Date: Sat, 06 Jan 2001 20:44:27 +0100 From: Roelof Osinga <roelof@nisser.com> To: Eric Harrison <Eric.Harrison@veritas.com> Cc: "'freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org'" <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: FreeBSD Supported Releases Message-ID: <3A57759B.D756A17@nisser.com> References: <E157E02AD50CD41180EE00508B6A722D01D87CB6@mtvxch05.veritas.com>
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Eric Harrison wrote: > > Hello, > I'm a product manager doing some research and wondering if there is a policy > or guideline that the FreeBDS board of directors/Community uses to gauge > release lifecycles. For example, how long will "community" energy be spent > to support older previous releases, over new. Basically how long will a > prior version be "supported". While this is a clear concept in commercial > software firms, don't yet understand how this works with FreeBSD and > community maintained OS. What I'm trying to ultimately decide is how long > we need to provide support for prior FreeBSD releases. > Thanks for your consideration, Best regards, That would be a neat trick. To wit, one of those huge market research companies released a something frased in such a way as to impress on Micro Soft the need to slow down their release cycle. They went on saying that since MS had the tendency to support only the latest two releases and a new release of NT in one form or another seemed imminent they feared that would mean or rather could mean that older versions like NT 4.x would no longer be supported. I've been in this business (was eboa) since the start of the first semester of 1982. Yeah, some coincidence <g>. Long enough to have learned that clear and concepts only match in marketing. IBM is (or was) an exception to the rule. MS defined the rule. Take MS COBOL, take MS Pascal, they even sold MuLISP back when. That having said if you would like the perceived security of a commercial solution, why not try BSDi? (http://www.bsdi.com/). Not only are they the commercial branch of the BSD tree, they also support in various ways the BSD community. Best of both worlds from your POV. Note too, that BSDi stands a very good chance to survive the onslaught that could and would result in further acceptance of OSS (Open Source Stuff). It is no coincidence that IBM already is embracing Linux whole heartedly. We're - as a society - becoming more and more a service based economy rather than a products based economy. A monkey wrench for any 'clear concept' not based on that. Your question is valid but unanswerable by any OSS community. For that question this OSS community fortunately has BSDi to refer interested parties to. Roelof -- Home is where the (@) http://eboa.com/ is. Nisser home -- http://www.Nisser.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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