Oh and people who keep suppressing honest criticism by marking comments dead are also quite annoying.
But go ahead and keep it up, whoever you are. As they say if the facts don't support the theory, they must be disposed of. My original statement:
People who misrepresent their part in successes and obscure or gloss over their role in failures bother me, especially when said individuals go on to offer advice such as yours about something as difficult as finding the right problem to solve and solving it in a practical way.
I really don't have a dog in this particular race but anything that could substantiate those numbers[1] or your other claims would be much more convincing and satisfying and go a long way to quelling my objections to your earlier comments.
[1] Millions of units? At a few thousand each that would mean FreeGate would have done around a billion dollars of business. Odd for a company so few have heard about.
Well, people who misrepresent their part in successes and obscure or gloss over their role in failures bother me, especially when said individuals go on to offer advice such as yours about something as difficult as finding the right problem to solve and solving it in a practical way.
I really don't have a dog in this particular race but anything that could substantiate those numbers[1] or your other claims would be much more convincing and satisfying and go a long way to quelling my objections to your earlier comments.
[1] Millions of units? At a few thousand each that would mean FreeGate would have done around a billion dollars of business.
Well, people who misrepresent their part in successes and obscure or gloss over their role in failures bother me, especially when said individuals go on to offer advice such as yours about something as difficult as finding the right problem to solve and solving it in a practical way.
I really don't have a dog in this particular race but anything that could substantiate those numbers or your other claims would be much more convincing and satisfying and go a long way to quelling my objections to your earlier comments.
From my perspective[1], instead of being a good example of a company that knew the right product to build and the right way to get it built, I think it just shows what happens when a company gets some bubble funding, tries to build "The Right Thing" and gets forced into an acquisition when it turns out too hard to do and the easy money runs out.
I find your quality claims rather incredible but I have no experience with your box. However I do find it rather curious and ironic that you of all people, an original member of the Java team, were burned by quality problems in Java. I know WORA fooled a lot of newbies but shouldn't you of all people known enough about Java at that time to have avoided being bit by those?
Perhaps you personally benefitted from the deal and I'm sure it was fun while it lasted, but your overall rationalization leaves me unsatisified.
Let's be serious here. If FreeGate
a. knew what to build
b. knew how to build it
we'd all know about it.
[1] Well, I could have posted this from the HN account I abandoned 4 years ago but who cares. I'm just a FreeBSD contributor who got wind of what FreeGate was doing second hand and was a bit saddened when I heard about the whole database thing. That meant I thought they would be unlikely to ever be able to contribute back to the FreeBSD codebase in a meaningful way (e.g. the way Whistle did with netgraph).
FreeGate? Wasn't that the company that thought the way to build a manageable router appliance was to take FreeBSD and rewrite all the software to use a custom built database instead of their existing config files (without /etc/passwd, /etc/hosts, etc)?
Didn't that mean replacing a large body of stable working code and engineering knowledge with fresh stuff with unknown behavior possibly understood by no more than one or two people in the entire world?
Didn't that cause recruiting headaches, quality issues and schedule slips causing them to almost entirely miss the window for their product?
I'd think it a bit disingenuous to call that company a success. If anything they should serve as an example of what happens when a company's technical leadership identifies the wrong problem to solve.
Edit: there appears to be a timeline here http://www.freegate.net.au/news/press_releases.html
with plenty of mention of funding and partnerships starting in 1997 but no announcements of actual shipments or sales.
But go ahead and keep it up, whoever you are. As they say if the facts don't support the theory, they must be disposed of. My original statement:
People who misrepresent their part in successes and obscure or gloss over their role in failures bother me, especially when said individuals go on to offer advice such as yours about something as difficult as finding the right problem to solve and solving it in a practical way.
I really don't have a dog in this particular race but anything that could substantiate those numbers[1] or your other claims would be much more convincing and satisfying and go a long way to quelling my objections to your earlier comments.
[1] Millions of units? At a few thousand each that would mean FreeGate would have done around a billion dollars of business. Odd for a company so few have heard about.