Is *BSD really dying??

I'm specifically talking about FreeBSD. It seems like almost every day I read something unfortunate about the FreeBSD project. Members of the core team leaving because of conflicting interests... results from benchmark tests constantly displaying poor results... Many people's lost of interest in *BSD...
Would it make sense to ditch an operating system that seems almost destined for doom?

Here are a few sites that put me into this situation:

http://daily.daemonnews.org/view_st...3?story_id=2837
no fun??

http://daily.daemonnews.org/view_st...3?story_id=2850
http://www.bsdvault.net/
Mike smith bye bye...
http://www.samag.com/documents/s=11...0107a/0107a.htm
sad performance

http://bsd.slashdot.org/article.pl?...=thread&tid=122
Netcraft officially confirms: *BSD is dying


FreeBSD has always provided me with reliability and quality... Is it still too early to say goodbye? By that I mean, will there no longer be an active development of the OS?

Considering that an election for core is coming up soon, 4.6-RELEASE is nearing completion, and a developer's preview of 5.0-CURRENT has been released, it's pretty hard to see how FreeBSD is dying.

Ports are being added to the tree everyday. Bits are being added to the source tree everyday. Some things are getting better, some things are getting worse, some things aren't changing at all.

So people are leaving core. Did you expect them all to stay their until they died?? Did you really expect the same group of people to run this project forever?? People come, people go, that's the way of life in the business world.

It's just their REASON for leaving that bothers me a bit... The committers themselves feel that without some drastic changes their project may no longer exist in the future. They're not leaving because they feel satisfied with the work they've done... no, they are leaving because they are disheartened by what's going on amongst the programmers. You have to think, the core members that left WANT to still work on FreeBSD, it's their desire to remain on the team... but all the other issues are so hindersome they want to leave. It's not just going with the flow of 'business'... in fact this could start a flow, that's what I'm afraid of.


Sure they're doing lotsa work... but does that mean they're going in the right direction?

I have noticed that Apple computing has been stealing away a few FreeBSD programmers here and there. That could be part of the reason they are leaving.

http://www.opendarwin.org/coreteam.shtml

E.

Spinkick,

FreeBSD is not magical; also it is not a product, or an item, or even a group. It is just a collection of code that happens to run remarkably well together. And this code exists on hard drives all over the world. If the whole FreeBSD developer team resigned, FreeBSD would still exist. If need be, I personally would put up a downloadable copy, and a CVS tree, and encourage any interested parties to continue working on the code. If you have a copy of it, then what's to worry about it "going away"?

Even if I was stuck using the current version of FreeBSD, with no advances, I would be happy for a good long time to come. In its present form, it is still a far more cohesive OS than just about anything else out there.

And this is only FreeBSD. The other BSD's each carry on just as strong as ever. Take your pick; they are all excellent operating systems. And if FreeBSD starts taking a sufficiently wrong direction, you can bet that at least one or two leaders will start a fork, in order to keep BSD "pure". What's the harm in that? More choice is welcome, as far as I am concerned.

So I don't think *BSD will die at all. The real thing that is hurting everyone right now is its success! The geek-developer community wasn't ready for FreeBSD to get as popular with industry as it has become, so the political signal-to-noise ration has gotten a little worse. But, geek communities have the ability to be self-correcting, which is exactly what's happening. Enough people like JKH raise a flag, and maybe the community will work on getting back to the basics. (But a certain amount of politics will by necessity accompany any achievement.)

So, the only question to ask yourself--as always, is: are you going to be part of the problem, or part of the solution ?