Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 21:48:16 -0500 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: info@softweyr.com, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Who is important to you? Message-ID: <v04210108b4c9136547f2@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <38A356E4.C9E234E@softweyr.com> References: <38A356E4.C9E234E@softweyr.com>
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At 5:25 PM -0700 2/10/00, Wes Peters wrote: >An interesting question came up yesterday, which I need to pass >on. This is not just a casual question, it may affect funding >for some potential BSD development projects. I can't help but think that this is a little odd. One person says "I think JKH is important", and someone else will say "Well then, I'm certainly not going to contribute any funding to the BSD's!"? >The question is: > > Who are the key people in the BSD community? > >I'm looking for both specific names (JKH and Theo obviously >spring to mind) as well as classes of people, like "committers >and core team members", "-questions answerers", "VM hackers", >or "booth babes." Oops, sorry, wrong discussion. ;^) Some of this will depend on the background of the people sending in the answers. For instance, I am interested and do keep track of OpenBSD, but I actually *run* two FreeBSD systems. I do not follow netbsd at all for reasons I'd rather not get into right now. So, I haven't a clue who would be notable in the netbsd world, but that is not meant as a slight to anyone there. For that matter, I don't really know all that many key names in the OpenBSD project, just because I don't follow it as closely as FreeBSD. I think JKH is critical, because for any voluntary programming project of this size, the "people issues" can easily overwhelm the technical issues. Jordan manages to do a good job of handling people issues, even managing to keep his humor (at least in the messages he writes) when wandering into a no-mans land between feuding sides. Perhaps the rumors are true, and this is just an advantage of being a perl script... I think Theo is critical (in more ways than one? :-), because I think many of the goals of OpenBSD are important, and it is hard to imagine OpenBSD having lasted this long without the sheer will power of Theo. OpenBSD now has enough of a "market awareness" that it could probably continue without Theo, but it takes awhile to build up enough of a critical mass of users and developers before a project will get to that stage. Someone like Terry Lambert is important, because every once in awhile he'll write some long detailed answer to someone's technical question. Even ignoring the specifics of whatever that answer might be, any intelligent programmer can't help but read the message and realize that "Somewhere along the line this guy has done about 147 cubic shit-loads of low-level detailed work". That brings credibility and some level of confidence that the people working on the BSD projects are fairly serious about doing the job right, and not just rushing things out the door with a longer-and-longer feature list of things which may-or-may-not work. Matt Dillion's recent work on things like NFS support are important, to me. Here is a part of the system which is certainly not "interesting" or "sexy" in any way, and yet it is still critical to a lot of people who use FreeBSD to run servers. Matt was willing to dive in and untangle many of the underlying problems, and NFS support in FreeBSD has improved considerably in the past year. Someone like Kirk McKusick is important, on several different angles. He's been a part of the BSD's for a long time, and thus can give history and proof that it isn't a johnny-come- lately group. He's running detailed college-level courses on BSD internals. He makes important coding contributions like softupdates. And he manages to keep detached enough from day-to-day bsd-project activities that he's not getting drawn into the inevitable feuds that will spring up between people who have to deal with each other on a daily basis... Someone like Greg Lehey is important to the growth and success of this cooperative project, because while the "fun stuff" is the coding, it is also important to try and write up some books and other tangible documentation for new people to pick up and get some kind of understanding of what the project is and how to test it out. [note: I'm not saying that Greg doesn't write code, I'm saying that books like 'The Complete FreeBSD' are very important and are much too rare for the BSD projects. We need more books which talk about BSD specifics. And no, I don't expect I would write more than any other programmer-type, but I do hope to provide some financial backing so Greg could write more information, such as programming information about writing drivers for FreeBSD]. The people behind daemonnews.org are important, because it helps to have a focal point to find out "headlines" of what is going on in the BSD projects. It's also important that such a site has at least daily activity, or it ceases to be worthwhile to check it out every day. It's important to have a 'core' overseeing projects like this, just so it doesn't go careening out of control. It's also important that the core is actually listening to the people who are trying to contribute, and not just focusing in on the projects that they personally enjoy working on. It's important that someone is paying attention to the problem reports, and trying to investigate them (particularly the ones which have taken the time to include patches to a problem). This is one of those things that pretty much anyone could do, if they are willing to test things on their own system. Maybe they can't COMMIT changes, but anyone can investigate problem reports and either confirm or provide some other reaction. Wes mentioned "VM hackers" as an example category. I think it misses the point to be that specific. What you want are "detail people" who are using FreeBSD to get an important job done. If it then turns out that they can not get their job done because of problems in the VM system, then they will sit down and turn into VM hackers because that is what it will take for them to solve their real-world problem. Having VM hackers (or any specific kind of hackers) "just to have them" is not the point. We could end up with the most amazing virtual memory system imaginable, and still have an unusable system because the drivers for ethernet cards can't pump out more than 100 bytes a second, or because we're running a telnet daemon with so many security holes that you can't keep a system running for more than 20 minutes before it gets broken into. If you're a serious programmer trying to run a real-world operation, then you can become a "guru" of whatever system you need to become a guru of to get the results you need to get. I'm trying to give reasons here, instead of just a list of names, because there are many people I could list for each of the above "categories" of important people. If I tried to give a list of names I would inevitably leave some people out by mistake, and I'm not sure what the consequences of that would be on this "funding" issue. This way I can just shrug and say that I never intended to provide a complete list, so no one can feel "unappreciated" if they aren't mentioned... Obviously there are other people who fit in each of the categories I've described, but I'm not going to try and list them... > I've redirected followups to my own info mailbox and to -chat > to avoid cluttering up other mail lists as much as possible. While I spent a fair amount of time thinking about what I wanted to say here, and typing it up, I'm afraid I don't have the time right now to start following freebsd-chat. Anyone who wants to discuss this, feel free to discuss it without including me... I do hope that this is at least food for thought, even though I may not add much more to discussing this topic. --- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or drosih@rpi.edu Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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