Re: [cobalt-developers] 2.2.14 kernel

[Tim Hockin <thockin@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Dennis wrote:

> Maybe Cobalt's market is selling to the brain-dead, non linux savvy
> community. But there is a whole (huge) market you are missing by
> (apparently) being 1 or 2 engineers short. My point, if you care, is that
> for the amount of money you raised you could sell a LOT more units by
> having a couple more people.

We are always ready to hire available talent - you'd be surprised (given
how popular Linux has become) how hard it is to hire anyone who has the
level of experience and enthusiasm we want.  There are a lot of linux
hackers out there, but most folks who are hardcore OS guys don't want to
work at Cobalt, they want to be designing a new OS :)  Unfortunately,
that is not the business we are in.

> But .14 is not yet released, and .16 is almost out....so really .12 is
> being shipped and 16pre is available. So you are "almost" only 2 revisions
> back. The ethernet contoller fixes for the intel processor was not released
> until .15, so you may be short on that also.

the .15 eepro100 update also has a MAJOR performance impact, as well as
a slew of bugs of it's own.  It may fix YOUR problems, but we sell
thousands of systems, and I need to make sure it works EVERYWHERE.  We
have a 2.2.14 available on teh ftp site, into which you can easily drop
the 2.2.15 eepro100.c and recompile - watch your bandwidth capabilities
drop by 10 fold.  I am working with the driver maintainers to understand
teh problem better.

> Good thing Im  not a stockholder, because a company that raised as much as
> you have should have more engineers keeping your product up to date. Worse
> than that, you dont even seem to understand the impact on your bottom line.

As I said before, I appreciate your honesty.  I will certainly pass this
input on to the decision makers, and we'll se what comes of it.

Tim

-- 
Tim Hockin
Software Engineer / OS Engineer
Cobalt Networks
thockin@xxxxxxxxxx