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."

Comments

This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary

[The_Jazzman]

I'm an avid open-source supporter, using windows NT at work, 95 at home, and ME on my laptop.

Now, this story seems quite interesting. In this day and age where we are increasing only interested how quickly we can churn out things, it's good that a developer (or rather, group) has decided to admit that things do need time, in this case a year, to be improved and have the features users want implemented to a satisfactory level.

Look at Netscape 4 - definately a rush job, as anyone who has to get CSS and / or javascript working with it will tell you - it's pretty obvious that little testing took place on it, hence even *really* obvious bugs stick out like a sore thumb.

Whilst users always like new features, ooh-ing and ahh-ing over them, it's no good if the features themselves are ridden with bugs. If a few more developers were to spend enough time testing and really ironing out the problems in their applications, the program would slowly come together, gaining a reputation for itself as it does so.

The only problem with this is that in a year, people will be looking at BSD, hoping for some king of uber operating system. I really do hope that the developers live up to expectations - it would be a real shame if they didn't.

Re:15 to 1 ?

[Nater]

The only FreeBSD box I've ever actually seen has been r00ted on two occassions.