Phil - Thanks

Dear Allan, Kris and JT,

I just wanted you to know that as a current non-user of the BSD group of
operating systems (although hopefully soon to be), your podcast series has
been absolutely fascinating to watch and get information from. I
particularly enjoyed the interview with Matt Macy regarding the import of
DRM drivers from Linux to FreeBSD, which is of great interest to me as it
would enable my Radeon HD 7850 to work.

I am a long-time Windows and Linux (Fedora and LFS mainly) user, and can
code to a (reasonably) acceptable standard in C, C++ and Java, as well as a
bit of PHP and Javascript. My university degree is about to end - I chose as
my dissertation project to write a PlayStation 1 emulator in Java which uses
dynamic recompilation from MIPS machine code to Java bytecode to speed up
the emulation - I could have written it in my favourite language of all time
(C) but I fancied a challenge! Sadly, I have run out of time so at the
moment although it now runs commercial software, it is in dire need of
optimization - I will be continuing my work therefore in the weeks and
months to come, and perhaps making a port for the ports tree, who knows! I
have been looking to get involved in Free Software/Open Source from a coding
perspective for a while, and my question has always been where to start - I
want to feel like I can make a difference, and not worry about license
zealotry and politics too much.

This is why the FreeBSD project in particular appeals to me, and the fact
that the entire base system including toolchain and kernel etc. are
developed together as one means I am much more enthusiastic about getting
involved and hopefully getting it running on my machine soon - my degree
deadline is next week, and some of the tools I run require Windows, but
after that I want to sit down with the handbook and get FreeBSD running well
on my system. Anyway, just so you know, you have made a great and
interesting podcast, keep up the good work!

Regards,
Phil
A fan from the UK