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I, personally, and my businesses, have a tremendous amount of time and money invested in FreeBSD as a platform. JohnCompanies[1] was started on FreeBSD, rsync.
by rsync 7y ago
I, personally, and my businesses, have a tremendous amount of time and money invested in FreeBSD as a platform.
JohnCompanies[1] was started on FreeBSD, rsync.net runs FreeBSD exclusively, and Oh By[2] runs on FreeBSD.
FreeBSD is an operating system by, and for, the FreeBSD developers.
You may choose to deploy, and invest in, FreeBSD for your own purposes (as I have) but you need to understand what the development process is and how FreeBSD is "released" if you want to make meaningful investments of actual money into adopting it.
In short: the official position of FreeBSD is that -RELEASE is the only production release of FreeBSD and, technically, -STABLE and -CURRENT are not production ready. Yet at the same time all investment and development of FreeBSD by the actual developers is done with -CURRENT.
The result is your legal, contractual, fiduciary, and even moral obligations to the customers you serve demands that you run only -RELEASE. And yet, any issues you have with -RELEASE will be difficult to resolve because the entire community is already 1-2 major versions ahead of you in their development, their workspaces, and even their personal machines. You will be met with incredulity when you insist that you need to run only production code and your "current" problems with the "current" -RELEASE will not be addressed.
This makes it very difficult (although not impossible) to make any kind of long-term investments in FreeBSD.
Pointing to the big name firms that run FreeBSD, like Netflix, is a bit disingenuous as only they have the resources to, essentially, run their own forks of FreeBSD (which they do).
I have written about this in detail, twice:
First, in 2012[3] and then later in 2014[4]. The 2014 posting is probably more succinct and relevant here, but if you really want a deep dive in the culture and tendencies of FreeBSD development, read the 2012 thread.
[1] JohnCompanies, started in fall of 2001, was possibly the first "VPS" provider as we now think of it, although we called them "Server Instances" and did not coin the term "Virtual Private Server".
[2] https://0x.co https://0x.co
[3] https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-January/037294.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-Jan...
[4] https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2014-June/045319.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2014-Jun...
- morning_gelato 7y agoGiven your current frustrations with the project, could you also describe the benefits of using FreeBSD in your company that offset these problems?
- jeffatfreebsd 7y agoDevelopers pick their own priorities as most are donating their time. Those that are not are following the wishes of their employers. People make an effort to ensure that bug fixes are MFC'd back to supported releases and for security fixes we have a stronger policy. Otherwise it should be no surprise that we focus on future releases. The release process has a certain organizational cost for validation and running them too frequently burns out project volunteers. Many companies who use linux also effectively maintain their own forks that are gradually updated and tested. This is not a unique problem to FreeBSD. We unfortunately don't have a redhat equivalent although there are now several companies offering paid FreeBSD support if you need that for your enterprise. I think you also got quite a lot of very reasonable replies in your thread on hackers. You need to realize that your fundamental request is for people who are giving up their free time to do something interesting to change their plans so that you can run your enterprise while providing no help or financial incentive. When there are reasonable proposals it may catch someone's eye and prompt action. I can't even really tell what your proposal is besides changing release frequency. What are _you_ willing to do to support that?
- rsync 7y ago"You need to realize that your fundamental request is for people who are giving up their free time to do something interesting to change their plans so that you can run your enterprise while providing no help or financial incentive." ... "I can't even really tell what your proposal is besides changing release frequency. What are _you_ willing to do to support that?" ... I offered $50k to run 9.x up to 9.15: "... I can contribute USD $10k per year that this course was followed, or $50k over five years. We can contribute some hardware, hosting and bandwidth as well."[1] As I said in this old, old thread: "I'm not a FreeBSD developer and I have little use for either CURRENT or STABLE. I'm saying that I need a major release to have an effective lifetime longer than two years." ... and in anticipation of your 2020 response, I direct you to the FreeBSD handbook, which explicitly states: "This is still a development branch, however, and this means that at any given time, the sources for FreeBSD-STABLE may or may not be suitable for any particular purpose. It is simply another engineering development track, NOT A RESOURCE FOR END-USERS."[2] FWIW, we have also offered and paid several FreeBSD development bounties since 2005.[3][4] [1] https://0x.co/TCZM6C https://0x.co/TCZM6C [2] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/current-stable.html https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/current-stable.html [3] https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2007-April/001127.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2007-Ap... [4] https://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/01/64bit-freebsd-quotas.html https://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/01/64bit-freebsd-...