Re: Serious question (not trolling)

[Miod Vallat <miod@online.fr>]

> Appears someone's gotten their blood pressure jacked up again. That's 
> too bad... but there seems to be an incongruity here. Perhaps the 
> gentleman with the pulsing neck veins can reconcile his nonchalance for 
> users with the requests for donations of hardware, t-shirt and cd sales 
> which are advertised as essential to continued development of OpenBSD. 
> How can you ask people to support the project in one breath, and then 
> tell 'em they're irrelevant in the next? If this is how you really 
> feel, why not post this on the openbsd.org "home" page: "We want your 
> donations, but we don't really don't give a hoot in hell what you think 
> about our product."
Where did anyone's blood pressure do sheep jumps?
Everything Theo told you is right. We are having fun doing OpenBSD.
If you are happy supporting us, that's a plus, but do you really think
dozens of people having real-life jobs to pay bills and food would
listen to your opinion as long as food and bills are paid?
Come on.
There's something named ``common sense'', that is curiously not
delivered enough in most countries. You might need some.

> I don't doubt that everyone involved in the project is doing so because 
> they want to be, but it's obvious there are additional forces at work. 
Actually, it's obvious you don't know what you are talking about.
Speaking of my cose alone, I am allowed - although no written piece
exist - to hack on BSD 1 hr/day, simply because reusing BSD code in our
work saves > 1 hr/day. Sounds fair to me. You are not asked for advice
anyways.
Other developers share similar status. Other have more liberty to work
on BSD licenced code. Should I matter? As said above, I work on OpenBSD
for fun. I don't care about anything else, especially your opinion on
the subject.

> Why is this obvious? If the project existed only for the devlopers, why 
> isn't it just closed off to the public? The project could be set up 
> like a private club or something, and you could get a copy of OpenBSD 
> only if you were invited to join. 
Oh, the project is public because we believe in men, darwinism, etc. The
more people looking at OpenBSD, the more developer we get, etc.
This has worked well so far. Care to prove us false?

[...]
> enjoy it? I don't buy this regardless of how many times it's been said -
>  it's just contrary to human nature, and contrary to how the project is 
> being run. 
You don't have to buy anything - all our work is free, including what we
might send to lists - although you might have to pay to get our prose.

> I'd like to see everyone use OBSD - because I think it's a good 
> concept, and more users means more development resources which means 
> more and better applications and better support. 
Quite frankly, I'd like to see most of the people use something else
than OpenBSD. OpenBSD has its uses, behaves well for some needs, but
nobody ever said that OpenBSD is the system to ``rule them all''. Live
and let {live,die}. And have fun doing so.

> Having said this, I'm still interested in hearing what others think 
> about the "Linux trend", and how it may affect OpenBSD. But, I guess if 
> all of the other OBSD users are satisfied with Theo's "Users are 
> Irrelevant" policy I'll just butt out of this thread. 
Want my opinion? I don't care, as Linux does not work reliably on > 50%
of my machines, whereas OpenBSD achieves better results there.

Miod (you asked for it, you got it, and now I'm gonna go to the couch)