Policy for removing working code

[Oliver Fromme]

perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:
 > [...]
 > Beyond that, I suspect
 > that dropping an HBA or three would have been far less burdensome
 > on users of the hardware in question than dropping ISDN is on its
 > users.  One can always replace a no-longer-supported HBA with a
 > supported one, or (worst case) replace the whole box.  In contrast,
 > someone located beyond DSL range may have no other viable option
 > than ISDN.

It is a common misconception that ISDN is only used by
people who can't get DSL or other connectivity.  I can
only guess that ISDN is very uncommon in the USA, but
it isn't in other parts of the world.

In Germany (and possible other countries), ISDN is still
very popular.  I have ISDN at home (in addition to DSL
at 18 Mbps); it costs almost the same as a "normal"
telephone line while providing many useful features.

Many (most?) companies here do have ISDN, including the
one I work for.  We use FreeBSD's I4B stack to implement
an answering machine and fax services.  This is the reason
why we still have to run FreeBSD 6.x on one machine, but
when 6.x runs EOL we will have to make a decision (which
might end up putting a different OS on that machine,
depending on the choices at that time).

At home I used ISDN as a fall-back when the DSL line didn't
work for some reason.  I lost that feature about two years
ago when I updated beyond 6.x.  Fortunately DSL outages are
very rare at my provider, so the decision wasn't difficult
in this particular case.

Don't get me wrong -- I understand very well why the I4B
code had to be removed from FreeBSD.  It was an unfortunate,
but necessary decision.

Best regards
   Oliver

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