3 ms·

I wrote this in 2012 - almost exactly ten years ago - and it remains true. Looking at freebsd.org right now I see that my options for production, release syste

by rsync 5y ago

I wrote this in 2012 - almost exactly ten years ago - and it remains true. Looking at freebsd.org right now I see that my options for production, release systems are 12.3 and 13.0 ... ... which means that if 12.1-RELEASE came out at the end of 2019 and 13.0-RELEASE came out in April of 2021, you had all of 16 months to make investments in the 12 branch before it was hopelessly passe and all queries regarding it would be answered with: "That's fixed in current ..." The 4.x nostalgia is justified: it was polished and polished and polished over many years and many organizations were incentivized to invest in that branch

LeoPanthera 5y ago
Just because you think it's still true doesn't mean you're justified in not putting (2012) in the title.
- freedomben 5y ago
  That's harsh and definitely not the benefit of the doubt. Seems more likely to me that OP didn't think about putting (2012) in there.
themerone 5y ago
What is "The Rift" you mention?
- rsync 5y ago
  The transition from the 4.x branch of FreeBSD to 5.x. 5.x had all kinds of problems and then 6.x was the first release that barely got out into public use before 7.x undercut it ... and that is the cycle we have been in ever since. 4.x had minor releases going all the way to 4.11. Nowadays, major versions generally stop at X.3 (for instance, 11.3).
  - rjsw 5y ago
    I switched to NetBSD instead of completely wiping 4.11 and installing 5.x.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Lammy 5y ago
  5.x was the start of "Giant lock" elimination: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2007-November/022368.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2007-Nov... There wasn't a "STABLE" release of it until FreeBSD 5.3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_version_history#FreeBSD_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_version_history#FreeBS... FreeBSD may not be a perfectly-run project but I honestly can't imagine using anything else :)
akulbe 5y ago
It also seems like 10 years ago folks were a lot more willing to have discourse, where today… if you have difference(s) of opinion, it's not received as well. Discourse used to be a thing.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  Is this true? When I was a kid using the internet to learn to code on the 2000s people seemed a lot meaner in general than they are now. It was hard to ask a question on a forum without being made to feel like an idiot.
  - philliphaydon 5y ago
    I would like you to meet stackoverflow. When I was learning to code in the late 90s early 2000s people seemed much nicer and more patient then than they do now… I try to avoid asking questions on SO because of the negativity there.
    - bee_rider 5y ago
      StackOverflow isn't really for beginner questions/"help me learn" kind of stuff. In the course of trying to come up with answers to most questions, they knocked out the easy/fundamental ones early. I used to answer question on the askprogramming subreddit sometimes, I generally didn't see a ton of negativity there.
    - teh_klev 5y ago
      You could learn how to write a better question. I've got ~140 questions on SO and none of them ever had hostile responses. Usually questions are downvoted because they're: * vague * no code example * pretty basic that a google search could answer your question * same old, same old repetitive questions answered many times over Back in the days of usenet there would be a FAQ and likely a set of HOWTO's, you had to read this so as not to fall foul of pushback from the group (probably considered hostile). If you are asking what might be a repeat question but didn't find a solution either on SO or elsewhere, then quote the sources that came close but didn't help. That shows you at least did some research. Both usenet and forums from the 1990/2000's were no different. I quit answering questions on SO because I felt people were lazy and wasting my time, and I was done with that, mostly for the reasons above. I still monitor the same tags I was active in, see the same old crap, and really cannot be arsed because it's clear the OP's did no research. Also when you do assist some users become quite indignant that you must solve their exact use-case. Many users never even say thank you for an answer that might take 30-45mins to produce. So feck that shite. I don't have the time or energy to be hostile, I just went dark. And sadly many early enthusiastic answerers that helped bootstrap the site in the early years did the same.
throw0101a 5y ago
