Why?	Oct 11 20:34 UTC 2004

#5 of 5: by Jan Wolter (janc) on Mon, Oct 11, 2004 (16:20):
 I was out of the loop on that decision.  There was a board meeting, Marcus
 was there (as a member of the board, I think) and the decision came out not
 to use Picospan.  I think most of the Picospan users won't notice that they
 are running Fronttalk instead.  I think a few bugs will be found, reported,
 and fixed, and then it'll be fine.  I think the motivation of the decision
 was that Grex doesn't really want to be dependent on software it cannot
 modifiy.  It is beyond Marcus's legal capability to give Grex that power over
 Picospan.  I had understood that there was an OpenBSd version of Picospan,
 but it has never been installed on NextGrex.


Why was such an important decision made without user input?

response 2 of 5:

Oct 11 21:36 UTC 2004

The board did not pass a motion about Picospan.  However, it was the feeling
of those present the last time we talked about it, that we might have to
wait a long time before Picospan was ready to be ported to Open BSD.  As far
as I know, that's still the case.  Since we've waited a long time already
for NextGrex to come up, the consensus (though not unanimous) was that we
shouldn't wait for Picospan to be ready before changing over to the new
machine.  Since we have a very viable alternative in FrontTalk, hopefully
the conferencing community should hardly skip a beat.

response 4 of 5:

Oct 12 03:33 UTC 2004

I use picospan on GreX, but fronttalk from m-net is indeed usually faster.