Announcing: nuOS 0.0.9.1b1 - a whole NEW FreeBSD distro, NOT a fork

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On Jul 7, 2013, at 4:06 PM, "Chad J. Milios" <freebsd-list at nuos.org> wrote:

> This doesn't provide anything to the core OS that can't already be done, albeit with many more keystrokes and the peril of possible confusion and misconfiguration. The main thing here is a collaboration of what we consider best practices and consolidating the more useful configurations into consistent recipes with useful simplification of parameters. We don't mean to add yet another layer in the name of simplicity that obscures or hides the real nuts and bolt beneath and limits your options.
> 
> We want to make things more flexible and easier at the same time by using the sanctioned FreeBSD ways of doing things, simply allowing the ones with most merit to rise to the top, hopefully through community involvement. We've had a lot of success using this in our production deployments and hope that we don't have to be the only ones to maintain it forever. It is an open offer of contribution to The FreeBSD Project but it probably doesn't exactly belong there yet. It's a layer above, so to speak, and we think we have a place in the community working side by side.

[ As requested - removing freebsd-hackers and retaining only freebsd-chat ]

I, for one, am happy to see folks willing to strike out in new directions with the FreeBSD code base.  After 20 years of fairly gradual evolution, I think it's fair to say that any major conceptual leaps are probably going to happen outside the project, and not necessarily eternally but just until they've proven themselves.

That said, I see some flaws with the project as currently constituted:

1. Too much buzz-wordy mission statement, too little emphasis on technical goals and/or specific points of differentiation.  The nuos.org web site is a veritable wall of (green!) text that is so verbose as to be unreadable.  If there's a purpose to the project, it's so obscured by high-concept statements that it's essentially opaque.  If you can't reduce both the mission statement and the key points of technical differentiation of your project to 6 one-sentence bullets or less, you're doing something wrong!

2. You're trying to have your cake and eat it too when you create a new project with a new name then say things like "it's not a fork" and "we're going with the sanctioned FreeBSD way of doing things".   If you just wanted to create a "distro", you could have done it in far less heavy-weight fashion with some special build tools that could be run against a FreeBSD source tree to spit out a custom installation image, just many other BSD variants currently doing (to good effect).   FreeNAS and pfSense are great examples of where a distinct brand was necessary.  nuOS is not, at least not yet.

Call it what it is:  A fork.  That doesn't mean it has to be a fork in perpetuity, but that's what it is now.  Furthermore, you're not going to attract many people by being just a couple of standard deviations away from FreeBSD.  If you're going to create any compelling reason to run "nuOS" at all, it has to be more ambitious.  Just shuffling everything into ZFS filesystems by default has been done - check out a PC-BSD distribution sometime.  The whole configuration / startup management picture that you claim to want to preserve from FreeBSD, on the other hand, is really showing its age.

3. You've put the cart before the horse in emphasizing donations and soliciting bitcoin to such a strong degree at the very outset of the project, before it's proven its value to anyone.  That runs the real risk of a lot of folks in the community dismissing you as "just the latest in a long line of wanna-be profiteers."  First you attract a user community THEN you look for donations to keep development going, if and as necessary.   That's not just a nice-to-have item, it's pretty crucial to any success the project may have.

- Jordan