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New FreeBSD Core Team Elected
BSD-Pat writes "A new FreeBSD core team has been elected for the first time in the project's history. The BSDToday article can be found here.
I'm personally excited that this seems to open up the playing field for developers to get involved on a deeper level with FreeBSD and choose the direction to take for the future." Update: 10/14 01:44 PM by H :BSD-Pat sent an update saying that the story was actually broken by Daily Daemon News.
Its true though. Is it potshotting to point out flaws in something else? When MS says "Windows is a much more robust enterprise computing solution than Linux" they are taking potshots. When someone points out an actual flaw in a plan or design (like when Mindcraft pointed out that the TCP/IP stack needed some work for high-end hardware) then it is totally valid and in fact useful. In the case of mindcraft, the kernel developers took a look at the problems and fixed it.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Would you consider this a problem of supply or demand? I don't know what the BSD culture is like, but I don't know any male geeks offhand who don't like the idea of female geeks. Calling it an "old boys' network" kind of implies that men are somehow trying to exclude women from the game, but in my experience there just aren't that many female players.
Obviously it makes sense to select the "politicians" from the group of people that are interested in participating in the project. If no women were interested in participating, it is unsurprising that none were available for selection.
The problem, if it be considered such, does not lie in the selection of the FreeBSD core team, but rather way back when people decide what sorts of things they want to get involved with. Where there weren't any women that put FreeBSD on their lists.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I think it all boiled down to concerns that the core team weren't doing enough, that they were doing too much, that they were too closed off from the rest of the committers, that there were some people not doing any work just lurking there, and that some new blood would probably help revitalise things.
The idea for the new "democratically elected" core is that it will be re-elected on a regular basis (I can't remember exactly, but something like one or two years), and that it will allow people to get time off, take a break, return to real work without the overhead of core, and allow new, fresh, and revitalised blood back onto core.
I'm a FreeBSD committer, and my opinion is that is good - some core team members have been hanging on just because they were afraid no new blood would replace them - earlier this year a core member left core so he could concentrate on "real hacking" instead, and wasn't replaced. The new blood means people more motivated and eager, and often with more time and new perspectives.
"I sent email to [LINUS] a couple of years ago, offering to help, buy stock, port something, whatever. Never heard anything back. So fuck [him] ... (mother joke deleted) ... and the horses [he] rides in on. Fuck [him] [] with a wire brush!"
Listen to yourself rant. Your just bitching because they rejected you. At that time period, Be was extremely supportive of developers. Ask anybody who has worked with them. Just because they didn't get to you doesn't mean that they are somehow evil. And www.beunited.org is a user group, and they are quite a friendly bunch over there.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It would be pretty impressive to come up with a female on a team out of a group of available nominees of all males.
The reason the nominees are all male is because there aren't any repeat female contributors. I see no reason for this to be due to any cost of contributing, nor to any adverse behaviour, unless it was entirely private and not on the regular mailing lists, and the female in question not making a public announcement about it, which I doubt is the case.
If that's not the case - if there is a cost to contributing, or there is negative behaviour that prevents you from contributing again, then kindly contact me directly (I'm nbm at FreeBSD.org), because I'd like to hear about it - bad reactions are not what anyone working on FreeBSD wants to happen to contributors.
If anyone (male or female) wishes to contribute to FreeBSD, it's very easy, and they can feel free to ask me via email if they have any questions, preferably after reading the relevant documentation.
Neil (nbm)
The problem is that the ascension of power is NEVER that easy. Not even Linux is immune from egoists, and if Linus goes away, there is going to be a major transition period while things readjust. As Linux becomes more popular, the "Grand Linux pooba" position will become more coveted. Take, for example, the US government (to strech a metaphor) The main reason why the US government is so phenominally stable is because everything is down on paper. There is none of this "I'd guess Alan Cox..." business. They have it mapped out very far. If this guy dies, this guy gets it. If he dies, this guy gets it. There is no ambiguity, and thus there is little chance of a power struggle. The point is that FreeBSD has plan of what to do if the leadership changes, and how to handle changes of leadership. A constitution if you will. Linux has no such plan, and is susceptible to the problems that come from not having a plan.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Or, to coin a phrase ala the Japaneese,t ive"
"ultra-turbo-super-snarky-double-happy-conserva
To get an idea of good sueprlatives, look no further than our good friends in the Japaneese media industry.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Yeah, seriously, you tell them, man. Those Slashdot Moderators have NO sense of humor whatsoever, or we wouldn't have to have mod wars over funny posts, and whatnot.
