> >
> > I've heard several times that the core team doesn't "like" John
> > Dyson's work for FreeBSD, without specific information. While FreeBSD
> >
> :-(.
> 
> John
> dyson@freebsd.org

I don't think it is you personally John. It is NIH. The plague of
the free OSes. (Not Invented Here for those wondering who NIH was :-)

How much granularity are you people going to add ({Net,Free,Open}BSD,
Linux etc) before someone actually says "Hang on, they already did
this work once".

We use NetBSD, BSDi, SunOS and Solaris (in that order of preference,
or in the case of Slowlaris, sufferance) at work. The *only* reason
that FreeBSD is missing for production machines, although running
on some of our developers machines, is that FreeBSD did not exist
as a 4.4lite based kernel (radix routing etc) when we needed to
build core routers. We stick with NetBSD because we know some of
the failure modes and the workings of the development team.  FreeBSD
will probably be required in the near future, since some of the
routing engines we are thinking about implementing will *need* >
64Mb of RAM and a Pentium 133 or more to run. We have very weird
requirements in terms of CPU usage. A NetBSD/alpha is an alternative,
but we are (like most production platforms) very conservative with
changing architectures.

NetBSD gives us the multi-platform support, and when "some people"
pull their collective fingers out and *finish* the sun4m port, it will
runon *all* our platforms. We didn't pay for a SS5 for nothing. I
know you are listening. I do not particularly want to run *BSD.
Just BSD will do me.

More cooperation would do out there, even at non-kernel level. Just get
/etc and /dev uniform across *BSD and I will be *very* happy. I can't
stand editing different files across BSDi and NetBSD just now, and adding
even more versions would be painful. The sysctl variables are in a similar
vein. Sometimes I wonder why people haven't noticed what (before they
got hijacked by the self interest groups) things like POSIX and
X/OPEN were created for.

This is just the continuance of a non-partisan appeal for people
to look beyond their pond. See what the other goldfish out there
are doing.  Please.

Regards,
-- 
Peter Galbavy                                           peter@wonderland.org
@ Home                                                 phone://44/973/499465
in Wonderland                              http://www.wonderland.org/~peter/
                               snail://UK/NW1_6LE/London/21_Harewood_Avenue/