From: rcd@raven.eklektix.com (Dick Dunn)
Subject: this nascent segment of an old community
Summary: whither?  and how gracefully?
Organization: eklektix - Boulder, Colorado
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 1992 09:37:03 GMT

Most people here would like to ignore the politics and the "sociology" of
the 386BSD effort if possible, but we'd best pay some attention to it now.

I saw Paul Vixie come out against the "them and us" posting about Linux,
asking if we could be spared a new diatribe against the ubiquitous "them".
It made me angry/sad to see Lynne Jolitz attack Vixie in response, ten
lines for every one in Paul's article.

Vixie is no stranger to controversy, but he never goes into it empty-headed.
He's also a long-standing contributor to the UNIX/Usenet community, and he's
close to enough of the "movers and shakers" that his opinions count.  He
took a posting with a most cautionary title--"they" and "us" in the Subject,
when in fact the two communities are probably 2/3 overlapped--and asked
that we be spared one more re-run of attacks on "them".  It was a fair
request.

What sort of community is being created here?  Is it really acceptable for
Lynne to blast anyone and everyone who disagrees with The Jolitz View?  Are
question and controversy forbidden, only vapid acquiescence allowed?  Why
are so many long-standing valuable contributors to the UNIX community now
considered "opponents"?

Let's shift that out of nebulous "social interaction" terms into the con-
crete stuff we care about: code.  Most of the code in 386BSD was written by
people who are now "bad guys".  Is this community really ready to splinter
away from the people who did most of the work?  Yes, I'm serious:  Most of
the code was developed outside the 386bsd project itself.  The cleverness
of 386bsd is in filling in the missing pieces and making it work, but it
couldn't have happened if most of the code didn't already exist.

I certainly do not want to denigrate Bill's efforts.  "Pulling the pieces
together" is not trivial.  What I want to do is ask people whether they
want to let Lynne speak for them and forcibly split this group from other
efforts.

Lynne says:
>It is unfortunate that a person who I barely know and have no contact
>with to speak of has chosen to use this positive challange to launch a
>personal attack on me and 386BSD...

Anyone who read Vixie's article and has been around for a month or two can
understand that Paul was not making a personal attack, but rather trying to
forestall yet another series of attacks.  We have seen attacks on CSRG, FSF,
BSDI, UUNET, LBL, plus personal attacks on Adams, Kolstad, Karels, McKusick,
Stallman, Torek...(surely I've forgotten others).  A pre-emptory request to
avoid more conflict is hardly out of order.

>I am puzzled as to why this has occurred, since I have always viewed
>BSDi as irrelevent to the freely available software discussions.

Then why have you spent (and why do you continue to spend) so much time
excoriating BSDI?  There are scores of proprietary systems, of which
BSD/386 must be the least threatening, since it is so small and new.

>While I have known for some time that Mr. Vixie is very close to Mr's
>Bostic, Karels, McKusick, and Adams, and tends to agree with their
>views,...

This is the sort of statement I want to ask folks here to examine:  Is this
sort of attack acceptable to this community of people?  It might as well
have been said that Vixie is a "fellow traveler" with Bostic, Karels,
McKusick, and Adams...after all, this is a McCarthy-style innuendo.

Also, please keep in mind the phrase "tends to agree with their views" when
Lynne tries later to tell us that thinking is allowed here.

>...I have been dissuaded by others from responding to his earlier
>attacks in netnews,...
(read "you didn't have a good enough excuse to flame him")
>...with the reason given that he is going through
>severe personal problems....

Hmmm...glass houses, I hear.
Whether Vixie has "severe personal problems", I know not.  But if he does,
he doesn't display them on Usenet.

>However, I do not feel I can continue allowing him to attack me and the
>entire 386BSD community, nor use BSDi as a weapon in this regard.

Paul has not attacked you.  He has asked you not to start attacking more
people.  Your attacks have been so widespread and vicious in the past that
his request is more than reasonable.

As to "the entire 386BSD community"--Paul is as much a part of it as you
are, and he made no judgement against it.

>>386BSD is good stuff.  BSDi is also good stuff.  There are some good people
>>contributing to each.  
>
>This is most confusing, as there is no relationship in any way with
>386BSD and BSDi...

This bears on my concern with the community.  Vixie (>>) is trying to
explain that there is a functional relationship between BSDI and 386BSD.
The success of either one boosts the success of the other.  People inter-
ested in one are also interested in the other.  The larger community
includes people interested in, and working on/with, both systems.

>There is an enormous international user base for 386BSD, closing on
>250,000 copies (according to UNIX Magazin's latest estimate)...

This number needs repair.  It is obviously too high by at least an order of
magnitude.  An error that large does nobody any good.  An accurate estimate
would be more useful, as it would give more substantive leverage to the
community.  It's also disturbing that it's the same number we've been
reading for several months...yet I believe neither that this community
sprung forth at a quarter-million people nor that it has failed to grow.

>I don't know about BSDi however. Everyone I talk to says that this firm
>hasn't got a chance...

