and PPC teams and collaborate to share information and
source code so that no one goes screaming to Steve that they're being left
out, because that's the surest way to guarantee that nothing ever gets
made available in the future....  :-)

With a little caution and a lot of luck (finding old material), I'm
hopeful that they'll keep letting me help.


Thanks,
David

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David A. Gatwood                                dgatwood@gatwood.net
Developer Docs Writer                             dgatwood@apple.com
Apple Computer                                  dgatwood@mklinux.org

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