> ... which means that if 12.1-RELEASE came out at the end of 2019 and 13.0-RELEASE came out in April of 2021, you had all of 16 months to make investments in the 12 branch before it was hopelessly passe and all queries regarding it would be answered with: So basically the same as Debian and Ubuntu LTS? Debian releases every ~2 years with 5 years of Security+LTS support, which is the same as Ubuntu (LTS): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history#Release_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history#Release... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu#Releases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu#Releases From "Changes to the FreeBSD Support Model": - Resolving our arbitrary (and unofficial) 5-year branch lifetime guarantee. The support policy is that the stable/X branch will be supported for 5 years (minimum) from the point X.0-RELEASE is released. We now guarantee a 5-year lifetime on the branch, regardless of how many releases are built from the branch. Additionally, a "last minute" release from the stable/X branch does not constitute expanding the support lifetime for the branch as a whole for an additional two years. […] - A new stable/ branch release will not occur before two years after the X.0-RELEASE from the prior branch. This limits the number of simultaneous supported branches, which will greatly reduce the overall number of branches that must be maintained and build-tested for Security Advisories and Errata Notices, reducing turnaround time. * https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2015-February/001624.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2015-Fe... * https://www.freebsd.org/security/ https://www.freebsd.org/security/
- ianai 5y ago
  Two thoughts: 1. GP makes me wonder whether the FreeBSD definition of LTS is less than people expect. 2. Maybe to properly admin a modern FreeBSD box the admin is supposed to be making the underlying system version easily replaceable. i.e. Make the actual OS files changing have no effect upon hosted system/application stability.
  - toast0 5y ago
    > Maybe to properly admin a modern FreeBSD box the admin is supposed to be making the underlying system version easily replaceable. This is how things worked at Yahoo and WhatsApp. For the most part, a server kept whatever version of FreeBSD it was installed with, and the application logic lived in /usr/local/ or /home/y/ or /home/whatsapp/ Keep your 'build' machine to compile production executables on the oldest OS release of your fleet, and everything should run everywhere. (You'll need to use the compat-X stuff so your FreeBSD X+1 machines can run FreeBSD X binaries, but that's easy) You can use stuff from the base system, but not if you expect recent changes. I don't remember ever doing an OS upgrade at Yahoo, although it must have happened. In my group, we only got updates with new hardware; which was fine, hardware was changing rapidly. At WhatsApp, I drove the OS updates towards the end of WhatsApp's use of FreeBSD. A fair amount was just not wanting to have 4 different major versions out there, but there were also forced updates to get important network bugfixes or performance improvements. Sometimes it was easier to find the handful of boxes that were too old to use something nice in a script and update them, rather than fixing the script to not use the nice feature. When we ran into bugs on older versions, upgrading to a version that already had it fixed was sometimes an option, but sometimes it'd need to be backported, and sometimes the bug was still in -current. We didn't run into too many of those though, our local patch set was never more than about 10 patches.
alberth 5y ago
As someone who loves BSD, and really respects your opinion, a few questions given your long history with: - if you could start all over fresh, what OS (and why) would you run your business on? - what’s your opinion about Dragonfly? Any experience with it? - what are the things you love about FreeBSD, as well as what still needs improvement (besides release cycle topic)?
- rsync 5y ago
  I would still have built rsync.net on FreeBSD because of how familiar I was with it and how much I had personally (and institutionally) invested in it from JohnCompanies. Since ZFS is now so core to what we do, it was a very natural evolution. I have zero experience with Dragonfly BSD. I love that FreeBSD is still a very simple UNIX without complications like systemd. I was recently tinkering with a raspberry pi and had to work out wifi connectivity and had to interface with ... what is that weird wifi subsystem that linux uses ? Supplicant ? Wow. I just want to pipeline commands and edit config files. I don't care that it's inefficient or doesn't scale. It has scaled just fine for me.
  - dijit 5y ago
    I believe wpa_supplicant is still needed for wifi access on freebsd (or, it was in 2017 when I was last using freebsd on my laptop). OpenBSD has better integrations with ifconfig and wpa though, it’s possible they are ported over now, but wifi config is the same as in Linux (or had been for quite a significant amount of time) on freebsd. Completely agree about the opaque and incidental complexity of the systemd ecosystem though, I’m glad people love it but it’s not for me.
trasz 5y ago
If you have a large installation, why depend on FreeBSD releases at all instead of choosing (arbitrarily) a newer STABLE snapshot, testing it and eventually rolling into production same way you’d do with a release?
akkartik 5y ago
As someone without skin in this particular game, I'm curious to hear your view of the OS landscape today. Have you considered (or perhaps even tried) migrating rsync.net out of FreeBSD given these issues?
lmm 5y ago