Actually, wait a minute, isn't it "Trolling At +2 Day", also known in some countries as "Friday"?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Microsoft = Fascism (?)
Actually, Linux is probably a democracy of elites, similar to what you saw in certain countries in a variety of forms during the middle ages and slightly later.
The specific historic example is Poland, who also had the unfortunate element that all group decisions had to be unanimous. This was somewhat un-workable and un-fortunate. [The Linux community does not have this particular flaw.] It also deteriorated from a true brotherhood to a typical group of people trying protect their turf instead of the community, etc. [insert other political rants here]
- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
There's an interesting article @ Daemonews here: http://www.daemonnews.org/200010 /da dvocate.html. It's a short summary of the history of BSD, the various leadership approaches (NetBSD's + FreeBSD's CORE, Linux's benevolent dictator, OpenBSD's hybrid), and other cool stuff. I recommend it.
hi all (george here)
maybe you will remember that microsoft had some goons KILL my nephew's dog. maybe you also remember that i vowed revenge by trying out some other operation systems other than microsoft (windows or nt or 2000.) well this really tall guy at starbucks said i should try FREEBSD. normally i would have ignored him but he was really very tall. so i went to cheap bytes.com and got some FREEBSD cds sent to me.
well my first impression was that my wife liked it, she REALLY thought the free bsd devil was cute. she said "george what a cute devil." well i felt like slapping her because just because they have a cute mascot doesn't mean they have a GOOD operation system. but anyway i said "well now let's just wait and see how it works." after all LINUX has this penguin and my wife gets all blubbery at wildlife so if she thought the demon was cute she probably would go apecrap over the penguin because it is smiling.
now anyway i loaded up the cd and turned on the machine. normally when you install new software from the cd you click on start and then click run and then type "d:" and look for setup.exe. well i was like NOW WHAT IN THE HELL. for some reason this was not there. so i went down to SEARS and asked a nice man with an afro if there was anything i should do, he looked at me like he wanted to kill me, so i got out of there real quick.
any way there was a READ ME file on the cd that i imported into word and it said that i should do this, that and the other thing. so i tried to follow the instructions but what is this about hard disk and partition. PARTITION is what separates cubicals at work. well i didn't know what in the hell so i just tried making some floppies. well that didn't work either. so then what i did is played SOLITAIRE (VEGAS scoring, not standard scoring.) but i (george) lost.
so in conclusion FREEBSD has a long way to go before it is ready to be used by normal people.
-gbd
Much has been made of the difference between men and women (or the lack thereof) but one difference that seems to pop up no matter what rag is running the latest "women in computing" story, is that as a general rule, women tend to see computers as means to an end, while men tend to see computers as an end unto themselves. Whether this is biological, phsychological, or imagined, isn't important. What it does do is explain why there are so many women who are *users* and not as many who are *hackers* (hackers, by definition, being the ones more likely to be interested in Alternative Operating systems). To sum up: to say that there is no woman *qualified* to be part of the BSD core group is blatantly false, I know too many female programmers myself. However, to say that there is a disproportionate ratio of women users vs. women hackers is undeniably true, and thereby leads to a shortage of women in *every* corner of Alt. Os. land. The qualified women are undoubtably programming some routers for Cisco, putting in 80 hour weeks like the rest of us, and just plain don't have the time. I, on the other hand, have the time and interest, but not the skill :-)
:-P)
Hope this perspective clears things up a little, and I also hope I was PC enough (tho. I'll get flamed now for being too PC
What do you want to bet the loosers (assuming there are any) spinn off their own BSD derivative?
Amber Yuan 2k A.D
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
The biggest problem with the "being hit by a bus" scenario is that if Linus gets hit by a bus then someone has to head over to his house and request access to his computer.
