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FreeBSD 5.0 Delayed One Year
Satai writes: "FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE has been delayed a full year, until November of 2002. The reasons included a lack of support for SMPng - including a developer fall-off ratio of 15 to 1 - a desire to finish the PowerPC/Sparc64/IA64 architectures, and a general desire to robustly test the additions. The economic downturn even makes an appearance in the announcement."
Well, it's pretty bad news if you are a manager in a company and fought for using BSD.
Boss - "So, are we on schedule to start rolling out the 4-way file servers in July next year?"
Me - "Um, no, that will have to wait until, maybe, Jan 2003".
Boss - "Errr, why's that? You said to me last quarter that the new SMP stuff would be ready by the end of this year? Surely 6 months is plenty of safety margin?"
Me - "Actually, the release date slipped by 12 months. I just found out now. I think it was due to most of the developers leaving the project."
Boss - "What?!?!?!! They fired 14 kernel developers?! I thought you said this organisation wouldn't be affected by the economy, on account of not being an evil capitalist outfit that only cares about their quarterly results!"
Me - "Yeah, well, no-one got fired, it's more like, they, uh, just kind of stopped doing any work. I guess maybe they got bored."
Boss - "OK, that does it. We're going with Solaris x86, I don't care what you say."
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Would we prefer they strip out everything that isn't ready, and released 5.0 in two months?
Then we could call it RedHat 8.0.