why support alpha??

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 4:54 AM -0500 12/10/03, 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.

You are welcome to "serve" the FreeBSD community in any
way you choose.  But people volunteer their time and
their effort to work on what they want to work on.

Also note that the "FreeBSD community" does include people
who are running FreeBSD on Alpha machines.  Thus, the
developers that work on FreeBSD/Alpha are *already* serving
the "FreeBSD community", and doing a good job of it.

Me, I am not directly interested in alpha.  That means I
and not spending *my* time and *my* money (for hardware)
on Alpha.  Philosophically though, I'm happy when there
are FreeBSD developers who spend *their* time on it.

As long as there are a critical mass of developers who are
doing the work for FreeBSD/Alpha, then I see no reason why
we would want to drive them away.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu