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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."
Can somebody, who knows what happened, explain to the rest of us why so many developers left the boat ?
15:1 is way above what can be regarded as "bad luck".
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
I don't want to start a FreeBSD vs Linux battle. I get enough of that from some of the people I know. But I have to admit that after using several Linux distros and using FreeBSD, the choice (for me) was quite clear. That's not to say I didn't like some of the Linux distros I tried. Not at all. I really liked Storm and I fully intend to install either Debian or Slackware on an IBM I have sitting in the corner. But when it came time to choose a system of the many I tried to run my web-server off of, I had to settle on FreeBSD.
At first I was a little wery about going with something slightly less mainstream than Linux, but good Linux binary compatibility (not to mention the Ports Collection) was a plus that won me over to FreeBSD.
With FreeBSD the first few days were really rough because there were several major annoyances I had, and none of my Linux friends had any useful insight. But I quickly solved most of my problems on my own. I feel I have learned much more this way. Plus, when I needed quick answers, web-searches almost always provided immediate and exact answers because there is only one FreeBSD and many other users have experienced the exact same problems.
It's something of a shame that Storm went the way of the wind, but after I made my choice to run FreeBSD it hasn't mattered too much. As for my soon-to-be Linux system, that just shows that I'm not knocking Linux at all (how could I?) it's just that I made the choice based on my needs and what I like. I personally don't feel I was moving forward fast enough with any of the Linux distros, but I felt comfortable with FreeBSD very quickly.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
it seems to me that it isn't even really about churning things out, these days. it's all about the number...if my number is higher than yours, it must be better, right? take the Slackware jump as an example, everyone else is at 7.0, so we have to be, too.
why not back off on the numbers and start spending some time fixing the issues you already know exist....maybe the open source companies should start looking at making a stable release, then releasing stable updates at regular intervals, like Sun, IBM, Apple and others.
it's fine now, but it seems like the marketing scheme starts to back fire as the numbers start to get higher....one would hope that when Mandrake gets to release 10(next month?), it would be an "uber operating system"....I mean they've had at least 10 tries, right? that's what the numbers are supposed say.
and they still haven't gotten it right.
as long as development is continuing, I see no reason to see this as a bad thing.
As others have pointed out, it's good that the FreeBSD developers have decided to push the deadline by several (14) months.
But I can't help but wonder if the FreeBSD "core" isn't trying to do too much with too little.
SMPng is great. Porting FreeBSD to dozens of architecture may not be -- I thought NetBSD was the one group that was supposed to focus on portability? Stick with Intel CPUs, guys! =)
Nevertheless, a magnificent OS, and one that I use very often...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I have to say that I've had the totally opposite experience. FreeBSD had a very easy root/boot floppy disk procedure and network install (ie. install over the Internet), whereas slackware, had a much more complicated procedure, with many, many floppy disks needed.
A few months ago I wanted to install Red Hat on a CD-less machine I have at home, over a 56K modem. I was going to download the files to my Sun box and then NFS mount them locally. Red Hat doesn't go out of their way to advertise that they have a network install of Red Hat but a friend of mine pointed it out to me. Harkening back to the good old days, my NE-2000 compatible card didn't have the proper drivers (for RH Linux, there was no problem when it had Windows 95), and enabling/disabling Plug-and-Play, changing the IRQ and all that jazz didn't help. I hadn't done an install of FreeBSD for a while but at wit's end I did that. Imagine my surprise when I saw that it was able to install over the Internet via a modem!
Frankly, it's my opinion that FreeBSD has always been one step ahead of Linux in ease of installation for the past 5 years. I am speaking of the most popular Linux distributions, since I almost always install what the most popular dist is (although I have used Debian and so forth). The only thing Linux ever sometimes surpassed FreeBSD on was NIC cards - sometimes Linux would work with a cheap NIC card that FreeBSD wouldn't. And frankly, Windows always killed both of them in working with virtually every network card.
In terms of being memetic, ease of installation is more important than even ease of use. If you get totally stuck on installation, who cares who user-friendly GNOME is?
Why are they setting dates in the first place? Can't they just say that they will release it when feature A, B and C are implemented and stable?
"its easier for existing developers to write a new driver than teach someone how to do it". yeah. brilliant. thats the thinking that leads to a 15:1 reduction in developers. congratulations.
teaching someone to write a driver is about the most important thing a free software developer can do. its the ONLY way that linux has been able to get so many developers on board. EVERYONE including torvalds encourages newbies to write drivers because the newbies tend to write several drivers not just one after learning how to write a single driver. read the lkml sometime and learn why FreeBSD's on a death spiral, apple or not.
Guess what? OS X has 1 million users.
That doesn't include pirated copies, so it could be 1.25 million users of mac on a BSD base.
As apache is bundled with OS X, there could be 125,000 servers running on BSD from OS X alone.
OS X is doing great from all the unix apps for it.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
About a week ago, I saw the latest FreeBSD Development Report, compiled by Robert Watson. It's a simple report, including a paragraph or two on the state of all the major projects.
After reading the report, I decided to be a little bit scared of 5.0, because there were a lot of ambitious projects slated for inclusion therein.
This move strikes me as a recognition of a reality: it's going to take a lot of time to integrate all those projects and turn the result into something worthy of being called FreeBSD-RELEASE.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Well, it's pretty bad news if you are a manager in a company and fought for using BSD.
My answer to these people is: Maybe you should have taken the money you saved by not buying Solaris, and spent it by allocating half of one of your developer's time to the FreeBSD project?
Supporting Open Source has to mean actually doing some coding somewhere, or there isn't any source to support. Who better to code the features than those who genuinely need to use them?
It seems that this newbus bit may add a level of nice abstraction like that of the Linux kernel. It's good to see steps being taken in this direction. Hopefully, there will be more open-minded people willing to assist interested parties learn this interface.
What bothered me was the usual snobbery about it not being their "place" to help newbies learn how to write drivers. The whole API being in flux issue is mostly a red herring since they could simply request that the person submit their drivers against a frozen architecture, such as the FreeBSD 4.X branches -- unless these too are in a "constant state of flux." I mean, big deal -- the Linux driver models were quite different between 1.2 & 2.0 and between 2.0 and 2.2. That doesn't mean that people were turned away from submitting new drivers under the older stable tree during the 1.3 & 2.1 development cycles.
If they have a good interface, then they should really have documentation to help people add system support for the stable branches. I mean, really, the main "expert" developers shouldn't be bothering themselves with device driver writing. For one thing, it requires them to take time away from their usual projects to learn the interface for a new piece of hardware -- which should be the hardest part of writing a driver under a good architecture. Device driver writing is exactly what newbies should be doing. The kernel interfaces should be a trivial matter -- let the newbies worry about learning the actual hardware while the main developers work on more important core issues.
What bothers me is that this guy is. You can see his name all over FreeBSD mailing lists and code fixes. A quick search turns up that he's been a committer to the FreeBSD source tree since June 1999. This guy is in on things, and he's displaying this level of snobbery towards new developers. What a great way to gain mindshare! They're squandering a great resource.
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