| Dates | # Posts | Subject |
|---|---|---|
| Nov 08 | 3 | accessing portal site |
| Nov 06 - Nov 12 | 17 | Any artists interested in doing a FreeBSD animated GIF banner? |
| Nov 06 - Nov 08 | 9 | CounterStrike |
| Nov 10 | 2 | FreeBSD Foundation: Examples of FreeBSD as teaching aid/research platform |
| Nov 07 | 2 | Good piece of advocacy |
| Nov 06 - Nov 12 | 7 | Installation: what to (not) do about it |
This started out with a poorly composed letter of complaint, Cc'd to us from a representative of Freedom Technologies Corporation, a company that builds pre-installed FreeBSD systems. He seemed upset over a URL on the Intel web site that doesn't load for anything but IE, and used this is a plug to sell his services. A couple of replies quickly let him know we didn't like that sort of thing.
A continuation of last week's thread, here we have a couple examples of what people are coming up with:
This discussion is also continued on from last week. Some interesting additions to the conversation were:
Some games have bugs that have audible manifestations on FreeBSD but not on Linux, probably because FreeBSD follows the spec instead of emulating OSS or Linux bug for bug - [Dag-Erling Smorgrav]
[Michael Wu] sends us a couple specific examples of how FreeBSD is used as either a teaching aid or a research platform by educational institutions.
[Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven] wanted to clue us in on a book he recently purchased. It seems that Warren W. Gay has written a book called "Advanced UNIX Programming" that uses FreeBSD 3.4-RELEASE throughout the entire book to test examples. Warren also supports and mentions FreeBSD a lot. If you'd like to take a look at his book, I found it at Amazon. The ISBN number is 0-672-31990-X.
.Another thread stretched into its 2nd week, Terry & Jordan are still discussing an alternative to /stand/sysinstall. A couple of interesting tidbits:
It would be nice if the project would publish a roadmap indicating what it wants from developers, so that they don't end up spending an incredible amount of effort, only to find themselves stonewalled later. If the project would at least publish an architectural roadmap for even only six months ahead, I think it would help to commit more people to expending the necessary effort to see to those goals.
Clearly, the SMPng work is one goal that's pretty widely known, thanks to Jason Evans and others publishing their direction; if the project could be that forthcoming in other areas, then there would be a "guarantee" that, even if the work was ultimately rejected, at least you could know that you were travelling in the right direction, instead of getting to your goal, only to have the project say "that's nice, but that's not where we are headed". At least put up some street signs". - - [Terry Lambert]
+ - [Terry Lambert]
Roadmaps are produced by people with the time and energy to write roadmaps. One of the reasons SMPng is going so well is that we paid to fly a bunch of people to a kick-off meeting and get them working more cohesively together and then we continued to pay the manager of the project to do it on a full-time basis. Management is pretty important where the generation and implementation of roadmap documents is concerned and it's as hard to get it done on a purely volunteer basis as it is to get companies to pay for it in all the areas it needs done.
I'd love to see more management and more roadmaps but I've also learned to live with the fact that there will never be as much of either as I or most anyone else would like. - [Jordan Hubbard]
This conspectus expresses my understanding of what occurred on the FreeBSD-advocacy mailing list during the specified week.
Hey, I'm human... I may have made an error or two... If you think this is the case, and/or that I have omitted some significant thread or part of a thread, feel free to contact me via email.
