Re: The case for FreeBSD

Diego Calleja wrote:

>>So I guess my message would be this: we should focus our energy in
>>demonstrating (and making sure) FreeBSD is the best platform out there.
>>We've done an incredible job, but we need to keep doing it.  This includes
> 
> 
> However, "people" seems to have the impression that 5.X is unstable and slow and
> it don't really matters if it's true or not, it's what people associates with the number
> "5.x"
> 
> In my opinion, 5.x is not so bad as many people wants to think, but i think that the
> freebsd developers have "failed" at telling people what those things are, and why
> they should look better at 5.x. In the firefox 1.0 release it has been demonstrated
> that agressive "marketing" _matters_ even if you are not a company. Firefox is
> a great browser, but it would not have been as succesful if there was not so much
> noise around it. What Freebsd needs is to make more noise, documeting changes
> is good but it doesn't really makes lot of noise.

The Firefox comparison is actually very apt.  There are quite a few
areas where Firefox is still inferior to the Mozilla Suite, but the team
has done an _outstanding_ job of advertising Firefox for what it is.

> 
> In my very humble opinion, what freebsd should do is concentrate in stability
> and performance tuning for 5.4, then release 5.4 as 6.0 (which is not a bad idea
> anyway) saying something like "we've learned of our errors, we've fixed all the major
> problems, we've a excellent system because of [list of features] and we're working
> hard to continue improving it". It looks stupid but many people are _aways_ going to
> associate "5.x" with "failure" no matter how good you make it, calling the next
> release 6.x would be a nice way of getting rid of all bad 5.x experiences and
> "start again". And the paragraph would not be very untrue anyway. Maybe you hate
> such "versionitis", but the true is that you're not going to run out of numbers to make
> releases, so why not?
> 

We're actually planning on releasing 6.0 this summer.  I understand your
points about 5.4, but it's a bit too late to do this is in a sane way.
The 6.0-CURRENT development is already well underway and has diverged
significantly from 5-STABLE, and trying to do CVS merge gymnastics on it
won't make it any easier.

Scott