Theo de Raadt says Pegasos Bad

[hirschma]

Got this from the OpenBSD Misc mailing list today - from the head of the OpenBSD project:

"The saga continues.

I urge everyone to spread the news far and wide that the Pegasos powerpc platform vendor ... is quite simply, a con-artist company.

Nothing really works, it is all about 4 years from ever going anywhere, they are essentially bankrupt, the machine architecture is  more closed than the PC architecture -- the machines are SLOW and will be expensive -- and it is all a fraudulant rip-off operation as far as
we can see.  I suspect the North American wing of this is an
investment scam operating; since it owns nothing, and it appears some
European outfit owns all the hardware.

In time, Dale or I may post some mail to show what has really gone on between them and us.

I cannot remain quiet.  After 3.5 is out, the code to support that platfrom will be removed from the source tree.

In any case, I am quite confident that there are almost NO WORKING machines in existance -- and we've got some mail that makes that clear.  Apparently there are only a handful of working G4 cpus in North America...

As I said, I believe it is smoke and mirrors and investment games."

I find this interesting, as Genesi promotes OpenBSD as one of their main operating systems. Comments?

You can find the same messages in the OpenBSD archives. Here's a link:

Theo's scathing Pegasos message...

[hirschma]

Hey, don't shoot the messenger. I saw this on the OpenBSD Misc list, and I passed it on. I was interested in getting a Pegasos specifically for running OpenBSD, and well, now, I ain't gonna do it No other agenda.

At any rate, the quote is genuine enough. Do a search, and you'll find a quote from a few weeks ago about how the firmware is totally broken - also from Theo.

Jonathan

[hirschma]

Jonathan

itix wrote:

I tried but could not find that. Could you provide a link?

First, here's Theo's previous messages, dated 2/20/04 (sorry for the raw language...):

"At this point, I would recommend against anyone buying a piece of hardware from the Pegasos people because their firmware is SO BUSTED that it makes Apple roms look like hot {bleep}.

If you want a powerpc machine, I must relunctantly recommend Apple hardware, since the alternatives are impossible to use.

ps. And their tech support people have proved to be intensely arrogant about the bugs in their software..."

You should be able to find it on the Sigmasoft archives, but they're down right now

I'll also make note that there are many reasons to want to run OpenBSD on non-x86 platforms, and that Pegasos would be a great solution if the project's leader didn't condemn it.

Jonathan

[hirschma]

takemehomegrandma wrote:
(Someone actually registered a new account here on amiga.org just to
bring us this "news item". I find this somewhat interesting. And
touching. An "exodus individual" that has come back home perhaps? ;-))

I guess I could be called an exodus individual - I ran a business on Amigas back in the '80s/'90s. Put myself though school doing graphics for local car dealership commercials.

I'd love to have a new Amiga platform - hell, I'm toying with the idea of recreating my old Amiga desktop - but the Pegasos was particularly interesting to me since I'm a big OpenBSD supporter - and Genesi identifies it as one of their major OS's.

So, when someone that I greatly respect, and who is widely respected, for his OS work, I figured it was newsworthy. Yes, Theo De Raadt may be consider an a-hole by a lot of folks, but he's smart, he's dealt with all the weirdness of the PC world, he's accomplished a lot - and when he makes such charges, I think that we all should at least take note. He's earned that much, IMO.

I wouldn't read much more into it. I'm not affiliated with any of the pretenders to the Amiga throne. I just like cool computing.

Jonathan