Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 13:19:34 -0800 From: Jordan Hubbard <jkh@osd.bsdi.com> To: asmodai@wxs.nl Cc: cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: The Project and onward [was: Re: cvs commit: src/sys/netinet ip_output.c] Message-ID: <20010313131934K.jkh@osd.bsdi.com> In-Reply-To: <20010313104243.B60817@daemon.ninth-circle.org> References: <20010312043409.A86273@mollari.cthul.hu> <20010312103340.A15895@dragon.nuxi.com> <20010313104243.B60817@daemon.ninth-circle.org>
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> What we currently lack, at least in my opinion, is some idea of where > we want to head to for the coming time in global lines. I think people who put a lot of emphasis on this simply lack sufficient perspective as to how FreeBSD has evolved since almost day one. From late 1992 onwards, a very significant part of FreeBSD's mission has always been to simply do what our "customers" ask us to do. We don't have an overridding technical mandate to port BSD to every platform in the universe (that's NetBSD) and we don't have a mandate to create a reference platform for security (that's OpenBSD) since our customers have never asked us for those things. What they've asked for is a system which is easy to use, has a rich set of capabilities and delivers maximum performance with excellent reliability and a practical degree of security. They've also asked us to support lots of different types of networking hardware and protocols, which we do, and someday they may start asking us about streaming large amounts of video or audio, who knows? We'll certainly know once they start asking in sufficient numbers and if all things go well, we'll start doing those things. I also know that it annoys some engineers to think of customers driving our technical direction. Their experience is that a lot of customers are as dumb as posts, and the words "customer driven" have been so over-used by various marketing departments as to have an almost unpleasant ring to them now. Even so, the fact remains that if what you're doing isn't relevant to a large percentage of your user base then what you're doing is ultimately fruitless and more of an exercise in technological masturbation than anything else. I've also seen projects driven purely by engineering and I can tell you that engineers tend to make *terrible* overall goal setters. They're too myopically focused on new and clever features and they can often get so enmeshed in solving a particular problem that they continue slaving away at it long after the solution has any practical relevance. I also realize that FreeBSD is a volunteer project and a certain number of "just for fun" projects will and should exist somewhere under its umbrella since if it's no fun for engineers to do this then we soon won't have any engineers. When we're talking about "architectural direction" for the entire project, however, I don't think that's something we're going to properly arrive just by sitting around as a group of engineers and thinking of what it would be neat to do. If we simply stay neutral and *react* when customers start agitating for something then FreeBSD will always remain popular and relevant to what people need because we'll be the ones who "get it" about who we're really writing software for. That's a bit of "architectural direction" I'm proud to say that FreeBSD has had all along and it's certainly one of the major reasons why I'm here. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
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