AFAIK, Linus has the final say in what goes into the kernel because his computer is the only one that has the current "official" development copy. I'm sure that if the bus incident happened, the people surrounding Linus could get together and work something out, but because they all report to Linus as opposed to each other in regards to what the latest kernel will have, there will be a major transition period.
With FreeBSD, the plane can go down with the entire core team and all the commit people, and the community still has access to the CVS servers. Sure there will also be a transition period, but at least you'd have access to the code.
I wonder how many Linux people realize how much access the *BSD people have to the source. The definitive guide to FreeBSD, "The Complete FreeBSD," even shows, in newbie terms, how to automate your system to do a nightly fetch of the latest *everything* and then do a world build. It would be like having the exact same kernel that Linus is working on right now along with every patch applied by all the developers--no 2.2.18pre or whatever the scheme is!
Regular contributions are like more than three to five contributions ever. Or, rather, if it were defined that way, there would probably still be no regular female contributors.
Regular contributors become committers if they show they're able, and an existing committer asks if they're willing and they accept, and there is no veto by core (can't say I know of any recently).
Personally, I don't think there's any bias against women in the combined committer group, even if it's possible there is in one or a few individuals, and there certainly isn't any with me. It's all business - do the work, get the rewards, even if at first it's just recognition and praise. There is plenty of scope for new contributors, if you're having trouble looking for stuff to do, feel free to contact me. (nbm at FreeBSD.org)
Linus isn't important because of the code he writes. It is just a small part of the code written today. He isn't even important because of the administrative and coordination work he does. Other people could do that, probably even better.
He is important because of the respect he commands. Even when other developers disagree with his technical decisions, no matter how strongly, they don't challenge his right to make these decisions.
This mean we don't get real source forks. Of course, we get lots of minor forks, when people need to add features and fix bugs for another schedule than Linus they have to fork the code. But these forks are clearly so, they define themselves compared to the main trunk, and there is no debate about what is the main trunk.
If Linus was kidnapped by flying saucers[2], and Dave Miller and Alan Cox disagreed about the future of Linux, there would no longer be clear what the "real" Linux was. Alan's or Miller's?
Or what would make them more real than all the practical branches?
--
Per A.
[1] Well, I just did, but I like catchy headlines.
[2] Hope that is less morbid.
Then Al Gore could have been elected, after he loses that other election. After all, he did invent FreeBSD, didn't he?
AFAIK, there is one non native English speakers among the non-elected. Mind you, there is a healthy number of non-americans among elected and non-elected.
The results, to me, seems reflect how active the candidates have been in the FreeBSD technical mailing lists and commit logs, and how important their contributions have been.
And I'd wager at least one of the non-elected would have been elected had he not spent some months away from FreeBSD in this past year.
So it comes down to lack of non-native english speakers candidates. Since any committer was allowed to become a candidate, and FreeBSD has a good number of committers who are non-native english speakers, I have to wonder why that was so.
(8-DCS)
The most work that could be lost would be the difference between the last "testing" release and what Linus has on his computer. In general this is less than a month's work. Today, there is a 10-day difference between the 2.4.0-test9 rekease and whatever has been done since.
But in fact, what would be lost is much less than that, because most of the deltas would be in the hands of the other developers who wrote them, and in the hands of second-stage coordinators like Alan Cox.
All of this hit-by-a-bus talk is pure guff.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Why does every BSD article I have ever read deem it necessary to take potshots at Linux?
In this case, they're touting how much better then BSD development model is than Linux.
Lame.
One thing I noticed, there wasn't much changeover in the core members. I noticed the names were reordered, but many names were the same.
I thought that this was interesting, apparently there was a lot of satisfaction with the initial team.
Would someone more involved with the process explain how this worked? Who could vote, etc?
Alex
Maybe I'm missing something. (I don't follow very closely the "people-related" aspects of projects that I'm not involved in.)
Why did they need a new core? Do they have a term of office which expired? Was there a popular uprising and overthrow of the oppressive bourgeoisie? (Considering that some of the former members are on the list of new members, probably not...)
