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Date:      Thu, 13 Sep 2001 16:10:39 +0100
From:      Paul Richards <paul@freebsd-services.com>
To:        Will Andrews <will@physics.purdue.edu>
Cc:        Warner Losh <imp@FreeBSD.org>, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/sys/pccard pccard.c pcic.c pcic_pci.c pcicvar.h
Message-ID:  <57650000.1000393838@lobster.originative.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <20010913073210.X30764@curie.physics.purdue.edu>
References:  <200109130826.f8D8QtY18779@freefall.freebsd.org> <1121080000.1000369966@lobster.originative.co.uk> <20010913073210.X30764@curie.physics.purdue.edu>

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--On Thursday, September 13, 2001 07:32:10 -0500 Will Andrews
<will@physics.purdue.edu> wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 13, 2001 at 09:32:46AM +0100, Paul Richards
> (paul@freebsd-services.com) wrote:
>> Can we try and restore a sense of professionalism to the commit logs.
>> There's been a growing trend to treat them like a chat list.
> 
> I am not your company's hired hacker.  I am a human being that
> wants to show his humor, ability, and expressiveness.  Just
> because we create a professional operating system doesn't mean we
> can't have fun while we are at it!  :-)

Totally agreed. The operating system includes the cvs logs though so a
"professional operating system" includes "professional cvs logs".

Do we want to continue to create an operating system that can stand up and
compete against Solaris, OS X, AIX, Linux and Windows or has FreeBSD become
a playground for hackers to have fun in?

We certainly started out nearly 10 years ago with the intent of creating a
best of breed project. Lately that attitude seems to have changed and the
project now has more of a feel of hobby OS for people to play with in their
spare time.

We still had a lot of fun when we were "serious" about the work, having fun
doesn't require that we treat the project as something to mess around with.

One of the pleasures of working on FreeBSD was that it provided an
opportunity to work on a project that wanted to do things "right" and was
free from the commercial pressures to cut corners. This attitude has also
been lost. The attitude that seems much more prevalent know is that FreeBSD
is something to hack on for fun and *not* have to worry about the issues
that you have to be concerned with in work or in class, such as thorough
testing/release engineering, backwards compatibility and all the difficult
issues that are hard work rather than fun.

I think this may be part of the reason that significant research is not
taking place on FreeBSD. The project just doesn't look "serious" enough for
the research community to use it as a basis for work (that and a lack of
stability of the codebase which is essential for comparitive analysis).

It's also resulting in a drop off of respect amongst the silent majority of
consultants/sysadmins out there who started using FreeBSD because it
appeared to be the most professional project. There's been feedback in the
UK from people that are saying they are dissappointed with the direction
the project is going, it doesn't provide the quality assurances that it
once did.

Doing correct software development doesn't mean having no fun but in
comparison to the Apache/Postgresql/Perl6 projects which I follow this
community has become by far the most ameteurish in it's behaviour.

Paul Richards
FreeBSD Services Ltd
http://www.freebsd-services.com

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