From owner-freebsd-stable Mon May 24 23:10:49 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from zippy.cdrom.com (zippy.cdrom.com [204.216.27.228]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 52B7814E47 for ; Mon, 24 May 1999 23:10:47 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jkh@zippy.cdrom.com) Received: from zippy.cdrom.com (jkh@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by zippy.cdrom.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id XAA03204; Mon, 24 May 1999 23:11:10 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jkh@zippy.cdrom.com) To: "David Schwartz" Cc: "Mike Smith" , "Sergey" , freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: [Q] How stable is FreeBSD 3.X ? In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 24 May 1999 22:53:07 PDT." <000001bea672$dce52580$021d85d1@whenever.youwant.to> Date: Mon, 24 May 1999 23:11:10 -0700 Message-ID: <3200.927612670@zippy.cdrom.com> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > Have you stopped to consider that users may just want to _use_ FreeBSD > without having to follow the development? Have you considered that bad > releases affect them? This is yet another piece of the 'Open Source' versus > 'company supported' puzzle. You're inferring far too much from this. If you want a "supported FreeBSD" then you can always buy a support contract and pay someone some money to ensure, more or less, that the software/support combo you're getting will predictably meet your needs. If you're just downloading something off the net which represents an ongoing moving target and you're working with volunteers who REQUIRE precise and accurate bug reports in order to do anything at all useful for you, however, then certain minimum standards in the user himself must be met. Some users who "just want to use it" and not be bothered to adapt to the unique non-commercial environment they're now in are expecting far too much from too little personal investment, basically. To put it another way, there are certain laws of entropy that stay the same regardless of the commercial or free nature of the software, and to get a certain amount of energy out of a system you simply have to put a certain amount of energy in. If that "energy" is not being introduced into the equation via the currently acceptable barter unit (money) then that's obviously going to have to be balanced by extra energy from somewhere else. :) - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message