RE: Any serious production servers yet?

[Matthew Dillon <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

:...
:their hands than the rest of us. People want to
:use 'BSD as network servers. People in the real
:world that is. Maybe thats why your not with
:FreeBSD anymore; your refusal to modernize your
:ideas to what's going on in the real world, and
:your complete lack of understanding where the
:dollars are to fund your efforts?
:
:DT

    Danial, this just shows that you have no understanding whatsoever
    of what 'Open Source' is or how the open source community operates.
    It couldn't be more clear. 

    Do you honestly believe that Open Source is about money?  Do you, in fact,
    believe that people doing Open Source are doing it to make a living?
    Well, I got news for you!  99.9% of open source projects are not
    conceived of or intended to be turned into commercial products, let
    alone conceived of or intended to make any money whatsoever.  The greatest
    open source programmers out there do not directly make money off of
    their work.  Not even Linus (he doesn't 'sell' linux, for example, but
    he certainly leverages his status in the linux community as part of his
    real life job!).

    Open Source put those people, and me, where they are today.  Not by
    directly making money, but by being an ENABLING factor that put those
    people in positions where they could go where they wanted to go, whether
    it means working for Yahoo, or Google, or Apple, or being a professor
    at a unversity, or SysAd'ing a Bank's machine room, or simply having
    the contacts that allow opportunities to drop in your lap (as happened
    with me and BEST Internet in the early 90's), or a myrid of other jobs.

    I can't even begin to count the number of success stories.  I *STILL*
    get email today from old DICE users who cut their teeth with my open
    source C compiler oh so long ago.  It is emmensly gratifying to know
    that my code helped enable them to make a career out of programming.

    The vast majority of open source programmers do NOT make money directly
    from open source.  Not even Linus.  So it should come as no surprise
    to you that I have absolutely no interest in turning DragonFly-the-project
    into DragonFly-the-commercial-project.  DragonFly isn't about funding
    or about making money.  It is about enabling OTHERS to leverage their
    experiences with the project to further their own goals, goals which
    might or might not include making money, and might or might not even
    include the DragonFly operating system itself.  DragonFly is also about
    me wanting to accomplish my own personal goals, which I have outlined
    (and which do not involve 'money').

    Open Source is not about money.  Open Source is about recognition.  It
    is about building something that you want to build, whether other people
    ever use it or not.  Open Source is about community -- Open Source
    communities are not constructed, they coalesce as people discover like
    ideas, desires, and wants.  It is the ultimate evolutionary principle,
    in fact.... OSS communities form and break apart according to individual
    desire.  They are a synthesis, an outcome rather then an intended
    construction.  But, I think most importantly, Open Source is about
    enablement.  Open Source is an enabling factor for so many people you
    shouldn't wonder why people do it when they don't make any direct money
    from it.  It should be obvious.

    Open Source projects don't 'fail'.  If a project starts with 10 people
    it is certainly not considered a failure.  If it grows to 5000 people,
    then a few years later drops back down to 50 people, those 50 people are
    not going to care.  Someone on the outside might care, might think
    'well, projoect XXX is dead, dead, DEAD!', but that's someone on the 
    outside.  The bare truth of the matter is that ALL projects have a
    life cycle.  Even Linux, even DragonFly.  It takes an older programmmer
    like me who has written hundreds of serious programs (most of which
    are in the dustbin even for me now) to understand how the life cycle works.

    But what doesn't disappear... what NEVER disappears is the effect... the
    enablement effect that a project has on the people working on it and
    using it.  And also, what doesn't disappear, are the algorithms and
    ideas behind the code.  The code itself may not survive (not even Linux,
    if you consider how many times core kernel infrastructure has been 
    rewritten from its inception)... but the concepts certainly do, and the
    people do, and their experiences do.

    I 'fund' DragonFly with my time, as do most Open Source programmers.  And,
    as with most Open Source programmers, my actual income, for living, is
    not directly derived from Open Source, but the life-rewards I reap
    from Open Source are immense.

    *THAT* is what Open Source means.  It most assuredly is *NOT* your warped
    and twisted view of it.

						-Matt