Where is FreeBSD going?

Rahul Siddharthan rsidd at online.fr
Tue Jan 6 20:13:09 PST 2004


Brad Knowles wrote:
[... linux vs freebsd stuff from Brad and Paul ... ]
I've only had FreeBSD experience on the desktop lately, but I think 
FreeBSD 5.0 was already more "stable" than Linux 2.4.x for x<10 at
least.  Even with the present lot of 2.4 linux kernels, one runs into
all sorts of little non-reproducible problems (unkillable processes 
due to I/O problems, problems under heavy load, etc) that I've never
seen in FreeBSD.  Linus has now released 2.6.0 when it's clearly not
ready, because bugs won't get fixed unless people use it widely, he
says.  So maybe FreeBSD is more conservative in numbering than Linux
(2.6.0 corresponds to 5.0-DP1 at best) but that's not a bad thing.

[ ... Matt Dillon ... ]
> >  OK, I've never run into that. Over on the DragonFly stuff, he seems
> >  pleasant enough and his ideas are innovative, strong, if sometimes...
> >  *cough*... eccentric (e.g. replacing sysinstall with an Apache server
> >  and a load of PHP...), but I'll accept I haven't seen that, and I
> >  know others have had their problems there.
> 
>         Well, since it's his project, I'm sure he feels a lot more 
> secure.

No, I have exactly the same impression from his FreeBSD mailing list
postings too, and many others said the same thing when he was chucked
out.  He was always willing to help inexperienced people and his mails
were a pleasure to read for their technical detail.  The impression
given out then (eg, by Greg Lehey in DaemonNews) was that he had two
faces to his personality: the friendly help-newbies one, and an
aggressive behind-the-scenes one that only showed up when dealing with
other developers.

So Matt was easy with newbies and aggressive with other developers.
Somehow (being from an academic background) I can sympathise with
that.  On the other hand, many of FreeBSD's key developers are rather
curt and abrasive with newbies, while being (apparently) gentle with
other developers.  Is that a good thing?  From the project management
point of view (get 5-STABLE out the door quick) I don't know, but from
the advocacy point of view (convert new users), I certainly fear the
answer is no.

I have to agree with many people that the internal issues and
half-truths pointed out by the troll haven't been great PR for FreeBSD
lately.  I've not advocated FreeBSD lately, not because of worries
about the quality of 5.x but because of unease about its future and
the attitude of its leaders, and the turning point in my feelings
towards FreeBSD was probably the chucking-out of Matt Dillon.

Rahul


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