Some of us non-FreeBSD users are curious.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Define regular.
The BSD rules say that you must have committed at least once in the twelve months previous to the election.
Committers don't meet face to face. No will know your gender unless you tell them. Demonstrate that your code is good and worthwhile and you'll get to be a committers. Commit at least once a year and you'll get to vote.
Simple.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I suppose I was a bit reactionary at first. I use (and admin) Linux and took it as a slight. That's not to say, though, that I haven't had a hankering to try {Free,Open}BSD as of late, as soon as I can get a spare box to try it on.
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We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
So, development could go from "hyper-conservative" to "ultra-conservative"?
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Here we go.. only found 1 pic searching on google..
link
Kinda blurry, but any chick dressing up in a devil costume that's a geek to boot has my vote.
BilldaCat
She's so SCSI.
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blinko - "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down"
As far as I can tell, neither Linus nor the FreeBSD core team have much power to compel. People go along with them because they want to do so, and if they had good reasons to do otherwise, they would
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Talk about him getting hit by a bus is absurdly morbid and is getting to be very tiresome, too. He could simply decide to go on to something else. If he did so, one of the other well-known kernel developers would step into his place. Alan could do it in a blink, but he's not the only one.
If you study the kernel development, you will find that it is at least as decentralized as that of any BSD if not more. The fact that there is one figurehead does not change the fact that the kernel development is actually carried out with no formal organization whatsoever, and it works darned well without one.
Another point that people don't think about enough is that these kernels will be finished eventually. Development will go on to something new. Free Software is forever, but Linux, Unix, and BSD are just steps on the way.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
1. Become a FreeBSD committer.
This is most easily done by sending enough Problem Reports (see send-pr(1)) that the poor bastards who get to commit all your stuff for you gets tired of it and asks the core team to have brought as a committer.
Committers usually fit in one of the following profiles:
1a. Doc Committers are documentation freaks who go through the handbook, the faq, the web site, the man pages, etc, and actually fix things, add things, etc. There are even the occasional maniacs who track down code hackers and extract, with the help of red hot irons, iron maidens and similar instruments, information required to document a feature.
Suggestion: read freebsd-questions. Make a note of frequently asked questions, and check the answers to it. Write the Q/A to the FAQ. send-pr(1).
1b. Ports committers. These are complete freaks who seems not to have a thing to do in life besides surf the Internet looking for the most arcane pieces of software, and the "port" them to FreeBSD.
Suggestion: look at the software you use that has yet to be part of the FreeBSD ports collection. Read the porters handbook. Follow the instructions in writing the port to FreeBSD (this is often very easy!). send-pr(1).
1c. The code hacker. These are the completely insane persons who go to the trouble of writing code to help the lives of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people around the world, often without getting a single thank you note of recognition. Not only that, but they are often being chased around by docs committers who make use of extremely painful methods to extract information about what they have just written, as if they could remember that! Well, not often enough, actually, but still...
Sugestion: Do you have a problem you need solving, a bug that needs fixing, or a feature you want? Well, write the code for it, and send-pr(1).
2. Become well-known. This is actually easily done. Subscribe and be vocal in -hackers, -current, -stable, -arch and, perhaps a few more choice lists such as -ports, -doc, -scsi, -fs, -mobile, -small, -questions, -chat, -advocacy, besides the ones you'll already find yourself subscribed to, like -committers.
You don't need to be a genius. Listen, present your opinion when an opinion is being asked for, and speak of technical matters when your knowledge enables you to. Never be afraid to ask. Try to avoid flame wars.
3. Candidate yourself to core. This can only be done once every two years, but there is no further requirement aside from being a (active?) committer.
Since you are a woman and there is little female blood around, chances are you'll get elected simply because of gender. Of course, that will happen IF people know you from the mailing lists and commit logs, and you haven't pissed off everyone. But since each committer gets nine votes, I'd wager the chances of them choosing to vote for you just to provide some "balance" is rather large.
(8-DCS)
There are female FreeBSD users, and a good many deal of them are experts in one cs field or another. Why none of them has ever come forth as a committer candidate, if nothing else... beats me.