> ... which means that if 12.1-RELEASE came out at the end of 2019 and 13.0-RELEASE came out in April of 2021, you had all of 16 months to make investments in the 12 branch A worst-case 16 months sounds like an absurdly long support window by the standards of most actively developed projects; anything but the largest and most corporate of projects is unlikely to do better than that. And it seems contradictory to complain that stable releases aren't supported long enough but you're waiting too long for new functionality. Of course everyone wants daily releases that are supported forever, but realistically with finite development effort most projects have to settle on something equivalent to "you can run -CURRENT or you can run LTS, pick your poison".
- smaudet 5y ago
  As others have pointed out LTS exists elsewhere - the truth is LTS is minimum level of support necessary for most users. Everything else is essentially bleeding edge - too much work to maintain, constantly bugged, etc. The previous model where a major change could have support last for decades, where the system was modular in that patches could apply to any major version - that was gold. Unfortunately today we have this "yesterday's tech is garbage" attitude, and honeslty it is mostly making all software garbage.
- r_hoods_ghost 5y ago
  This has not been my experience over the last 20 years across multiple industries. Generally I'd expect (and have written into an SLA) a minimum of 2 years support for anything even vaguely critical. If using Open Source I'd be buying from a vendor who would guarantee that level of support. I acknowledge it's different if you're working for an early stage startup designing the next tinder for marmosets or whatever in which case you probably don't care about support windows because you're likely to crash and burn within your support window.
  - lmm 5y ago
    I've worked across industries in everything from a 2-person startup to an F500 investment bank, and I've very rarely seen a 2 year SLA for anything. (Rolling 6 months was the standard at the investment bank). Buying all your open source frameworks is an expensive luxury (and rarely worth anything), at least if you're in a position where you actually need to deliver.
benschulz 5y ago
> It's difficult to escape the notion that FreeBSD is becoming an operating system by, and for, FreeBSD developers. I'm curious: Why _shouldn't_ it be an OS primarily for its developers? Why should they focus on others when they're the one building it?
- beowulfey 5y ago
  Well, it’s fine if you aren’t a FreeBSD developer yourself and don’t want to use FreeBSD. How many people run TempleOS these days, I wonder?
  - nix23 5y ago
    >How many people run TempleOS these days, I wonder? Probably more then ever ;)
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  We could quibble about what exactly "primarily" means, but that's not the phrase he used which is "by, and for" without the qualifier. So here's two reasons to make FreeBSD for others as well: - They use a lot of code that they don't develop. If FreeBSD is not for others then those external projects and developers would be disinclined to make their stuff work on FreeBSD. - Every new FreeBSD developer comes from a non-FreeBSD developer who is interested in FreeBSD and probably uses it. More developers ~= better FreeBSD for FreeBSD developers. - More users (very roughly) means more money. Whether that's money to pay for more FreeBSD developers, or incentive to make your hardware work with FreeBSD or port your software to it, there are some positive effects on the system and possibly your wallet. - Personal satisfaction to develop software lots of people use. Also the recognition that comes with that can get you a job or help you meet people and go places. So lots of reasons. Even being purely selfish and hoping to extract the most from it, there are plausible reasons why some amount of focus on others might be the best way to go about developing a the project.
rsecora 5y ago
Either there is a code contributor pushing for functionality (Example sendfile/nginx) or a donor suggesting a path forward or a volunteer given free time. Every foundation goals can be driven via sponsorship. At the end everything is simplify as who pays the bills at the end of the month? This raises the old question: Who pays for the free in free software? https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationYear=2019 https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationYea...
- MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
  > "It's difficult to escape the notion that FreeBSD is becoming an operating system by, and for, FreeBSD developers." I don't know how many FreeBSD devs are paid full time and how much of it is voluntary, but this is the outcome that I would expect absent a traditional customer-vendor relationship. This is basically every open source project ever where most of the work being done is non-commercial.
r3trohack3r 5y ago
I’m curious, this response seemed fairly reasonable and proposed it start at 8.3: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-January/037401.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-Jan... Did anything come of it?

