Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 13:33:29 -0400 From: Bill Moran <wmoran@iowna.com> To: Jordan Hubbard <jkh@osd.bsdi.com> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD Mall now BSDCentral Message-ID: <3B4B3C69.B2267DE8@iowna.com> References: <b0.1719021d.287c7f53@aol.com> <20010710095200C.jkh@osd.bsdi.com>
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Jordan Hubbard wrote: > From: Bsdguru@aol.com > > These mechanisms existed before without BSDi, so there was no "impact". > > Actually, ftp downloads got a LOT slower after BSDi took over, so i consider > > it a negative impact in that area. <SNIP Elvis metaphore> > BSDi had no effect on ftp.freebsd.org's services and kept things > completely unchanged there, it was merely other factors which changed. > The Internet started to suck more and changing economic realities in > the ISP space forced the archive to move to the east coast, where > things only got progressively worse. This would have occurred even > sooner had Walnut Creek CDROM been involved and, in fact, we probably > would have pulled the plug a lot sooner since WC had far less money to > spend on things like that. I'm going to go out on a limb here ... There are how many comitters now? and how many developers? And how many people like me who are VERY reliant on FreeBSD and are not (yet) serious developers? Add all those numbers up and you get a whole LOT of people. The upshot being that keeping that many people informed accurately as to (for example) whether or not the BSDi merger caused the ftp site to slow down is going to be tough. Very tough. Damn near impossible. Yet, just about every one of those folks is going to know that BSDi bought Walnut Creek, and just about every one of those people is going to notice when the ftp site slows down. And a frightening percentage of them are going to put two and two together and come up with an answer that sounds right, even if it isn't. In the lack of an authoritative announcement such as "Because of Internet infrastructure problems we are moving ftp.freebsd.org and we don't know whether this will improve the situation or hurt it." Along with the subsequent announcements that the change didn't particularly help. Look at it, how many sources of (mis)information are there? All the mailing lists? The "announce" section of the website? Daemonnews? trash^H^H^H^H^Hslashdot? (who sometimes seem to hate BSD as much as they hate Microsoft) With all these, the inner workings of how one merger or another affects the big picture are simply not going to be broadly available. Making them broadly avialable would be a wonderful thing for the community. Perhaps an announcements page on the web site that is updated with more frequent announcements? Maybe a special mailing list that can be used to send out frequent announments as to what's going on in general. How would you keep speculation from getting out of hand? Personally, I don't know. But I think (overall) at least part of the solution to the arguments that have been occurring is to improve the communication channels. So that's my "going out on a limb" for today. Hope this dissertation is actually helpful/useful. -Bill To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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