Subject: Re: NetBSD: Certified mom-ready.
To: None <netbsd-advocacy@netbsd.org>
From: Mirian Crzig Lennox <lennox@alcita.com>
List: netbsd-advocacy
Date: 04/19/1999 19:31:18
Ken Nakata <kenn@synap.ne.jp> writes:
> On 19 Apr 1999 17:43:26 -0400, Mirian Crzig Lennox wrote:
> > 
> > I think the major feature that Linux and FreeBSD has which NetBSD
> > doesn't is a bazaar-oriented development style in various forms.
> > Linux is pure bazaar; FreeBSD is what I consider a bazaar-cathedral
> > hybrid.  NetBSD's development model is cathedral through and through.
> 
> Oh, puh-lease.  You are not serious, are you?  There's a whole bunch
> of NetBSD developers who have a privillege to commit his/her own
> changes to the tree.  AFAICS, ESR's argument of BSD development model
> being `cathedral' is just bogus.

The number of people who have commit privilege is really irrelevant to
whether it's a cathedral or bazaar style of development.  What's
relevant is the process by which new code is accepted into the tree.

As an example: consider SMP.  We have a project blessed by core to
implement SMP in NetBSD.  As a result, if you or I try to implement
SMP in NetBSD, none of our work is likely to be accepted by core.  We
wouldn't even *try* to work on SMP, even if we were confident we could
succeed, because it would be a waste of time.  This is cathedral model
pure and simple.  In the Linux community, and to a lesser extent the
FreeBSD community, it's permissible, sometimes even encouraged, for
competing groups of people to work on the same feature.  That's the
essence of the bazaar.

-- 
Mirian Crzig Lennox                                Systems Anarchist
  "Don't follow leaders... watch the parking meters."  --Bob Dylan