Support

[Steve Petrie, P.Eng.]

Warm Greetings To This DragonFlyBSD (dfly) Forum From A Long-Time Lurker :)

I agree with the spirit of Arnkjell Eriksen's remark that people who use open source software should contribute something to it.

However, it seems to me that the "moral" situation surrounding open source software is more nuanced than a simple money-versus-time (e.g. time spent working on the open source code) dichotomy.

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The value of an open source software "product" is determined largely by the size of its user population. Every user immediately contributes an increment of user population, and thereby helps to improve the survival prospects of that product. So it's not entirely fair to view otherwise "non-contributing" dfly users as merely free riders.

While the primary focus of dfly seems to be on providing a performant reliable bare metal server operating system, please consider the frequent postings to this forum, by hardy souls who are excited by the idea of using resource-efficient dfly on their old / slow laptop / notebook computer. These personal computing dfly pioneers (often cash-short students) struggle valiantly with video driver issues (e,g, recent dfly forum tumult regarding NVidia hardware). 

And the wise folks at the centre of the dfly development world, cheerfully help these rugged personal computing pioneers to push dfly into a secondary market of personal workstation usage. So, each personal computing dfly user provides a double boost to the success of dfly (1. adding a user, and 2. helping create a new dfly market segment)

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Here's a second example of how adventurous dfly users are expanding the dfly market. My personal interest n dfly is as a rock-solid reliable and performant operating system with a robust file system, that can run in the "cloud" on a VM on QEMU / KVM virtualization. I cannot cost-justify even the least expensive bare metal server for my website application. But I can justify a VM. 

And because dfly is so very performant, I know I'm going to squeeze great value out of my VM rental fees with dfly. So I can afford to pay the rent for a top-notch reliable and well-supported VM hosting service.

Kudos to the dfly developer team for past efforts making quick fixes in support of dfly users running on virtualized servers !! We saw some pretty rapid fix turnarounds from the dfly development team, in response to calls for help from one dfly user (not me) running a critical production app on dfly under virtualization. This prompt action by the dfly development team really warmed my old heart. And convinced me that my own strategy to use dfly on a VM for my future website (not yet online) is a good one. 

Although I have had to pause my dfly work on a VM at www.elastichosts.com for too many months, I do plan to get back to it. And once my website is up and running on dfly, I do intend to contribute detailed notes on the dfly setup used. This is why I remain subscribed to this forum and read carefully every posting. 

Look forward to upgrading my dfly to 5.0 !! And to kicking the tires on HAMMER2.

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As for contributing money to the dfly project, well, it may seem like a good idea but, money comes with its own problems e.g deciding where and how to spend it (and e.g. avoiding fatal reputational hits caused by mis-spending it ...

My 2 cents worth :)

Best Regards,

Steve

----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Arnkjell Eriksen 
  To: users at dragonflybsd.org 
  Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2017 9:10 AM
  Subject: Support


  I think people who use any BSD should contribute something, if not time than money. If you use something and would like to see it alive than help to keep it alive.

  Congrats on 5.0 release,
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