The case for FreeBSD

[Diego Calleja]

> So I guess my message would be this: we should focus our energy in
> demonstrating (and making sure) FreeBSD is the best platform out there.
> We've done an incredible job, but we need to keep doing it.  This includes

However, "people" seems to have the impression that 5.X is unstable and slow and
it don't really matters if it's true or not, it's what people associates with the number
"5.x"

In my opinion, 5.x is not so bad as many people wants to think, but i think that the
freebsd developers have "failed" at telling people what those things are, and why
they should look better at 5.x. In the firefox 1.0 release it has been demonstrated
that agressive "marketing" _matters_ even if you are not a company. Firefox is
a great browser, but it would not have been as succesful if there was not so much
noise around it. What Freebsd needs is to make more noise, documeting changes
is good but it doesn't really makes lot of noise.

In my very humble opinion, what freebsd should do is concentrate in stability
and performance tuning for 5.4, then release 5.4 as 6.0 (which is not a bad idea
anyway) saying something like "we've learned of our errors, we've fixed all the major
problems, we've a excellent system because of [list of features] and we're working
hard to continue improving it". It looks stupid but many people are _aways_ going to
associate "5.x" with "failure" no matter how good you make it, calling the next
release 6.x would be a nice way of getting rid of all bad 5.x experiences and
"start again". And the paragraph would not be very untrue anyway. Maybe you hate
such "versionitis", but the true is that you're not going to run out of numbers to make
releases, so why not?


Diego Calleja
[forget the mail address, I'd use other but my ISP is classified as spammer]