Future of FreeBSD

Hello FreeBSD users and developers!

As an active FreeBSD user, I'm ever so interested about the future
plans of FreeBSD and direction of developement. Many of the features
that 5.x taunts are very impressive. But as of late I have been
increasingly worried about the direction (or, lack of direction) things
have been going. 

Departure of Jordan and Greg. Jordan said it's not fun anymore. Is the
strive for new features driving developers past their limits, or has jkh
simply gotten old? Also kicking out Dillon, a very talented and active
programmer, didn't look good at all, especially when it went down
completely without any explanations to userbase. 

Stability of 5.x: from my point of view, the 5.x series, although
including a lot of very fancy work in many areas, is nowhere near the
reliability you'd expect from a stable FreeBSD release. Originally 5.x
was due to go stable in the beginning of summer, are there any new plans
made yet? 

Feature-wise: things simply don't seem quite ready. ACPI breaks every
other box, ULE is still not SMP aware, Giant is far from being
completely removed and so on. Yet, all these features have been
presented in the media long ago, giving the impression they would be
ready (soon). 


Now, I'm not trying to pick a fight with anyone. I just want to talk
about things with their real names. And when things are going bad,
things are going bad and calling shit on one another ain't gonna make it
one bit better. I would dearly like to hear an honest opinion from
someone who feels he knows what he's talking about, against my feeble
knowledge over much anything. And I would really like to see FreeBSD get
a grip again, put the media behind it, see what's real and attainable
and go an' do it, and as a user I will do what I can to assist. 


Cincerely,

Atte Peltomäki
http://kameli.org