Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1998 17:10:04 -0400 From: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@MIT.EDU> To: Peter Mutsaers <plm@xs4all.nl> Subject: Re: Linus is on a powertrip.. From: Peter Mutsaers <plm@xs4all.nl> Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1998 22:09:58 +0200 (MET DST) I don't know. Those conflicts were from before my FreeBSD time (I was using Linux 4 years ago and had been using it for years back then) but since at least 4 years I haven't seen any real conflicts at all. Some of these conflicts have been more recent than that, but you may not have been aware of them. Charles Hannum (Mycroft) hangs around MIT a lot, and I know a number of the NetBSD core team members, so I got to see some of the backwash of the NetBSD/OpenBSD conflict --- fortunately only second-hand! (And at the last Usenix, I was still hearing mutterings from the NetBSD folks, so it isn't just in the past.) It was enough for me to be convinced that a potential risk of a core team "architecture" is the *BSD factionalization. It doesn't have to happen, and there are certainly plenty of examples of projects that have not had this problem --- especially among application-level projects. It may be that application-level projects are smaller in scope, and that's why they work out. It may be that FreeBSD is working out because somehow (either by accident or by design) FreeBSD doesn't have some of the more..., ah, combative... personalities which OpenBSD and NetBSD are blessed with. In either case, the essential problem with a core team is specifying how you decide who is a member of the core team, and who is not (which is an extremely political act), and how do you resolve disputes within the core team. In the Linux model, one of the things which works is that we don't have the argument of who is on the core team, because there is no such thing (in all of the *BSD cases, the splits occurred when someone was thrown out of the core team). Also, we have a relative simply dispute resolution mechanism --- Linus decides. Richard and Larry and others may argue about scheduling changes, or Richard and I may argue about the appropriateness of devfs, but ultimately Linus gets to make the final decision. This all boils down to the old saying that the benevolent dictator is the best form of government --- there's only one problem: finding the benevolent dictator. Linus has, up till now, served as a very good benevolent dictator. It may be that the job has been putting much pressure on him, and we need to find ways of relieving this pressure, or otherwise solving the problem. But I am not convinced that the *BSD model is the only solution, or even the best solution. FreeBSD may have worked out well, and I'm happy that you've found a community where that's worked. But I also see the NetBSD and OpenBSD, and the conflicts which produced them, and that's also part of the *BSD model. Note that for better or for worse, the organization of the various *BSD's aren't all that different. The personalities involved seem to be what makes the most amount of difference. - Ted - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/