Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 16:12:08 -0700 From: Rich Morin <rdm@cfcl.com> To: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD spokesman. Message-ID: <p05100311b76bca89c163@[192.168.168.205]> In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010706012158.0449d990@localhost> References: <4.3.2.7.2.20010705190110.045359a0@localhost> <4.3.2.7.2.20010706012158.0449d990@localhost>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Brett Glass, quite obviously, has very strong opinions on Stallman and the GPL. He is welcome to promote his positions in any forum that will accept him. In fact, I strongly support his right to do so (and my own right to skip past his messages, when I've had enough of them :-). OTOH, I have NO interest in having Brett act as any sort of "official" spokesperson for FreeBSD in particular or BSD in general. And, reading the recent traffic on this list, it appears that I am far from alone in this position. Any "official" spokesman for FreeBSD needs to have a "centrist" position on most issues, a tolerance for diversity, the ability to compromise on occasion, and strong technical credentials (e.g., as a committer or some other form of substantial contributor to FreeBSD). Then, with the center well covered, folks like Brett can push their own positions. If I don't agree with Brett's position on an issue, I can simply shrug and say "That's Brett's opinion". In contrast, if Brett were to become an official spokesperson, I would have a much harder time supporting FreeBSD. FWIW, my own position is that long-term FreeBSD's strengths lie in its commitment to good engineering, "best practice", etc. The Linux folks can adopt a routine here or there, but until they understand the need to have clean code and organization throughout, their systems will not be as robust or maintainable as the BSDs are. As an example of what I'm discussing, consider the relationship between installed files and the underlying source code. In FreeBSD, a fairly small number of rules can be used to find the source code for any given file on the system (e.g., /bin/foo is built from /usr/src/bin/foo, using /usr/obj/usr/src/bin/foo along the way). I asked my Linuxish friends about how the Linux source tree does this sort of thing. Well, it seems that each Linux variant does it differently, and none of them are nearly as well organized as FreeBSD... -r -- email: rdm@cfcl.com; phone: +1 650-873-7841 http://www.cfcl.com/rdm - home page, resume, etc. http://www.cfcl.com/Meta/md_fb.html - The FreeBSD Browser http://www.ptf.com/tdc - Prime Time Freeware's Darwin Collection To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?p05100311b76bca89c163>