Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 12:09:20 -0800 From: Jordan Hubbard <jkh@winston.freebsd.org> To: Alex Rousskov <rousskov@measurement-factory.com> Cc: Jonathan Lemon <jlemon@flugsvamp.com>, freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: funding TCP stack rewrite Message-ID: <2047.1007150960@winston.freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: Message from Alex Rousskov <rousskov@measurement-factory.com> of "Fri, 30 Nov 2001 10:27:04 MST." <Pine.BSF.4.10.10111301012590.7584-100000@measurement-factory.com>
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> Will the dedicated work of the said guru get a high priority as far as > review and commit steps are concerned? A public semi-formal commitment > or encouragement from FreeBSD core group may be in order to raise > support from the community. Otherwise, folks may worry that these big > changes, once implemented, will get stuck in the commit queue forever. I think it's an absolutely terrible idea, frankly. One of the areas most ignored by engineers when contemplating paid development is the management aspect - e.g. we as engineers would all like to believe that we're personally motivated and focused enough to accurately size a job, set to work on it and complete it on time without anybody poking us or running interference between us and the "customer" (in this case, all the users/developers with strong views on what a "TCP stack rewrite" should mean). In reality, all of these things generally trip engineers up and seriously endanger the projects they're working on without others to take on those "meta engineering" tasks so that the actual engineers can focus on hacking code and nothing else. So you'd need to add managers to the mix, both to work on nailing down just what the heck is being committed to and how much it will cost and then managing the milestones so that it actually arrives on time and within the budget. That adds even more expense to the problem and would also start reminding various FreeBSD folks too much of Real Work, one of the benefits of working on FreeBSD being that you don't have to contend with engineering managers. :) If someone has a re-written TCP/IP stack to present to the user community and some arguments as to why it should replace the current one, let them approach it that way. If several people have re-written TCP/IP stacks, let's take the darwinistic approach to figuring out which one is best. If nobody has a re-written TCP/IP stack but thinks a pile of money would help them write one then they're probably better off going to work for some company which does that and not trying to do this purely in the open source space. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-net" in the body of the message
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