Strategic Thinking (was: Re: Speculative: Rust for base system components)

[Enji Cooper]

On Jan 5, 2019, at 07:07, Wojciech Puchar <wojtek at puchar.net> wrote:

>>>> A) FreeBSD needs to become a platform that can host current and
>>>> evolving virtualization technologies.
>>>> 
>>>> B) FreeBSD should be able to play in the container space similarly to
>>>> Linux. Unfortunately I believe that this horse has left the barn and it
>>>> may be too late. Then again maybe there is something we can redeem.
>>> 
>>> C) Make FreeBSD like others. So why making FreeBSD?
>> 
>> Because we offer some technologies the others do not. Unfortunately
>> inferior and incompatible approaches (similarly: VHS vs BETA, Blue Ray
>> vs HD) have left us on the outside. Try porting Kubernetes to FreeBSD.
> no need to.

Actually, not having Docker/Kubernetes support makes it more difficult to ride the CI/distributed system wave, requiring FreeBSD to reinvent the wheel to do CI, and force various groups to write their own homegrown distributed systems infrastructures instead of leveraging existing technologies.

>> The technologies used today are more than just fads. They are building
>> blocks onto which future technologies will be built.
>> 
> and this is really sad.

Not really. It’s a sign of maturity as most things now run on a “cloud based” infrastructure, or small embedded OSes running embedded Linux (not FreeBSD).

>>> Not everyone needs the same.
>> 
>> Niche. We should be more than simply a desktop O/S (which BTW I use as
>> my primary desktop) and we should be more than a simple bare metal O/S.
> 
> Simple bare metal O/S is what is really needed.

Not really. As Cy pointed out, in order to ensure that FreeBSD is well-supported by large companies (Dell, Facebook via WhatsApp, Juniper, and Sony were some of the large contributors over the past couple years, along with a host of other smaller storage companies), so it continues to exist in a healthy way, it needs to be dynamic and customizable to meet the needs from embedded development up to large-scale distributed systems. A number of these companies have considered switching away from FreeBSD to Linux because FreeBSD is niche (see Microsoft with Hotmail, Yahoo, etc). Let’s not give developers willing to make the switch more ammunition to do so.

Cheers,
-Enji