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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!inquo!news.uoregon.edu!symiserver2.symantec.com!usenet From: tedm@agora.rdrop.com Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Look, this is depressing! I'm outta here, folks! Date: 27 Jun 1996 05:01:42 GMT Organization: Symantec Corporation Lines: 119 Message-ID: <4qt4jm$dkd@symiserver2.symantec.com> References: <31C6A7A0.7DE14518@FreeBSD.org> <4qan42$g3@anorak.coverform.lan> Reply-To: tedm%toybox@agora.rdrop.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 198.6.34.3 X-Newsreader: IBM NewsReader/2 v1.2 In <4qan42$g3@anorak.coverform.lan>, brian@awfulhak.demon.co.uk (Brian Somers) writes: >Jordan K. Hubbard (jkh@FreeBSD.org) wrote: >: I'm going to stop reading USENET again, I think. It does bad things for >: my blood pressure. Sorry, folks.. > [some deleted] >: pretty hard to find. But even with that, people expect more. They >: expect every volunteer project member to dedicate the same level of >: "drop everything and help me now!" support and they expect to get that >: support whether they've ask for it with a smile or a snarl. > [some deleted] >I appreciate your situation, and agree with your statements to an extent. [more deleted] >at the number of people posting to the FreeBSD groups these days. The >problem is that I suspect that many of these people come from a >commercial background. Commercial backgrounds teach people the following >when running their business. > [more deleted] Actually, I think it is more complicated than that. What we are starting to see is the inevitable result of success in the computer industry. If you look at the history of PC's it always starts out with a small dedicated group of hackers who really only care about the hardware/software project, and do great things with it. Then, the project gets really good, and more and more people climb on board. Eventually, all the dedicated people in the industry that would be interested in the project are involved in some way or other, and more and more people who aren't really dedicated start climbing on board, wanting to take advantage of the fruits of the labor of the dedicated people. Now, nothing is inherently wrong with this, understand. After all, I'm quite sure that the FreeBSD core team wouldn't really be that interested in coordinating several thousand programmers all at once! The whole idea is that a small group does something great, and a lot of other people take advantage of it. Now, in the past the usual result of this is that eventually the project gets taken commercial. This is already happening with Linux, for example, it also happened with the original SYSV and BSD source code. The many people that want to climb on board and take advantage of a good thing expect that, of course. The problem in this instance is that the FreeBSD core team is completely uninterested in taking the project commercial, at least so far they have shown that they are. The folks that are climbing on board and wanting to take advantage of the fruits of the FreeBSD group's labor cannot understand this. These people are used to dealing with a commercial organization where they can call them up and threaten to "take my business elsewhere" to get the organization to fix a bug, etc. Of course, the FreeBSD's answer to these people is "you have the source, fix it yourself" Unfortuantely, there is really no easy solution to this all. FreeBSD is NOT a commercial operating system! It can be USED in a commercial setting, but it is not commercial software! While there are many many people in business that would probably love to see it become commercial, I strongly doubt this will ever happen. I think what happens in most commercial organizations is that the movers and shakers see something that is really cool, and looks fun to get into, and then run around thinking up justifications to do it. Good businesses tend to have lots of these people that in addition to being good bullshitters (to think up the justification reasons) also have an "eye for the dollar" Bad businesses generally seem to have good bullshitters who don't have an eye for the dollar. I strongly doubt that most businesses sit down and logically figure out what the best product is for their needs, etc. like you describe. Certainly none of the ones I have ever been involved with worked like that. I think what we are seeing in the FreeBSD newsgroups is a lot of people who see something really cool, figure out some way to get it dragged into their commercial place of business, and then after the newness has worn off are starting to look at it like a commercial product, in other words if they have a problem rather than spending their valuable time on figuring it out they attempt to leverage everyone else's time to do so. While this is no problem for a commercial OS, it is unfair to everyone involved and contributing to the development of FreeBSD. This is what Jordan is pissed at, I think. Another issue is that of documentation. Most commercial software projects seem to come with plenty of documentation, even if you have to pay extra for it it exists. FreeBSD has excellent documentation, unfortunately it is written in C which most people don't understand! ;-) Speaking from experience, good software documentation is very difficult to get written. This is because of two reasons, first there are few people that can do it properly, and second because it takes a lot of time to do it right. I have been writing articles about FreeBSD for a while now, and I think that I can say from doing that that the task of bring the FreeBSD documentation up to the point to where it is a "one-button install for ignorant users" is going to be as large as the operating system itself. I very much doubt that it will ever happen without commercial intervention. If a user is in the hand-holding category, they should probably not be considering using FreeBSD unless they are willing to do a lot of learning by themselves. I think that if Jordan decides to concentrate on other things than Usenet, then great. While I appreciate his answers very much, I know that there are enough people in the group that can probably help that the problem will eventually get solved. The thing that should be made clear to people, though, is that Usenet is not a support forum, and if they don't get an answer well then there are lists of FreeBSD consultants that will be happy to charge to provide one. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@agora.rdrop.com Network Community Column http://www.computerbits.com