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To: Allen Benn who wrote (9445)	4/4/2001 10:11:19 PM
From: Brian Lempel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10309

Allen, could you share some color on the other acquisition? It would seem that the potential benefits from capturing a large share of DSP powered devices dwarfs the potential of the FreeBSD movement. -Brian

To: Allen Benn who wrote (9445)	4/4/2001 11:11:56 PM
From: Prognosticator	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10309

Thanks for your (as always) thoughtful and informative post. Once I saw the GPL issue (and its viral infection nature for other IP) the whole FreeBSD thing fell into place. One minor quibble, however with this statement: Since applications that run on Linux are a mere recompile away from being executable on BSD Unix, the effective difference between Linux and BSD Unix can be discerned only by the truly technically religious. This means that a BSD Unix NAS device easily can be equipped with the same management, security and connectivity software that a similar Linux device might use; thereby making it exactly as saleable as would be an equivalent Linux device. In other words, there are no network effects favoring a Linux-based NAS device from a functionally equivalent BSD Unix device. Anyone who's had the joy of porting software between Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, and other Unices knows that its usually a lot more work than a 'mere recompile'. Each vendor manages to add 'value' i.e. their proprietary way of doing things, and this is what makes porting of C/C++ applications a nightmare, and makes Java so attractive to us software engineers. Once you've got it to compile, then there is a lot of testing and performance tuning to do to get things working well and stable. Note: FreeBSD at least has a chance to track the Linux API's that will inevitably be used by Linux tools. Indeed, the approach that SUN had of providing a shared-library wrapper for Linux applications means that you need not always compile to get an application running, provided it is on the same machine architecture as the original. Unfortutnately, most Linux binaries are x86, most embedded systems aren't. I would suspect, however, that as long as WIND keeps their FreeBSD offering focuseed on x86, they will be OK. Where they are going to get hurt is if they try to move it off x86 and onto more cost/power competitive high-end embedded processors an subsystems. But then again, maybe the FreeBSD community will be able to absorb that task. So, overall a win for both WIND and FreeBSD, I think. P.