Schedule for releases

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <alpine.BSF.2.00.1012212215320.36028 at fledge.watson.org>, Robert Wats
on writes:

>Looking at 7.x, I'm struck by how much it has slowed down.  There's a 
>significant user community, but not a significant developer community.

This is a very important point to interpret correctly:

	FreeBSD is whatever its developers make it be.

If there are no developers who has an interest in MFC'ing back to 7.x,
MFCs will not happen, no matter how much we talk about it.

Trying to force developers to maintain multiple branches will not work,
they have to take an interest.

People/companies who wants to see more attention to older releases,
need attack the problem from that angle:  How to interest some
developers in this.

The easiest might simply be to dangle cash in front of developers:

	"We offer $500 to MFC driver foobar to 7.x"

But that gets unwieldy fast and is generally less reliable than
one could hope.

A more structured and more desirabe option is to channel such funds
through either the foundation or a commercial entity, who then pays
developers to pay attention to 7.x

Companies who use Open Source are not adverse to paying for the
service they get, but somebody needs to make it easy for them.

Poul-Henning

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.