On Fri, Jul 06, 2001 at 12:55:25AM -0600, Wes Peters wrote:
> Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> > If WindRiver gets on the ball and keeps fulfilling CD orders, why then this
> > name might continue to be worth something. Otherwise, it will go away and
> > the FreeBSD CD distributions will simply take place through other
> > distributors.
>
> Or not, if every other distributor that actually cares to distribute
> FreeBSD has dried up and blown away because WRS has been handing out
> exclusive access to the "official" FreeBSD ISO images.
This came up in discussions at Usenix between myself and several members
of -core. I agree that the project needs a clearer distinction between
releases made "by the project", and releases made by commercial third
parties, such as Wind River, or the DVDs put out by FreeBSD Services Ltd
(or the various distributions put together by other European and
Japanese companies).
I think that the conclusion is that "the project" should be putting out
five ISOs and making them freely available. Four of them would
correspond with the four discs that have traditionally made up the
commercial CD sets. The fifth one would be a mini-ISO that contains
everything needed to do a complete install, but now ports or packages
(basically, the existing disc 1 with no third party apps, except,
possibly, XFree86). This ISO would only be about 200-250MB in size, and
is more useful to the people who only download the ISO to do an install,
and use the net for packages/ports.
Third parties can then base their commercial distributions around these
ISOs. They might simply repackage them (on CD, or DVD). Or they might
provide value-add services, such as additional documentation, more packages
and so on.
The thorny question of "What do they have to include and still call it
FreeBSD?" is resolved by saying that any FreeBSD distribution must
include, as a minimum, the contents of the "mini" ISO (including
sysinstall). Anyone that wants to include an alternative installation
routine (open or closed source) can do, as long as sysinstall is still
there. Then the FreeBSD docs can continue to refer to sysinstall, and
the project doesn't get flack if someone puts together a distribution
with a crap installer, because sysinstall will always be there as a
fallback.
N
--
FreeBSD: The Power to Serve http://www.freebsd.org/
FreeBSD Documentation Project http://www.freebsd.org/docproj/
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