[SUGGEST] Reform eclipse and eclipse related ports

[Mark Linimon]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 09:08:22AM -0700, Vizion wrote:
> was horrified that we were unable to counter the rise of MS because
> the **ix community was unable to wrest control of its development
> cycle from engineers and determine its future policy by reference
> to user requirements.

If you haven't noticed, almost everyone who provides FreeBSD to you
is a _volunteer_.  Most of them are engineers or developers or system
administrators or the like.  They work on FreeBSD mostly because they
consider it A Neat Thing; there's no money, and not much glory, in it
otherwise.

If you, personally, want to set up an entity that develops a FreeBSD-
based product with a feature set defined on a completely user-driven
basis (e.g. something like a "Linux distro"), feel free to do so.  IMHO
you would be meeting a lot of people's needs.  I would even hope that you
could make a solid commercial entity out of it.  If it had a good enough
business model, I would probably even send you a resume.

But in the meantime, while we try to _listen_ to what the users want, in
the end of the day what gets _built_ is what any individual contributor
wants to build -- for whatever their own motivations are.

Simply repeating over and over again that the developers are to some
extent "bad guys" for not immediately changing the way that the code is
set up to suit you personally is not going to provide any extra positive
motivation to these individuals.

But I suspect this point is going to be lost on you, because you seem
to want it free, and your way, and right now.  To the extent that that's
true, I predict that you are going to continue to be very frustrated and
unhappy with FreeBSD -- or, for that matter, any other community-based
effort.

Let me know if you get that funding together, I honestly think it would
be an interesting project.

mcl