Re: announcements

[Alex Schuilenburg <alexs@ecoscentric.com>]

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