[talk] FreeBSD Governance, Foundation/Project

[Pete Wright]

On 6/12/19 12:43 PM, Isaac (.ike) Levy wrote:
> --
> For those who have watched this, (or plan to, or were in the rooom), I'd love to openly hear people's thoughts on topics raised?
>
> In the years since the FreeBSD Foundation emerged, what have been it's biggest success and failures for the FreEBSD project?  (Aside from the obvious success of paying Glen Barber to stabilize RELENG :)

thanks for sharing this .ike!  to be upfront i have only looked at the 
slides and haven't watched the video link (yet?).  the slides kinda make 
it look like its festivus and we are airing grievances ;)

i do have a couple observations though:

- i'm really not sure what the thesis is.  is this a critique of the 
fbsd foundation, how core is currently constructed or just intended as a 
general "let's mix the pot so we don't get stagnant"?

- as someone who's been on the fringes of the BSD community for a bit 
and has only recently have been able to become more involved in the 
development process i honestly feel like the community is actually in 
pretty good shape.  i've seen healthy debate and a willingness to move 
things forward in a methodical way, and i don't feel like their are 
barriers to entry aside from time and willingness to contribute.

- i also *really* appreciate the fact that my personal time is respected 
- i'd love to hack bsd 24/7 but i also have work/life obligations and 
those boundaries seem pretty much to be part of the culture.

- i think one of the biggest hurdles that the community is facing is 
growing the visibility of freebsd with younger developers.  and while i 
appreciate what the foundation is doing here i feel like there is ample 
room to grow in this respect.  i've found that once i take the time and 
explain how BSD is different than the docker/linux world they get it and 
easily see how it can solve problems they run into on a daily basis.  
they really like the KISS approach of Unix and frankly most of them only 
use docker b/c that's what they copy pasta'd off stack overflow, github, 
HN or whatever.

so if the foundation can get better at advocating to a younger audience 
i think that'd be a huge win.  or maybe they shouldn't be involved and 
there's room for an offshoot project that hosts scripts/configs for 
standing up common web stacks in jails much like dockerhub?  i dunno, 
but i feel like freebsd in particular is viewed as not being "modern" 
for what ever value "modern" is..

-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA