Where is FreeBSD going?

[Paul Robinson]

Wes Peters wrote:

>People who hate rarely require rational reasons for hating.  Attempting to 
>apply logic to that which is not logical is not likely to produce useful 
>results.
>
Incorrect. Everybody who hates believes they have a rational reason for 
doing so. That others do not think that those reasons are rational is 
why hatred increases, and why ultimately, Europe has, on the whole and 
recently (last 60 years) in a more fragmented fashion, spent the last 
2,000 years at war. But that's another issue.

>Advocacy is important only if you want to conquer the world.  Brett 
>apparently does; many of us just want an operating system that meets our 
>needs, and don't particularly care what somebody else uses.  IMO, casual 
>'desktop' or 'laptop' computer users are probably better served by Mac OS 
>X than anything I want to turn FreeBSD into, which is why my 68 year old 
>father is a Mac owner.
>
And that's all well and good. But if you don't consult end-users in 
general, you're going down a slippery slope. Do not be suprised if after 
years of hard work when you finally -RELEASE, if the world of end-users 
sidles up to you at the launch party and whispers in your ear "You 
realise what you've produced is a pile of shit, right?" - you never 
listened to what they wanted, and so not suprisingly you missed it. If 
you don't have a set of aims to measure by, it's oh so easy to claim 
success when all the outsiders think you've spent too much time on the 
crack pipe.

All I'm suggesting (and no, I'm not the troll, but I'd thank him, 
whoever he is), is that maybe the Theo de Raadt school of thought that 
"only developers count" is not a grown-up, mature and efficient system 
of software development when we all have definite goals in mind. Nobody 
is asking anybody to work for free. I'm suggesting that non-developers 
can assist developers in refining the project's goals, aims, direction 
and make sure that the work the developers carry out is the best possible.

-- 
Paul Robinson