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Date:      Wed, 11 Oct 2006 22:09:38 -0400
From:      Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>
To:        Dan Lukes <dan@obluda.cz>
Cc:        freebsd security <freebsd-security@freebsd.org>, security-officer@freebsd.org, FreeBSD Stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: [fbsd] HEADS UP: FreeBSD 5.3, 5.4, 6.0 EoLs coming soon
Message-ID:  <p06240800c15328312263@[128.113.24.47]>
In-Reply-To: <452D7351.6050804@obluda.cz>
References:  <451F6E8E.8020301@freebsd.org> <20061011102106.GY1594@obiwan.tataz.chchile.org> <20061011151458.L97038@atlantis.atlantis.dp.ua> <20061011083021.C2780@treehorn.dfmm.org> <p06230910c152cf2743ce@[128.113.24.47]> <452D7351.6050804@obluda.cz>

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At 12:42 AM +0200 10/12/06, Dan Lukes wrote:

>	As I'm not commiter, I'm allowed to submit PR and speak.
>I'm trying both. This letter is "speak" part.

Understood.

But this has been announced for awhile.  If the people who actually
depend on 4.x can find the resources to support it, I am fine with
them doing that work.  I was running 4.x on a production server
until just about six months ago.  But now I am not.  I do have a
full-time job, and my "hobby" programming is going to go into the
operating system I run on the hardware I own.  It isn't going to
go into *your* hardware that you want to see supported, for free,
for as long as you can keep "voting" that SOMEONE ELSE must do a
bunch of free work just for your peace-of-mind.

Your 4.x system is not doing to die when we EOL 4.x.  We're only
saying that it is not going to see any additional work on it in
the official FreeBSD repository.  None of us are going to break
into your house and smash your currently-running system.

This is an open-source project.  If it really is as easy to support
4.x with security fixes as you think it is, then "you" (all of you
who depend on a 4.x system) should be able to do that work without
help from "us" (the people running AMD64, ARM, PowerPC, Sparc64,
or even just recent i386 hardware which is not supported by 4.x).

That's it.  The entire rest of your message is irrelevant to the
issues here.  I very soon will not own any hardware which can even
boot up 4.x, so you can be sure that I will not be providing any
support for your continued piece-of-mind.  If I do not run a given
operating system, then I can not claim to support it.  That fact
is not going to change simply because you vote on it.

I don't want to sound unsympathetic here, because up until just
six months ago I was also depending on security fixes for 4.x.
But after having two of my personal PC's fried (due to a broken
air-conditioner), I have now moved on.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@rpi.edu



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