Do you ever talk to anyone who doesn't agree with your biases?  BSDI
exists for one reason; 386BSD exists for another.  The two can and do
coexist; there are people who have and use both.  It's odd; the people I
talk to think BSDI's chances are quite good.

>...no reputable firm would finance them given what
>has already occurred, and no commercial firm wants their product with
>all this legal action flying back and forth...

Neither of these are true.  It is (alas!) not uncommon for a perfectly
legitimate business to be involved in ill-founded lawsuits.  As for
commercial firms wanting their product--they seem to.  They're willing to
take the chance IF their evaluation says the value is worth the risk.
That's simple business: you figure out what it costs, what you might lose,
what you might gain.  If the numbers work, you go for it.  There are some
real business cases where BSDI works.

[Lynne professes profound disinterest in BSDI, yet spends a lot of text
trying to dump on them, ending with...]
>Most startups fail -- even good ones. That is a fact. As such, one
>doesn't try to bring on additional liabilities while one is attempting
>to establish a foothold. Reviewing the last year from a business
>perspective, BSDi is a textbook example of what not to do when
>launching a startup.  The number of business, strategic, and PR
>blunders that have been made by this firm are truly staggering.

We could start a separate thread on this, since I've only seen the one
blunder you mention explicitly: the UNIX in the phone number.  Even that is
arguably not too bad, since there are many companies doing business in the
UNIX world which have phone #'s ending in 8649, and advertise in letters.

I don't think BSDI has made that many mistakes.  And, per the discussion
on USENET a year ago, they had to know they had a tiger by the tail.  The
main problem is that USL is determined to make a mess--and it looks like
they intend to make a big enough mess to splatter 386BSD (and others) as
well.

Good grief, look at the situation!  If USL had as many corporate neurons
as it has corporate lawyers, it would negotiate an agreement with BSDI and
make some money!  If USL got 5 bucks for every BSDI license, it would be
money ahead of anything it can get out of the stupid lawsuit.

>There is no antagonism between Linus or ourselves (he's a nice guy),

But then, that raises the question (and in the process, vindicates Paul's
concern): Why did the subject start with "Catch what THEY're saying about
US..."?  [emphasis mine]

>...People who just want to fill
>up bandwidth without thinking get caught quickly by both sides -- and
>in the case of 386BSD, thinking is allowed...

As far as I can tell, thinking is allowed only if it doesn't lead to
dissent from Jolitz dogma.  Vixie was well within bounds of relevance and
politeness in expressing honest concern (far more within bounds than I am
here!)  He got blasted for expressing a dissenting opinion...I hate to
think what I'll get, except that it doesn't matter.

>By taking 386BSD and twisting it their own proprietary and costly
>product, BSDi cannot easily match the rapid growth and learning curve
>which a freely available version allows...

Reality cringes at the revisionism here.  BSDI didn't take 386BSD, and
BSD/386 isn't costly.

>...In addition,
>even with a small paid staff, a single small company cannot compete
>with the hundreds of thousands of users making changes and adding new
>things to the system every day.

I'm not taking any bets either way on who can move faster, but I'll note
that a larger number of people is harder to coordinate, and there's nothing
like the incentive of a paycheck (or the negative incentive of the lack of
a paycheck) to make things happen.  The most successful software projects
I've been involved in have been five people or fewer.

And the idea of "hundreds of thousands of users making changes" is simply
ludicrous.

>...Also, since the systems have
>diverged (and will continue to diverge)...

But, as Paul noted, the divergence is backwards: BSD/386 is closer to BSD
than 386BSD is.

Back to the "community" aspects:  Unless there's a good reason to diverge
(in things which matter--file formats and such), divergence ill-serves the
larger community.  That's not aimed at 386BSD; that's a comment for every-
one.

>They [BSDI] have
>even received Chris Torek's sparc code, paid for by the taxpayers,
>which has not been made available to others despite repeated requests,
>and are currently attempting to make money off of it in the same manner
>in which they tried to appropriate 386BSD.

This is nice innuendo, but I'd like to hear the truth.

I won't believe what you're saying, because this is just another attack on
someone with whom you have a disagreement, and your track record isn't very
good.  To be halfway fair, I won't take BSDI's word on it either.  I'll
believe what Chris has to say.  Let him tell us, if there's anything to be
said.

Actually, I really wish BSDI *would* try to make money on a SPARC port. 
I've got to deal with a couple of SPARCs, and Solaris 2 sounds like all it
would take to make me an alcoholic.

>I hope that the 386BSD user commmunity continues to strive for
>excellence.  No amount of petty vindictiveness can derail this effort
>now,...

I guess you should know; you've certainly tried to derail it.  Why you
work so hard to cheapen the efforts of Bill (and many others) I cannot
fathom, but I'm glad you've failed and people have risen above it.
-- 
Dick Dunn    rcd@raven.eklektix.com   -or-   raven!rcd    Boulder, Colorado
   Clowns are necessities, not luxuries.
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd