Conclusion - Re: Backporting DFly patches to FreeBSD?

[David Rhodus]

On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 12:15:38 -0800, Kris Kennaway
<kkenn at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 2005-02-21, Hiten Pandya <hmp at xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > Okay, it is finally time for me to step-in and do my job - this thread
> > is not getting anywhere and must end with this closing note. :)
> >
> > If FreeBSD does not take our changes or what we consider as "important"
> > changes, than it is their loss and vice versa it applies if we dont take
> > improvements made in their tree and put them in ours.
> 
> Aren't you still a FreeBSD committer?  The talk of "us" vs "them"
> makes me think you're not interested in working on FreeBSD any longer.
> That's a shame, I'd hoped you would be interested in doing some of
> this cross-porting you guys are advocating.
> 
> > Facts:
> > It is important to be diplomatic with other projects or individuals from
> > that project.  If David is hostile towards FreeBSD, he can gladly do it
> > at GoBSD site because that is *his* site; it DOES NOT represent the
> > DragonFly project as whole.
> 
> It does reflect poorly on the DragonFly project as a whole, and
> contributes to on-going ill-will between the projects.  This is sad.

Oh please,  ALL of the statements you are talking about are from last
year.  Many of the FreeBSD developers have emailed me personally about
them many months ago. If I really was concerned about them I would
have already removed them from my blog.  This reminds me of an old
statement, "If the truth kills granny then let her die".

As far as the myth of ill-will goes, just the other day I was talking
personally to some of the FreeBSD developers about a problem I noticed
in the scheduler which 5.x is currently using and a method in which to
correct it.  This problem was completely unrelated development going
on in DragonFly.  The reason I noticed the problem is  because I still
am interested in FreeBSD from a purely technical prospective, just as
many of the FreeBSD are interested in DragonFly, from a purely
technical prospective.

As far as competition is concerned, because DragonFly and FreeBSD are
two different projects going down different paths they will be
competing for users.  If not for anything but from just a purely
technical prospective people have on the projects will end up causing
competition.  This form of competition would exist natively even if
the FreeBSD developers and the DragonFly developers did not know of
each others' projects.  Users are always looking for some program to
run faster which they use a lot or some new cool feature they want to
run.  If anyone doesn't want to be involved with a little competition
then they need to dig a hole and live in it because you find
competition everywhere.  Competition encourages us to implement our
best ideas to stay ahead, so it is a benefit, not a downfall.

As far as the FreeBSD developers go, I personally think of many of
them as friends and look forward to talking with them at various
conferences when I see them.  For many things I hope we can find a
medium between not only the fbsd project but the other BSD's too, such
as sharing device drivers and especially consolidating the USB device
code across all the BSD's.

-- 
                                            -David
                                            Steven David Rhodus
                                            <drhodus at xxxxxxxxxxx>