Why bother?

By Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@FreeBSD.org>

He told me that Kirk had told him to talk to me about FreeBSD, and his first question, while we waited for our "Galletes" to arive was, "Why bother ?"

There's a Calvin and Hobbs strip where Calvin asks his dad "How come you live here with Mom instead of in a penthouse apartment with 21 scantily clad dancers ?" My face probably looked like Calvin's dad's: It was not a question I was mentally prepared for.

There's a gentleman, or at least a bloke, named Lloyd Scott, who is dressed like one, who is attempting to ride a penny-farthing bicycle from Perth to Sydney to raise funds for charity. That's a cool thing to do, even if rather pointless, but I bet he has already answered the question "Why Bother" several times with a coherent and reasoned explanation for his madness.

I don't think I gave Peter a coherent answer that evening. But I promised myself I'd come up with one eventually, simply because it was too embarrasing not to know the answer when I've made over 6000 commits to the FreeBSD cvs tree over the last decade.

It would have been easy if I could have pulled out an official project answer to the question, but there is no help there: we've never really sat down and answered that question in the project: we don't have a "mission statement" or even a "project goal". Heck, the only reason we even have our cuddly, but politically incorrect, mascot is by default: we inherited him.

I guess the closest we get to anything of the sort is the "FreeBSD: tools not policies" catchphrase which I coined some years ago (heavily inspired by the Software Tools concept, which you can read more about in Peter's book).

"FreeBSD - the power to serve" is about as lame a slogan for anything I have ever known. It is about as pointless as the time & temperature sign companies which have nothing else to advertise for put up in order to not leave their facade naked. But I digress.

Why am I sitting here at ten in the night, writing a column for an e-zine that I don't know when will come out next ? Why did I even volunteer to co-write this column in the first place ?

Why will I rattle off on a night-train to Karlsruhe in a couple of weeks ("Be there or be a rectangular thing!") to participate in a conference about an operating system which nobody has heard about on the road where I live?

Actually, scratch that: I'd go to Karlsruhe on any flimsy pretext to taste some of their local beer.

Anyway... Why bother?

I have been close to quitting the project a couple of times over the years. But each time, emails from friends and strangers and the soft seducing song of code needing improvement have lured me back.

I guess that gives me personally an answer: I bother because I can make a positive difference in FreeBSD and have some fun with friends and likeminded individuals while doing so.

But shouldn't we also be able to answer the question as a project?

Isn't it about time, after a decade, for us to face that big existentialist question: Why bother?

In the light of the increasing commercial momentum of Linux, not, by definition, an entirely good thing for them, and with "Linux Standards Base 2" looking like a strong contender for the long promised definitive UNIX standard, we could find ourselves relegated to being "a better linux than linux" if we are caught unprepared.

Why do we bother?

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