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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.
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.
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.
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
Then Al Gore could have been elected, after he loses that other election. After all, he did invent FreeBSD, didn't he?
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)
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)
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.