by rsync 5y ago

LeoPanthera 5y ago

Just because you think it's still true doesn't mean you're justified in not putting (2012) in the title.

freedomben 5y ago
That's harsh and definitely not the benefit of the doubt. Seems more likely to me that OP didn't think about putting (2012) in there.

themerone 5y ago

What is "The Rift" you mention?

rsync 5y ago
The transition from the 4.x branch of FreeBSD to 5.x. 5.x had all kinds of problems and then 6.x was the first release that barely got out into public use before 7.x undercut it ... and that is the cycle we have been in ever since. 4.x had minor releases going all the way to 4.11. Nowadays, major versions generally stop at X.3 (for instance, 11.3).
- rjsw 5y ago
  I switched to NetBSD instead of completely wiping 4.11 and installing 5.x.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Lammy 5y ago
5.x was the start of "Giant lock" elimination: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2007-November/022368.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2007-Nov... There wasn't a "STABLE" release of it until FreeBSD 5.3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_version_history#FreeBSD_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_version_history#FreeBS... FreeBSD may not be a perfectly-run project but I honestly can't imagine using anything else :)

akulbe 5y ago

It also seems like 10 years ago folks were a lot more willing to have discourse, where today… if you have difference(s) of opinion, it's not received as well. Discourse used to be a thing.

edgyquant 5y ago
Is this true? When I was a kid using the internet to learn to code on the 2000s people seemed a lot meaner in general than they are now. It was hard to ask a question on a forum without being made to feel like an idiot.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  I would like you to meet stackoverflow. When I was learning to code in the late 90s early 2000s people seemed much nicer and more patient then than they do now… I try to avoid asking questions on SO because of the negativity there.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    StackOverflow isn't really for beginner questions/"help me learn" kind of stuff. In the course of trying to come up with answers to most questions, they knocked out the easy/fundamental ones early. I used to answer question on the askprogramming subreddit sometimes, I generally didn't see a ton of negativity there.
  - teh_klev 5y ago
    You could learn how to write a better question. I've got ~140 questions on SO and none of them ever had hostile responses. Usually questions are downvoted because they're: * vague * no code example * pretty basic that a google search could answer your question * same old, same old repetitive questions answered many times over Back in the days of usenet there would be a FAQ and likely a set of HOWTO's, you had to read this so as not to fall foul of pushback from the group (probably considered hostile). If you are asking what might be a repeat question but didn't find a solution either on SO or elsewhere, then quote the sources that came close but didn't help. That shows you at least did some research. Both usenet and forums from the 1990/2000's were no different. I quit answering questions on SO because I felt people were lazy and wasting my time, and I was done with that, mostly for the reasons above. I still monitor the same tags I was active in, see the same old crap, and really cannot be arsed because it's clear the OP's did no research. Also when you do assist some users become quite indignant that you must solve their exact use-case. Many users never even say thank you for an answer that might take 30-45mins to produce. So feck that shite. I don't have the time or energy to be hostile, I just went dark. And sadly many early enthusiastic answerers that helped bootstrap the site in the early years did the same.

