Date: Sun, 01 Apr 2007 15:26:03 -0400 From: FreeBSD Ports Tree Management <portmanager@FreeBSD.org> To: ports@FreeBSD.org Subject: FreeBSD and NetBSD's pkgsrc: A strategic synergy for awesomeness Message-ID: <1175455563.1871.33.camel@localhost>
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Dear FreeBSD ports community, It has been a good quarter for the ports collection and now is as good a time as ever to reflect back on the ports tree as well as plot it's future. We have broken 16796 ports. Tomorrow we will fix most of them. The past quarter the ports tree has managed to remain open the majority of the time. If you count the fact that so many committers forgot about the last slush after a while then we were actually open for the entire quarter. We feel all our committers and maintainers deserve thanks for their tireless work. However, issues of course still remain. The largest of which being the number of PRs for the ports tree. Over the past year ports tree related issues have made up roughly 80% of our incoming PRs. At present ports related PRs represent naerly 15% of our open PR backlog. core@ has expressed their disapproval over our division's numbers. They feel the ports tree currently requires too many project resources to maintain which distracts us from work in other necessary areas within the organization. While the ports tree has been an important symbol of us to our customers with a long and innovative history, it has ultimately become a resource intensive and losing division which requires us to take steps that will allow the other areas of the project to better thrive. We in the ports tree management have received recent approval from core@ for our resource redirection plan. FreeBSD needs to remain competitive in the free OS market so we feel the need to take suitable steps towards this end. Following in the path of our competitor DragonflyBSD we are pleased to announce a new strategic partnership with NetBSD and it's pkgsrc division. We are hereby announcing our intentions to switch over to NetBSD's pkgsrc tree and close our own FreeBSD ports tree. While some of you may be quick to call this outsourcing there can be nothing further from the truth. NetBSD has been one of our technology partners for many years as both organizations have routinely shared development for our mutual benefit and growth. We prefer to call this move "partner-sourcing". We feel this new partnership between FreeBSD and NetBSD will invariably produce a synergy of efficient utilization of FreeBSD resources for improved operating system development and continued organization growth while still maintaining a robust package management system. It's very simple, FreeBSD will see an 80% reduction in incoming PRs while being able to summarily close nearly 15% of its backlog in one shot. What were once our problems will now be someone else's problems. Partner-sourcing the ports tree is a large project and will take some time to complete. First, to our loyal customers. You will see no noticeable change in our product. We are still committed to providing high quality third party applications to meet your computing needs. You should feel no apprehension in the continued use of FreeBSD within your own organization. In fact, we feel this move will lead to a FreeBSD 7 which will finally be the improvement over FreeBSD 4 that you have been looking for. For our employee committers and contractor port maintainers we regret to inform you that due to redundancies many of you will be let go from FreeBSD. All port maintainer's contracts are immediately terminated. If you refer to the organization's Porters Handbook you will note that we have the right to terminate maintainer contracts at will. For our employee committers we will be restructuring in phases. Those of you with work obligations in the other repositories will retain your ports tree responsibilities while training the pkgsrc workforce for their new role maintaining their products on FreeBSD. Once this phase is complete your workload will be redirected towards your roles in the other repositories. Those of you with a ports commit bit only, we wish to put this gently. We are delivering a .pinkslip to your cubicles in the Freefall office currently. By the end of business tomorrow we expect you to login and collect your belongings there and in our satellite offices. All cubicles will be scheduled for deletion after that. Please be aware that members of the FreeBSD Security Team will be monitoring your access to ensure that no organization property accidentally goes home with you. We realize that FreeBSD's actions represent a noticeable disruption in the lives of our now former employees and contractors and we wish to help them by disclosing some exciting news. Due to certain recent events our strategic partner NetBSD is going through an unprecedented level of growth and expansion in their pkgsrc division. To keep up with demand they will be going through an extended hiring phase for new committers and maintainers. We feel that many of you would be quality candidates for their organization and suggest that as you leave FreeBSD for a different career path that you stop and take a look at them so you may remain close to the FreeBSD family. With gratitude and looking towards a new future, Portmanager
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