Mail Archives: opendos/1997/09/20/08:22:49
Pat Villani <patv AT iop DOT com> wrote:
> I don't know what
> went on within Caldera, but as an outside observer it would appear to me
> that the release of the binaries, limited source and restrictive license
> was strictly a teaser to entice commercial users to license the product
> from Caldera.
Exactly. The 'outside' person just sees it as a 'teaser' to get people
hooked and to get some free publicity (and lots of us have given it lots
of free publicity, not just in newsgroups and email but in Real Life(tm)
as well).
> With respect to releasing the kernel being of limited use, I can tell
> you and Caldera that it has been my personal experience that kernel work
> attracts very, very few contributors.
Let's face it, there are very few people who actually have the resources
or experience to do much kernel work. Basically you need a spare machine
- no-one with any sense would do kernel development on the machine they
need for other work, it's far too dangerous. Ideally you also need
thinks like hardware debuggers or in-circuit emulators as well. There
aren't many people I know like that (I'm certainly not!).
Writing and debugging utiities on an existing kernel is something which
will get a lot more support, because they are seldom threatening to
existing data (in fact I frequently do such things while other tasks
as running on the same machine).
> I think that Brian and his marketing people should
> carefully consider what source was released before judging the
> usefulness of that release and the benefits gained from that release.
It strikes me like the publisher who refused to reprint a book because
it had only sold 10 000 copies. The fact that they'd only printed 10 000
copies, and they all sold withing a couple of weeks, was too difficult for
the marketdroids to grasp.
How long has the OpenDOS kernel source been out? 6 months? Certainly well
under a year, and I know many people who were waiting until it seemed to be
settling down before coming onboard (there's little point in the same bugs
being fixed hundreds of times). How long did it take before Linux, for
example, got a significant number of developers after it was first released?
> Tim, don't complain that Caldera hasn't received useful input. By this
> statement, you are implying that Caldera expected to profit from the
> release of the source code by receiving "useful input" free of charge.
> Sorry, but it seems to me that Caldera "wants to have its cake and eat
> it too."
That is indeed what it sounded like. They want to have development and
testing done for free (if they have the source so they can recompile it,
it costs them virtually nothing to publish it; if we have problems
because of the different compilers used that's our problem, and the chances
are that we'll make it more generally compilable for them).
Chris
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