throw0101a 5y ago

> ... which means that if 12.1-RELEASE came out at the end of 2019 and 13.0-RELEASE came out in April of 2021, you had all of 16 months to make investments in the 12 branch before it was hopelessly passe and all queries regarding it would be answered with: So basically the same as Debian and Ubuntu LTS? Debian releases every ~2 years with 5 years of Security+LTS support, which is the same as Ubuntu (LTS): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history#Release_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history#Release... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu#Releases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu#Releases From "Changes to the FreeBSD Support Model": - Resolving our arbitrary (and unofficial) 5-year branch lifetime guarantee. The support policy is that the stable/X branch will be supported for 5 years (minimum) from the point X.0-RELEASE is released. We now guarantee a 5-year lifetime on the branch, regardless of how many releases are built from the branch. Additionally, a "last minute" release from the stable/X branch does not constitute expanding the support lifetime for the branch as a whole for an additional two years. […] - A new stable/ branch release will not occur before two years after the X.0-RELEASE from the prior branch. This limits the number of simultaneous supported branches, which will greatly reduce the overall number of branches that must be maintained and build-tested for Security Advisories and Errata Notices, reducing turnaround time. * https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2015-February/001624.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2015-Fe... * https://www.freebsd.org/security/ https://www.freebsd.org/security/

ianai 5y ago
Two thoughts: 1. GP makes me wonder whether the FreeBSD definition of LTS is less than people expect. 2. Maybe to properly admin a modern FreeBSD box the admin is supposed to be making the underlying system version easily replaceable. i.e. Make the actual OS files changing have no effect upon hosted system/application stability.
- toast0 5y ago
  > Maybe to properly admin a modern FreeBSD box the admin is supposed to be making the underlying system version easily replaceable. This is how things worked at Yahoo and WhatsApp. For the most part, a server kept whatever version of FreeBSD it was installed with, and the application logic lived in /usr/local/ or /home/y/ or /home/whatsapp/ Keep your 'build' machine to compile production executables on the oldest OS release of your fleet, and everything should run everywhere. (You'll need to use the compat-X stuff so your FreeBSD X+1 machines can run FreeBSD X binaries, but that's easy) You can use stuff from the base system, but not if you expect recent changes. I don't remember ever doing an OS upgrade at Yahoo, although it must have happened. In my group, we only got updates with new hardware; which was fine, hardware was changing rapidly. At WhatsApp, I drove the OS updates towards the end of WhatsApp's use of FreeBSD. A fair amount was just not wanting to have 4 different major versions out there, but there were also forced updates to get important network bugfixes or performance improvements. Sometimes it was easier to find the handful of boxes that were too old to use something nice in a script and update them, rather than fixing the script to not use the nice feature. When we ran into bugs on older versions, upgrading to a version that already had it fixed was sometimes an option, but sometimes it'd need to be backported, and sometimes the bug was still in -current. We didn't run into too many of those though, our local patch set was never more than about 10 patches.

alberth 5y ago

As someone who loves BSD, and really respects your opinion, a few questions given your long history with: - if you could start all over fresh, what OS (and why) would you run your business on? - what’s your opinion about Dragonfly? Any experience with it? - what are the things you love about FreeBSD, as well as what still needs improvement (besides release cycle topic)?

rsync 5y ago
I would still have built rsync.net on FreeBSD because of how familiar I was with it and how much I had personally (and institutionally) invested in it from JohnCompanies. Since ZFS is now so core to what we do, it was a very natural evolution. I have zero experience with Dragonfly BSD. I love that FreeBSD is still a very simple UNIX without complications like systemd. I was recently tinkering with a raspberry pi and had to work out wifi connectivity and had to interface with ... what is that weird wifi subsystem that linux uses ? Supplicant ? Wow. I just want to pipeline commands and edit config files. I don't care that it's inefficient or doesn't scale. It has scaled just fine for me.
- dijit 5y ago
  I believe wpa_supplicant is still needed for wifi access on freebsd (or, it was in 2017 when I was last using freebsd on my laptop). OpenBSD has better integrations with ifconfig and wpa though, it’s possible they are ported over now, but wifi config is the same as in Linux (or had been for quite a significant amount of time) on freebsd. Completely agree about the opaque and incidental complexity of the systemd ecosystem though, I’m glad people love it but it’s not for me.

trasz 5y ago

If you have a large installation, why depend on FreeBSD releases at all instead of choosing (arbitrarily) a newer STABLE snapshot, testing it and eventually rolling into production same way you’d do with a release?

akkartik 5y ago

As someone without skin in this particular game, I'm curious to hear your view of the OS landscape today. Have you considered (or perhaps even tried) migrating rsync.net out of FreeBSD given these issues?

