why support alpha??

[Leo Bicknell]

In a message written on Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 04:54:13AM -0500, eqe at cox.net wrote:
> Yes, you have a point here but I never said alpha hackers are working in vain. 
> I merely tryed to imply that their efforts could better serve the freebsd 
> community by concentrating our efforts on just platforms that are more 
> mainstream in the server market. I personally would stop dev. on anything 

You have made an incorrect assumption that if an Alpha hacker wasn't
working on Alpha then they would be working on other FreeBSD related
things.

People work on what they are interested in working on, and it's
quite possible if those people weren't working on Alpha they wouldn't
be working on anything FreeBSD related at all.  Indeed, I suspect
most of them would go to NetBSD, since it also has Alpha support.

There are many large side benefits as well.  I suspect the Alpha
crew fixed many (all?) 64 bit issues before the AMD and Intel 64
bit alternatives came out, which made adding support for those
platforms much faster.

The best thing an end user can do is thank the FreeBSD developers
working on any part of the system.  It is because of their volunteer
work that the project exists.  Even if you feel there aren't enough
people working on the subsystems important to you, the solution isn't
to drive other developers away by suggesting what they are doing is
useless, it's to encourage them and create a warm atmosphere where 
more developers will want to join in, hopefully developers who want
to work on what is of interest to you.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request at tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org
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