FreeBSD Looks Ahead to 6.0

I was catching up on mailing list archives when I came across an announcement from Scott Long of FreeBSD's release engineering team, noting that after the rather substantial amount of time that it took to take FreeBSD 5 to a -STABLE designation, their release schedule will be speeding up in the future. With the official release of FreeBSD 5.3 coming Real Soon Now, a new branch for 6.0 is now tentatively scheduled for mid-2005. It would seem that while the version numbers may increase more rapidly, so will the rate at which new features are merged from -CURRENT, so end users can get new features faster.

Comments

Re:RTFA -- It's Quite Interesting

[ulib]

TFA is really worth reading. And, as you say, moving to scheduled releases is a very good idea: even if 4.10 for production use is still very good in most cases, I think users are going to appreciate releases at more regular intervals.
For all that they've done and all that they'll do, kudos to the FreeBSD team!
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Kudos

[molnarcs]

I just want to express my deep respect for FreeBSD developers. All the hype is around linux these days, and rightly so: it is a wonderful system. But few know that there are now ~100 paid developers working on linux (which is 'just' a kernel) at any given time, while there are none in FreeBSD. Yes, yes, PHK now is payed to do FreeBSD-only development for 8-10 months. There are others who receive either support from their employers to work on FreeBSD part-time, or some grants or others, but all in all, the FreeBSD project has 1/100 of the resources linux has.

Of course, I realize that from a user/technical standpoint, this means nothing. But there are too many trolls out here who are bent on conducting a smear campaign against FreeBSD developers, going even as far as to question their programming skills. Now think about this: these developers have kept up with the pace linux development dictates with 1/100 of the resources linux development has. It is still one of the most reliable operating systems out there, no matter what disgruntled HawkinsOS guys will tell you about FreeBSD not being 'enterprise ready.' In fact, if you check netcraft's monthly reports about the most reliable sites, 4-5 sites from the top 10 is always running FreeBSD. In october, the top three sites having the fewest failed requests all ran FreeBSD (the 4th is Net~ or Open~).

So I just can't emphasize enough how impressed I am (as a desktop user btw) with the work of these guys. And now this announcment! Excellent ideas there! And I hope to see ULE allowed in -STABLE again soon :))) (did I say I was a desktop user?).

Thanks guys ... for everything!