lmm 5y ago

> ... which means that if 12.1-RELEASE came out at the end of 2019 and 13.0-RELEASE came out in April of 2021, you had all of 16 months to make investments in the 12 branch A worst-case 16 months sounds like an absurdly long support window by the standards of most actively developed projects; anything but the largest and most corporate of projects is unlikely to do better than that. And it seems contradictory to complain that stable releases aren't supported long enough but you're waiting too long for new functionality. Of course everyone wants daily releases that are supported forever, but realistically with finite development effort most projects have to settle on something equivalent to "you can run -CURRENT or you can run LTS, pick your poison".

smaudet 5y ago
As others have pointed out LTS exists elsewhere - the truth is LTS is minimum level of support necessary for most users. Everything else is essentially bleeding edge - too much work to maintain, constantly bugged, etc. The previous model where a major change could have support last for decades, where the system was modular in that patches could apply to any major version - that was gold. Unfortunately today we have this "yesterday's tech is garbage" attitude, and honeslty it is mostly making all software garbage.
r_hoods_ghost 5y ago
This has not been my experience over the last 20 years across multiple industries. Generally I'd expect (and have written into an SLA) a minimum of 2 years support for anything even vaguely critical. If using Open Source I'd be buying from a vendor who would guarantee that level of support. I acknowledge it's different if you're working for an early stage startup designing the next tinder for marmosets or whatever in which case you probably don't care about support windows because you're likely to crash and burn within your support window.
- lmm 5y ago
  I've worked across industries in everything from a 2-person startup to an F500 investment bank, and I've very rarely seen a 2 year SLA for anything. (Rolling 6 months was the standard at the investment bank). Buying all your open source frameworks is an expensive luxury (and rarely worth anything), at least if you're in a position where you actually need to deliver.

benschulz 5y ago

> It's difficult to escape the notion that FreeBSD is becoming an operating system by, and for, FreeBSD developers. I'm curious: Why _shouldn't_ it be an OS primarily for its developers? Why should they focus on others when they're the one building it?

beowulfey 5y ago
Well, it’s fine if you aren’t a FreeBSD developer yourself and don’t want to use FreeBSD. How many people run TempleOS these days, I wonder?
- nix23 5y ago
  >How many people run TempleOS these days, I wonder? Probably more then ever ;)
throwawaylinux 5y ago
We could quibble about what exactly "primarily" means, but that's not the phrase he used which is "by, and for" without the qualifier. So here's two reasons to make FreeBSD for others as well: - They use a lot of code that they don't develop. If FreeBSD is not for others then those external projects and developers would be disinclined to make their stuff work on FreeBSD. - Every new FreeBSD developer comes from a non-FreeBSD developer who is interested in FreeBSD and probably uses it. More developers ~= better FreeBSD for FreeBSD developers. - More users (very roughly) means more money. Whether that's money to pay for more FreeBSD developers, or incentive to make your hardware work with FreeBSD or port your software to it, there are some positive effects on the system and possibly your wallet. - Personal satisfaction to develop software lots of people use. Also the recognition that comes with that can get you a job or help you meet people and go places. So lots of reasons. Even being purely selfish and hoping to extract the most from it, there are plausible reasons why some amount of focus on others might be the best way to go about developing a the project.

rsecora 5y ago

Either there is a code contributor pushing for functionality (Example sendfile/nginx) or a donor suggesting a path forward or a volunteer given free time. Every foundation goals can be driven via sponsorship. At the end everything is simplify as who pays the bills at the end of the month? This raises the old question: Who pays for the free in free software? https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationYear=2019 https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationYea...

MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
> "It's difficult to escape the notion that FreeBSD is becoming an operating system by, and for, FreeBSD developers." I don't know how many FreeBSD devs are paid full time and how much of it is voluntary, but this is the outcome that I would expect absent a traditional customer-vendor relationship. This is basically every open source project ever where most of the work being done is non-commercial.

r3trohack3r 5y ago

I’m curious, this response seemed fairly reasonable and proposed it start at 8.3: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-January/037401.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-Jan... Did anything come of it?