From: Paul A Vixie [mailto:vixie@mfnx.net] Sent: Saturday, February 03, 2001 3:03 PM

...

The category "OS vendors" gets a little fishy... Do Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox get on the list if they sign the NDA? How about Patrick Volkerding?

If they're mature trustworthy people (I know Linus but not those other guys) and if they need some time to get patches ready for large user bases, then I feel sure that they'd be welcomed gladly.

The catagory "OS vendors" may be a canard. MHSC is a Caldera VAR, but we also have live servers and so do our clients. We had already deployed BIND-8.2.3 before Caldera even made it available. That channel takes too long. I'm not a direct Sun customer, but I'll wager that Sun has yet to make it available to their customers. The same goes for HP and IBM.