Bazaaring the cathedral (Lowering the Barrier to Entry)

Hi all,

FreeBSD today has a significant problem of attracting new developers.
The lack of new developers manifests itself in a dearth of driver
support, inadequate documentation, and trailing third party packages.

One of the key reasons for the lack of people is the high barrier of
entry to joining the FreeBSD project.  While every modern project uses
git (usually hosted on github), FreeBSD uses self-hosted subversion.
The use of git goes beyond just the choice of version control.  It
allows for workflows that FreeBSD can't even dream of.  The linux
kernel has no concept of a committer.  Instead anyone can clone the
git tree, build a kernel, and call themselves a Linux distribution.

Our wiki and code review tools are in an even worse position than our
repository.  In order to contribute you need to send an email to
clusteradm_at_ and hope they deem you worthy enough of access. The bug
tracking system is in a better shape but isn't perfect: while any user
can create an account, their privileges are limited: they can't help
close out bad PRs, reclassify good ones, or do other generally useful
work.

To solve this problem I propose a simple solution: self-serve commit
access.  We create a web service on accounts.freebsd.org via which
users can create themselves a freefall account.  In addition to a
freefall account, the identical username would be created for the wiki
and phabricator, bugzilla, and any other service we might provide.

This will allow us to quickly gain large number of contributors, who
will be able to make better progress on our missing features, and
rectify some of the drawbacks listed above.

Today I hope we turn ourselves from the cathedral into a truly open
and democratic project!


-- 
Eitan Adler