A long time ago I thought it was stupid not to upgrade to the latest and greatest. It turns out in business stability triumph over everything else. ( That is assuming you have a decent security measures put in place already )
@rsync, is there any other BSD out there that has a better model than FreeBSD? (E.g. netbsd, openbsd, dragonflybsd)
Unless your organization, after wasting a year and tens of thousands of dollars on 5.0, has implemented a SOP to never use the x.0 of FreeBSD.
I think that's a decent heuristic in general - for instance, I don't buy a car until they've been rolling off the line for 9-12 months - but in the case of FreeBSD it is a concrete rule based on experience - not a superstition.
So again, the cool kids all stopped working on 10.x[1] over a year ago, and 11.1 was not released.
In our case, 10.x was working fine for us and nothing was terribly broken driver-wise (unlike 8.x when we desperately needed intel NIC fixes circa 8.2 that all went to 9 and never got backported).[2] So we kept deploying 10.3.
[1] Driver fixes all go to 11, non-critical bugs all "committed to stable", etc.
[2] Well, except for some nice new bhyve features that all went to stable were not available to us for the last 12-18 months (and will never go to 10).
Frankly, if that's the lesson you learned from FreeBSD 5.0, I don't know that there's anything I can say to help you.
A more appropriate lesson to learn from FreeBSD 5.0 would have been "don't use releases which are cut from HEAD and announced as being for 'early adopters'". The FreeBSD 5.x stable branch started at FreeBSD 5.3.
Maybe we can't convince John to unlearn his wrong lessons, but I'd like to avoid having him teach those wrong lessons to everybody else.
> Unless your organization, after wasting a year and tens of thousands of dollars on 5.0, has implemented a SOP to never use the x.0 of FreeBSD.
The important thing to keep in mind is that these are two consequences of the state of the FreeBSD tree in the early 5.x days. There's no question the first couple of 5.x releases had a great number of stability and other issues, and I can certainly understand that experience leading to an approach of "never use a .0 release." But it is precisely because early 5.x was in such bad shape that 4.x continued to receive ongoing development for so long.
If FreeBSD were to accommodate this kind of SOP given their current resources, what could they do other than just call the first release x.1 instead of x.0?
Not true at all. The answer is:
1. If you have systems which are already running 10.x, you should run the latest 10.x release.
2. If you're deploying a new system now, you should deploy it with the latest 11.x release.
3. If you're building a product which you will be selling next year, you should build it on top of FreeBSD HEAD, so that it will be running a recent release when it ends up being deployed.
Old STABLE branches get updates and new releases because there are deployed systems which are using them. Think of 10.3 as "FreeBSD 10, service pack 3".