OT: Why OpenBSD is. was Re: Serious question (not trolling)

[Dave Taira <bodhi@hagakure.org>]

On Sun, 10 Feb 2002, Georg Klein wrote:

> >From: Theo de Raadt <deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org>
> >To: misc@cvs.openbsd.org
> >Subject: snapshots
> >Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2002 15:17:40 -0700
> >Sender: owner-misc@openbsd.org
> >
> >lots of new snapshots crawling out (for the faster architectures
> first..)>
> >since we just went through the first half of a major MAKEDEV whacking,
> >it would be nice if people could test all the snapshots and let us
   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> >know how things are.

Theo says "it would be nice". Because it would be. It's not *necessary*,
it's not *critical*, if it doesn't happen, Theo won't just fall over and
twitch. But if it does happen, it'll be helpful. To a lot of people.

> >thanks guys
>
> and this does mean anything other than that i said, than it is my fault:
> then users are 'people (who) could test' and feedback is 'to let us know
> how things are'. I'm obviously not using the same language.

IMH(non-developer)O, users can be beneficial. And more users is certainly
what any commercial OS wants. But OpenBSD exists because of the developers.
Not the users. And if the bulk of users suddenly decided to go run some
other OS, OpenBSD would still be around. Maybe development on certain
things would slow a little. Maybe. But it would still go on.

And you're right in that more users means more feedback. But y'know what?
People will grab the snapshots and install them, and poke around, and see
if anything breaks. And there will be a handful of bug reports with
GENERIC dmesgs, and exact error messages or stack traces. And there will
be a couple orders of magnitude more of "it doesn't boot!" or "my system
crashes!" or "what did you guys break?!?!". So yes, there are benefits to
having more users. There are also costs.
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Dave Taira <bodhi@hagakure.org>                2002.02.10/17:06:49 PST |
| Morlock for Hire                                                       |
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| Children have a right to be protected from idiots disguising their     |
| personal biases as the best interests of something helpless such as    |
| children.                                                     --Andr00 |
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