From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Oct 16 13:12:03 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id NAA01757 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 16 Oct 1996 13:12:03 -0700 (PDT) Received: from time.cdrom.com (time.cdrom.com [204.216.27.226]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id NAA01729 for ; Wed, 16 Oct 1996 13:12:00 -0700 (PDT) Received: from time.cdrom.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by time.cdrom.com (8.7.6/8.6.9) with ESMTP id NAA29684; Wed, 16 Oct 1996 13:11:57 -0700 (PDT) To: rkw@dataplex.net (Richard Wackerbarth) cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: IP bugs in FreeBSD 2.1.5 In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 16 Oct 1996 14:25:35 MDT." Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 13:11:57 -0700 Message-ID: <29682.845496717@time.cdrom.com> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > And as one who has done release engineering for paying customers, I can > tell you that your methodology is hurting your ability to be taken as a > serious product rather than a hobbyist toy. Richard, there are a whole SLEW of things we do and don't do which both hinder and help our ability to be taken seriously. Not having truly working 3COM adaptor support sucks, as does our poor IDE CDROM support. Not having a paid tech support hotline somewhere sucks, as does the non-ability to call ourselves fully POSIX compliant. I could go on, citing factors from every corner of FreeBSD's development which are lacking. What makes you think that release engineering is somehow immune to the same process of trade-offs, focusing on some things to the unfortunate and necessary exclusion of others? We don't have infinite resources in *any* area of FreeBSD's development, and if you expected a rose garden then I'm here to disappoint you. No, we don't match your ideal picture. We don't match mine, either, FWIW. What we ARE is simply no more than what we can be at this particular time with the resources we have available. > I am at this moment sitting in a client's office listening to some of them > argue that Linux is a better product to use AS A CORPORATE SERVER. Part of > their argument is directly related to their perception of the lack of > release testing. Then your clients are on drugs and need to call the Betty Ford Hotline (1-800-POP-PILLS). I don't see any heroic degree of release testing being expended in the various Linux camps. I see some nice packaging and some admirable vendor deals, but I don't see lots and lots of credible testing, sorry. >Remember -- Image is everything. See my previous missive about evangelism. None of that has anything to do with engineering, however. If you can sell something as intangible as god then you can sell anything, and all this engineering talk is mostly irrelevant to the "image" question. Stick to one topic, please! :) Jordan