[BlueOnyx:00272] Re: upgrading to BlueOnyx ?

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Gerald,

> Yes, we will all miss Brian,

Absolutely! He's a great guy and will be missed. Although we've been competing 
directly (business wise) we always had a great working relationship and traded 
ideas, concepts and code towards the greater goal. 

> If you remember we originally attempted to 'sell' the install CD.

Hehehe. Yeah, I remember that. And that CD really got things started. Before 
that BlueOnyx was just available as tarball install with a setup script. 
Although it installed easily enough, people were discouraged by that. Once 
Brian's CD was out, things really got started.

> Then, some business, I think "firstlight networks" which was pushing
> TLAS came out with a free CBQ install CD.
> I don't recall, but it was not anything near as good as Brian's
> installer.

Yeah, you have to keep in mind there that Hisao worked for TLAS and had helped 
them to port the RaQ550 source code to Turbolinux. At the same time he heavily 
invested time into working on BlueQuartz. Turobolinux TLAS had a slower 
release cycle than BlueQuartz, so pretty quickly BlueQuartz became more 
sophisticated than TLAS. 

Then throw in Brian's BlueQuartz CD and you had people wondering: "Why should 
I pay $950 US for TLAS, if the free BlueQuartz is better?" So people started 
voting with their feet and their wallets.

Additionally "that very company that sold TLAS preinstalled on hardware and 
named it something else" started alienating third party software vendors, so 
quickly they had a platform for which no third party software was available 
anymore. The rest is history. :o)

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber