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Re: announcements


Hi again

Gary Thomas wrote:
Alex,

I would very much like for you to make public clarification of your
announcement, as you have done to me privately.

The things I find misleading or missing are:
 * This offer is not coming from the maintainers [at large]
 * Proceeds are to go toward test farm improvements
 * The CDROM contents will be available for [free] download
All that was present in your text was the [seemingly] commercial plug.

If the above statements are indeed true, I think that they should be
part of the public information.  Even the web page mentioned in
the announcement has nothing to say about them, only how to order.

Firstly, IMHO putting out a clarification as per my previous response may appear to indicate a rift between the maintainers at eCosCentric and the rest of the maintainers. As far as I know this is not the case. There is certainly competition between Mind and eCosCentric, but that is a seperate issue. How much is your request influenced by your relationship with Mind?


If I were to make any further clarification, I would probably just reiterate:

  eCosCentric, in conjunction with all the eCos maintainers employed by
  eCosCentric, are pleased to announce that they will be selling eCos
  2.0 Beta Development CDROMs of the eCos 2.0 Beta release.

...

Is that what you want? What about Andrew and Mark?

As for the remainder of your email...

We cannot make public statements like exactly where proceeds will go for obvious reasons. It is our honest intention for proceeds to fund the test farm. Publically committing funds from a specified source towards the farm is a different matter, at the very least from a legal perspective.

Second, we cannot guarantee that all the toolchains will be made available on the web. This is not our doing but that of the s.r.c. overseers and bandwidth restrictions. Various alternatives have been proposed but nothing has been decided. Hence why some of the less popular toolchains may be dropped. We also know that Red Hat may object on the grounds that this may compete against their commercial GNUPro toolchains, but that still remains to be tested.

Also, IMHO there is a pretty strong hint that the toolchains will be made available on the web. eCosCentric are contributing these toolchains to the public and would like to see some return on their investment in actually producing these toolchains. AFAIK Mind are not selling eCos CDROMs with toolchains nor are you, so what benefit would this have to either of you? Surely our success would indicate a healthy state of eCos?

As for commercial plugs, there are precedents such as Anthony M's eCos book, so selling an eCos CDROM just falls under the same category IMHO and deserves equal coverage.



You also pointed out to me that there have been some harsh
feelings about email signatures appearing on the ecos-discuss
list(*). This is nothing compared with what appears to be a blatant
commercial announcement that you've sent out today.


(*) I started using such a signature in August of 2002.  The
fact that it changed to be a Mind signature (which is little
different) is what seems to have caused the friction.

I think you have misinterpreted what I said. I said that there was friendly rivalry amongst the maintainers and their commercial signatures. There was no friction or harsh feelings by the maintainers at eCosCentric, we simply joked about it.


I can certainly understand that Mind may be unhappy about our announcement, particularly with the commercial slant. After all, we are competitors in the same market place and Mind took you away from us :-(

As I said on the phone, we were not too enthralled ourselves about "Mind Breathing Life" into eCos which was undoubtably a very commercial slant. If it was, as you claim, an attempt to show eCos was alive and kicking, why was no mention made of the other 3 companies also supporting eCos? We all know from the activity on ecos-discuss that eCos is very much alive and kicking. We also could have picked out a couple of inaccuracies in that announcement but chose not to. After all, why advertise your competitors? We may not have been too happy with that announcement but that is as commercial competitors. At least it was not like the spin we know Red Hat puts on their public announcements :-)

Lastly, I certainly do not believe that something like my announcement is worth falling out over. Hopefully you can see your way through to the spirit in which the announcement was intended and simply drop the matter. On my side, I will endeavour to make further eCosCentric announcements more specific when I mention maintainers.

Cheers
-- Alex



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