Afterword

Overview

If you've made it this far, you now know how to manage and use FreeBSD as a platform for just about any server task. You might have to learn how a new program works, but you know enough about the operating system to make it work as you need to.

Congratulations! FreeBSD is a wonderful, flexible platform, and is capable of assuming just about any role in your network. To wrap things up, I'd like to talk briefly about some other aspects of FreeBSD.

FreeBSD is two things. In this book we've focused on the programs and software that constitutes the operating system. The other half is the community that creates those bits.

The Community

The FreeBSD community is composed of computer scientists, programmers, users, systems administrators, documentation writers, and just about anyone who is interested in the system. They come from all walks of life, all education levels, and all over the world. I personally have had dealings with FreeBSD users and developers from all over the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Russia, Kazakhstan, Denmark, Poland, Australia, and Japan. Some of the people I've worked with are from still other countries, but nationality simply isn't important in this community. I'm sure people are from a wide variety of races and creeds, but it simply doesn't matter online. Some are doctors. Some are computer scientists. Some work in video rental shops. At one point I worked closely with a brilliant developer who turned out to be a teenager. Since most of the community's interaction is online, the only things that represent you are your words and your work.

While members have conflicts, especially over the future direction of the software portion of FreeBSD, on the whole it's less fractious than you could expect from any group of thousands of people from such widely varying backgrounds.

These are the people who improve FreeBSD, drive it forward, and make it more than a collection of ones and zeros.

Each person does it for his own reasons. A tiny portion are developers who are paid to improve the code, either by corporations dependent on FreeBSD or government agencies such as DARPA. Most actual developers work on FreeBSD as a hobby, so they can program things more correctly than they are allowed to do at their day job. The deadlines FreeBSD has are announced months or years in advance, and developers set their own work habits and their own level of contribution.

Many of us are not developers, but work on some other part of FreeBSD instead. Since I started this book, I became a member of the Documentation Project, the group responsible for writing the instructions. While code is nice, if nobody can learn how to use it, the system is pretty much useless! Other peopleanswer questions on the mailing lists, or run support sites. We do it for satisfaction and enjoyment, or to give back some of what we've been given.

You're free to simply take what FreeBSD offers, and do as you will with it. After a while, many of us found that we wanted to return something to the group. This is how the community grows, and a growing community means that FreeBSD will continue.

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