They can certainly often be found on the secret virtual dens of FreeBSD committers around the net.
(8-DCS)
I think we should go for the naked BSD chick, myself.
BilldaCat
Geek geek Matt Bruce geek geek Henrietta Pussycat geek geek Presidents of the United States of America geek Kitty?
;)
Katz, is that you?
What do I do, when it seems I relate to Judas more than You?
Still not dead.
Oh, come on now, all of you! Almost all new committers are selected simply for the patches they sent. Just check http://www.freebsd.org/support.html#gnats, and count the number of patches submitted by woman, and you'll see it is no "old boys club" that's preventing women from becoming committers.
(8-DCS)
Of course, this assertion has already been disproven at Segfault, not once, but twice. ;-)
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We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
I got my picture taken with her in NY!
> The very fact that Geeks prefer to use such an arcane operating system as UNIX proves my point further.
/tmp/logs/* .
... I think that while most all geeks *do* enjoy complexity, far from all enjoy *senseless* complexity. Complexity in a tool is only acceptable if it allows for more complete control of the problem. It is a rush to understand the full power of an intricate tool. It is at best a relief when you uncover the pointless and silly incompatibilities that have been causing you headaches.
"Your" point has been made time, and time again. Indeed, it's true that many do get off on communicating with their system through arcane symbols. As we all know, Unix is *chock full* of the arcane. Personally, I've been typing garbage like this all day:
% yes | rm -R *; cp
% zgrep `ls`/err_log.Z ERR > isTemp
% p | g `which fvwm`
It's only years of experience that makes me comfortable throwing around this kind of syntax. And that "mastery" does periodically give me a little thrill. What geek doesn't want to be a wizard? Mythical wizards weave intricate and arcane commands to coaxe demons to do their bidding. Unix wizards weave intricate and arcane commands to coaxe daemons to do their bidding. The analogy is so tight that "Unix wizard" is a term used even outside of geek circles.
...but feeling like a wizard doesn't completely overcome the frustration of a poorly designed interface. Daily, I curse tcsh command syntax. It's overly complicated, inconsistent and kludgey. I yearn for something better. Just this afternoon I downloaded and compiled rc. For those who don't know, rc is the shell used in the Plan/9 operating system that Bell Labs created to replace Unix. The shell is an attempt to "clean up" bourne, and make it more consistent. Great idea...now if only people would use it...
Taking this from rambling to a point
I, for one, believe that Unix userland could use a serious overhaul at the command line level. 'find' is an extremely nasty program (it attempts to solve too many problems at once, if you ask me), and I think 'grep' could be made a lot friendlier without losing any power. The shells could have simpler and more consistent syntax for backquoting, and creating lists...
Anyway...not *all* of us are content with the complexity of Unix. Even wizards get sick of niggly details...
--Lenny
To sum up: to say that there is no woman *qualified* to be part of the BSD core group is blatantly false, I know too many female programmers myself. However, to say that there is a disproportionate ratio of women users vs. women hackers is undeniably true, and thereby leads to a shortage of women in *every* corner of Alt. Os. land. The qualified women are undoubtably programming some routers for Cisco, putting in 80 hour weeks like the rest of us, and just plain don't have the time. I, on the other hand, have the time and interest, but not the skill :-)
Two things:
1. it is also highly likely that a man will overestimate his abilities and qualifications and submit himself and that a woman will underestimate her abilities and qualifications and not submit herself (recent Psychology Today article). In addition, if there are other qualified applicants, a man will still tend to apply, but a woman will frequently not apply.
2. I think you're right that most of the qualified women are putting in 80 hour weeks, going home and doing another 20 hours, and just plain don't have the time.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
The first paragraph needs to be in the article itself. :-) It answers my questions and fills in all the blanks. Thanks, nxsy, for the note!
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I'm not arguing for affirmative action among opensource development teams. Far from it. But it still bugs me that here an entire new team has been elected and yet there remains not a single female team member among them. Sure, I could do my part and try to join, but I bear that burden enough here on slashdot and I have my priorities; isn't there some female programmer willing to join the "old B oy S D evelopment network?.
-- Anne Marie