The Trolling on the freebsd- lists

[Matthew Dillon]

    Well, money always tends to have a derogatory effect on open source
    projects.  Many OSS projects crashed and burned when money started to
    flow, though a few (e.g. MySQL, Apache, Samba, Sendmail) have managed to
    survive the transition.  

    One thing that is occuring in the FreeBSD community is that quite a
    significant number of developers are doing major pieces of work within
    the tree under contract.  If I recall correctly, the security work and
    GEOM are the two biggest contract funded projects (and not foundation
    funded though perhaps someone closer to these projects can explain 
    the actual situation on this list).  At least some of these people are
    core members.

    This certainly skews the political and governance structure quite
    seriously.  It creates responsibility and livelihood issues for 
    everyone involved as well as creates work compartmentalization in places
    that really need more eyes on them.  This in turn stratifies the
    development process and greatly reduces peer review and control over
    the effected subsystems.  It isn't so much that outside contributions
    are being ignored as it is that there are very few 'big picture'
    developers left who feel any responsibility to work on things outside
    their own areas of direct interest, or who are willing to ride the 
    gauntlet of other developers by 'intruding' in their territory with
    patch sets.

    Linus Torvolds, on the otherhand, has managed to keep the money away
    from the Linux political core, and there is far more money involved in
    Linux related projects then in FreeBSD ones.  Dealing with money issues
    is inevitable but when it does become an issue I hope to follow the
    Linux model in that regard rather then the FreeBSD model.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>