FreeBSD problems and preliminary ways to solve

[Pedro F. Giffuni]

First of all, thanks to Vadim for his initial post: it's
evident he spend a lot of time preparing it.

I just want to give my 0.02$ to this discussion:

FreeBSD 9.0 is a huge step in the right direction in many
ways. Perhaps what I like most is getting done with the
last GNU toolchain and ZFS updates and maintaining the well
known stability and performance along with the new features.

Unfortunately some necessary updates didn't make it in time,
in particular pkgng and the X.Org drivers. The new installer
is promising but lately installing and configuring XOrg has
become a nightmare so I find myself suggesting people to use
PC-BSD instead.

Some rather important changes that seem critical for the future
like ARM-EABI and a new toolchain seem to be lacking developers
and perhaps are going on too slowly to expect them to work in
the near future but, all in all, I should mention that FreeBSD
is still very influential and competitive. I've seen posts not
too long ago where linux developers praise FreeBSD for keeping
the development pace despite having a much smaller group.

What I think is that perhaps FreeBSD shouldn´t be expecting
to be a better linux than linux, simply because there is no
company related to any BSD in capacity to compete with, say,
Redhat. We still can do pretty much everything linux does
with a little extras, but we are a actually niche market and
it actually hasn't worked bad at all for us. 

Concerning BSD sites moving to linux to reduce costs, as a
long time Yahoo user I have to say that doesn't seem to be
going very well for them. I am pretty sure such a process
is painful for them as it is for the end user.

IMHO, we need to focus on the two fields where people expect
FreeBSD to shine:

- Servers: performance has always been our strong point
  but perhaps we should be focusing on ease of use. Ohh...
  BTW, jails are awesome!

- Embedded devices: FreeBSD's license is key here.

I don't think the FreeBSD Foundation has been clueless at all
though, coordinating efforts in a voluntary project like this
*is* tough. Some people complain because we release too fast
but some also complain because the release cycle is too long.
We can't satisfy everyone and development just goes on.

Pedro.