diskless (or rather, readonly)

[Mark Linimon]

On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 09:49:12PM +0100, James Mansion wrote:
> Its really not OK to present something as being the best thing since
> sliced bread 'as a complete system - not just a kernel' and then
> run and hide and say 'you found a bug - fix it yourself and send
> us a patch' at the first sign of trouble.

No one has run and hidden away.  I think you completely misunderstand how
Open Source projects that are driven by volunteers work.

FreeBSD is a "bottom-up" project, driven by people who contribute to it.
There is no "boss" passing out assignments saying "Person X needs to work
on problem Y now".  Person X works on what Person X wants to work on and
that's it.  To some extent, compromise and peer pressure come into play
to try to drive rough consensus on what should be worked on, so as little
work as possible is duplicated or wasted.

If Person Z tries to tell Person X, "you must work on problem Y", Person
X has every right to say, "sorry, I have other priorities" (and think, "who
made Person Z my boss, anyway?").  In fact, that's generally what happens,
since most FreeBSD developers have a long list of things they want to fix/
work on/whatever.

So when you complain "Problem Y is bad", there is no particular Person X
who is obligated to work on it.  You might find such a person by posting
on the list or using send-pr(1), but there is no guarantee.

I think you're going to find that any of the BSD or Linux flavors are
primarily made from volunteer contributions, as well.

Finally, I'm not aware of any OS that doesn't have both source and
documentation bugs, including the commercial ones.  Good luck on finding
one.  In the meantime, I think I'll just be done with this thread.

mcl