Ladies and Gentlemen, lend me your eyes for a brief moment for some feeble words of praise for your efforts.
The other day a friend of mine, for whom I have installed an OpenBSD system, mentioned that he had costly experience in the past with small shops and proprietary systems that cannot benefit from economies of scale. I told him that this was not the case with the machine I put together for him, that many hundreds of thousands of people over many years had worked on what I gave him for little more than a song and a dance. Yesterday I installed a Vista machine in my doctor's office, because that's what they bought. While I was able to make it talk internet right off the bat, for the life of me I could not convince it to see some XP boxes in a local workgroup (Link Layer Topology Discovery be damned). A Windows "Guru" was able to make it talk today with no more effort than a magic incantation MS had given him. Over fifteen years ago I worked a stint for MS, ostensibly to build a test suite to demonstrate the conformance of their email(MAPI) product to RFC 822 etc. I couldn't because it wasn't. I did manage to find some deep problems in their compiler and discovered they were using and early gcc (on SCO) to build it with. I then wrote a tool in Prolog to generate test basic code for their systems and promply found myself fired for "Software Piracy". They use similar tools today to test their products. What I'm saying here is not exclusive to MS, but common to many proprietary systems groups. I've worked for companies like Motorola, Lockheed, Lear and Mikoyan. MS had no "engineering culture". No documents more than some sketchty design docs and "running code". Because of this their systems have an 18-month half life: every year or two they _must_ reinvent the wheel because they've lost the human skill that made the previous version. So it's ASP or .NET or some reinvention of the internet that's shiney and new every few years. And it may make them rich but does nothing good for their customers' businesses: just another tax on their resources. Contrast this with OpenBSD and kin like Net/FreeBSD. I can make a machine running a 15 year old version of BSDI or SunOS interoperate with the latest revisions of these. Nobody has chopped slots in the roof beams to make way for a fancy doorway that's 13 centimeters taller than the building codes. And the bearing walls still touch the floor and footings that they bear on. Why is this? Many reasons, I suppose, but at the bottom of it there's your personal pride. And everyone else who has ever worked on this stuff from the some long-gone guys who worked on the first Berkley systems to people in places like Mumbai, Shanghai and Novosibirsk. Their names are on their work. Even long dead guys like Al Turing are acknowledged in this: none here says his work was for nothing, that "fuzzy logic" means his head was "soft" (yeah, I've heard that, no shit:) No one here needs to erase the past to make themselves look good. You know, after MS fired me, calling me a thief didn't stick. So I had to be a closet pervert, and sociopath and worse. My taxes were audited and my driver's license deleted. People jumped out of bushes to beat me up for things I've never heard of. On Sept. 11 2001, I spent the night in Gaol, under suspicion of something or other that didn't stick either. And my personal life makes The Crying Game look like Leave it to Beaver. So I have some idea about what you all must face, motivating yourselves each day to "do the right thing". But let me give you some assurances. MS employs mebbe 70k people, and another hundred K or so in dependant groups. That sounds big, but it's a little job-shop compared to you all. There's a hundred million who know something of open source systems and the brightest minds on the planet are among you. This is the Big House you are building with standards and sources that are open to the critical thought of every bright girl and boy on planet. Even the dead are with you, for this is God's work you do. Duncan (Dhu) Campbell
