I’ve been using it for years. I know the difference. You run FreeBSD and you install ports. The two come hand-in-hand. There’s no confusion. The maintainers, the admins, are far and few between on FreeBSD. The very reason I’m here is due to to just that. That, cannot be said of the Linux world. Your last paragraph is on point, and some people earn their “keep” regardless of how many errors they make. Historically, that’s the same for IBM and Microsoft, and everybody that employed those technologies because “IBM is too big to fail”. Well documented in business cases for decades now, something that a lot of tech people simply don’t understand. > On Aug 31, 2018, at 12:01 PM, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote: > > FreeBSD ports should not be confused with FreeBSD system. Each of ports is maintained by different maintainer(s), some of them get obsolete, sometimes quickly, and not every software that is ported deserves in sane sysadmin's opinion to be offered to the users. > > And the same can be said about RPM collections (which are many, and one huge one would be Fedora's one) or deb packages collection of Debian (and its clones). > > All in all, if one gets confused sometimes, one can get confused using any open source system. > > On the other hand, before starting to offer some software to users, every sysadmin analyzes it carefully and tries to predict if it will stay alive for long time. As it is huge pain to migrate users to some alternative once the software of your choice becomes dead... And that is how sysadmins earn their salaries IMHO. > > Just my $0.02. > > Valeri Cheers, Bee