FreeBSD core team elections

The application period for candidates is over. We have 23 candidates. alfred and obrien jumped into the boat in the last hours. Although some candidates are still working on rewriting their statements, there are some interesting statements I like to cite, as the voting period will start tomorrow, and I have not yet decided who will sit in my dreamcore.

alfred: I offer a a unique perspective, a kernel hacker that still remembers what it feels like to be a user.

Are hackers not users? Do users have different needs than hackers? Does the Core team deal with user issues or kernel hackers issues?

gordon: FreeBSD is not for everyone. My mother will never use FreeBSD and that doesn’t bother me.

Desktop users are important, because they are reporting a lot of bugs, that are not as easy to detect on servers, e.g. one of the best testing application for libpthread was XMMS, because users immediately reported, when their sound hiccups. But I don’t think we have the resources to compete with MacOSX or Windows at the Moment.

kuriyama: I’ll going to work for FreeBSD where I can serve for.[..] Anyway, being core@ is not so important. Please vote me only if you think I should work on core@ and it will make things better.

I am glad that I wrote kuriyama an encouraging email and that he decided to run for core again. I definetely like his attitude and I really hope he will get enough votes to continue working on core. FreeBSD has like many OpenSource project too many wannabe-leaders. The result are the endless bikesheds about the future. I think the role of core is not so much that they should lead FreeBSD into the future and all developers running behind them, but they should try to keep the different pieces together.

murray: The Project needs to do a much better job at reaching out to corporations to support FreeBSD Development.

I have written last month in this blog, that I don’t agree with this statement. markm says “I do FreeBSD because its fun.” And I think bringing money into the project automagically takes away the fun.

obrien: I think one of the most important things for a Core member to do is be very active with in The FreeBSD Project before being elected, and once elected to make Core activities a high-priority among all things in their life.[..] A Core member should not wear too many FreeBSD “hats” or they cannot fully serve their responsibilities well.

I have to agree with obrien. Unfortunately it appears to be the nature of the project that you will get sucked into it the longer you contribute. And I really wonder why obrien is running for core, as although he is one of those 100% FreeBSD addicted, he is also one of those guys who already wears many hats (Toolchain maintainer, Being on RE for several platforms, FSF/GNU contact…).

And finally rwatson: … it will be necessary to revisit the need for a formal system architect. The FreeBSD Project moved away from having a system architect hat, with this role largely being played by consensus on the RE team (and elsewhere) relating to an impressively ambitious 5.x feature set.

It looks like he resisted from writing over-ambitous. I bet some of the goals for 5.x will not be fullfilled with 6.0. While I agree that it is necessary to define goals, it is not possible for OpenSource projects to define long-term timelines.
This is IMHO the main reason for the failure of the 5.x development. Instead of trying to finish the TODO list for 5.x, the developers should focus on making 5.x stable enough for branching 5-STABLE. (Note that I did not write stable but stable enough.)

2 thoughts on “FreeBSD core team elections”

  1. Those who are lucky to get into Core.4 will be overlooking the burden of 5.3-RELEASE. Now *that* is not exactly one of the things I’d like to be responsible for. *shrug* 🙂

  2. Are you implying that RE will continue to fail and need lot of assistance?
    Talking about RE, I miss people on RE that have a good understanding of most areas and that have the time and motivation to fix bugs in obscure areas (rwatson being the only exception at the moment IMHO).
    I found it interesting, that a lof of candidates for core already talk about 6-CURRENT. I think 6-CURRENT development will start without much assistance from core.
    5.3 is the problem, putting all the Work-in-progress pieces together and produce a stable Operating System.

Comments are closed.