FreeBSD-current is the development version of the operating system, which will in due course become 4.0-RELEASE. As such, it is really only of interest to developers working on the system and die-hard hobbyists. See the relevant section in the handbook for details on running -current.
If you are not familiar with the operating system or are not capable of identifying the difference between a real problem and a temporary problem, you should not use FreeBSD-current. This branch sometimes evolves quite quickly and can be un-buildable for a number of days at a time. People that use FreeBSD-current are expected to be able to analyze any problems and only report them if they are deemed to be mistakes rather than ``glitches''. Questions such as ``make world produces some error about groups'' on the -current mailing list are sometimes treated with contempt.
Every now and again, a snapshot release is also made of this -current development code, CDROM distributions of the occasional snapshot even now being made available. The goals behind each snapshot release are:
No claims are made that any snapshot can be considered ``production quality'' for any purpose. For stability and tested mettle, you will have to stick to full releases.
Snapshot releases are directly available from ftp://current.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ and are generated, on the average, once a day for both the 4.0-current and 3.0-stable branches.