Where is FreeBSD going?

Brett Glass brett at lariat.org
Mon Jan 5 12:53:07 PST 2004


At 12:40 PM 1/5/2004, Munden, Randall J wrote:
  
>Right.  What concerns me most is the rise in the incidence of trolls all
>trolling about the same subject or along the same vein.  Would someone
>please explain what is going on?  As a production user of fBSD this is
>troubling.

It's probably one of the Slashdot "BSD is dead" trolls. The fact is, though,
that there ARE things about FreeBSD that could stand improvement. These
days, when I build a box, I am torn between using FreeBSD 5.x -- which is
not ready for prime time but is at least being worked on actively -- and
using 4.9, which isn't as stable as it should be because the developers
broke the cardinal rule of making radical changes to -STABLE. This *is*
a real issue for those of us who are admins.

FreeBSD also keeps falling farther and farther behind Linux in the area
of advocacy (and, hence, corporate adoption). Again, this is a governance 
issue. Many of the developers actually have an antipathy toward advocacy, 
since they dislike answering newbie FAQs and don't want too many
people to adopt the OS for fear that it'll overcrowd their "sandbox." So,
some of the criticism is actually valid.

--Brett



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