Why are so many people using 4.x?

[Vaaf]

Hello Vladimir!

First off, thank you for your worthy input.

You're a very wise man.

>30 years of development and continual introduction of new features
>build on top of existing ones is considered a very good design. And
>FreeBSD is still extensible and growing, despite of its age.

Yes, the fact that it's still ongoing is amazing.

If it has managed to keep going for 30 years, it will surely keep
on going for another 30 years.

What I meant was, the fundamentals for FreeBSD was set 30 years
ago. Isn't it time we change that?

>And FreeBSD is not a skyscraper neigther literally, nor metaphorically
>- it's more like a spaceship - a very robust one - gives you the means
>and tools to save your life in deep space when a threat to your life
>appears and there is noone around.

I think you're watching too much scifi.

>Before even starting talking about design, we should give proper
>definition for this concept.
>What is good design?

It's pretty well defined at http://www.designcouncil.org.uk

>How do we measure one design against an alternative one?

You ask an experienced designer, preferably an architect.
That's the only way, otherwise you'll just be trying to bite your own tail.

>The widespread notion of good desing is related to the ability to
>maintain, extent and comprehend easily some complex system.

No. Good design is transforming something complex into something easy.

FreeBSD is complex.

>30 years... You do the math!

?

>I'm not sure you're ready to present a new and revolutionary design
>(you should start a new threat on that). It's more like you're in
>search of volunteers to your FreeBSD Critisism Project.

I should be ready in a few weeks.

If you're interested I'd be glad to show it to you!

>Revolutionary design means starting from scratch  - this would be a
>huge, tremendous investment of time and efforts(choose a platform, a
>language, write a compiler for it, start building a kernel, write
>completely new device drivers - Microsoft have its Singularity
>Research Project - an operating system written entirely in C#, but
>they don't share the tools - the C# compiler and linker they use to
>build that system, neighter the code - you can get just a couple of
>PowerPoint presentions, an interview, and a short 50 page long paper,
>about the features that this system will introduce - on the other hand
>you can get all of the FreeBSD source code, tones and tones of
>documentation, and hundreds of ready to help you people - FOR FREE).

Revolutionary design, according to Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, one of the most popular science models of our time,
characterizes science (where the same applies to design) as going from
normal science to science in crisis and from science in crisis to scientific
revolution. To me there's a crisis now because I personally believe things
are moving in the wrong direction. Again, this is just personal.

>And there's no guarantee that this new design would last even 5 years.

You're absolutely right!

>At some point in time this will probably happen, but it won't be
>FreeBSD. FreeBSD is not a vendor - it's an existing and evolving
>operating system and a commited community of FreeBSD users. The
>emphasis is on evolving.
>If we want to stick to FreeBSD, the new design should be evolutionary
>one, which is pretty different in concept - we would start from a
>familiar code base and would slowly integrate changes (just like the
>DragonFly project) into this base, thus creating a new BSD branch of
>development.
>
>Best Regards,
>Vladimir Tsvetkov

Thank you again for your useful response!

All the best,
Vaaf