James Jegers typed:
>   Hi,  
>      I was just looking at the state of NetBSD an feeling pretty happy
>      about how things have been going and what we have done, in particular
>      with all the ports NetBSD now has.
> 
>      Then I looked at FreeBSD's latest copy and got really depressed
>      as they have all kinds of neat things in there system.  Like, 
>      video capture boards, pcmcia support, many pci drivers, apm, 
>      slip utilties, and many more.
> 
>      What happened to NetBSD?  It used to be the greatest with all kinds
>      of neat new things.  I'm starting to wonder where all the development
>      effort in NetBSD has went.  I understand people just work on NetBSD 
>      for the fun of it, but how come FreeBSD and Linux are so far ahead 
>      of us?
> 
>      I know NetBSD's philosophy is to only give out the best written, 
>      best operating things in it's system.  I think we need to change
>      that philosophy.  NetBSD-current is a system that is supposed to be
>      full of things which  don't work or are in progress of being worked on.
>      We should be putting all types of things in NetBSD-current, even if
>      they aren't working.  Let people work out the bugs.  Keep a log file
>      which says "program/section xxx does not work, this is what needs
>      to be done still". Then for the release we can finish tuning things so
>      that they work perfectly. 
> 
>      I'm not saying anyone has done anythng wrong, I just think that the
>      CORE teams job should be to incorporate things others have written, and
>      not spend so much time writting new things.  Fix bugs, incorporate
>      things people have written, and then work on things they think
>      should be fixed/redesigned.
> 
> NetBSD person from when it started, wondering if he will still be one.

>From what I've been reading, the main push of NetBSD's development has been
to be not only well written but also to support as many platforms as is
humanly possible (or not-so-humanly depending on one's point of view). Thus,
instead of having one large Intel/PC based dev team they have many smaller
platform-specific dev teams. This means I guess that they don't have the time
to write drivers for all the things the FreeBSD team do. Linux also is
Intel/PC specific (duh =)). I definitely think NetBSD has a place, but if
you're looking for the hottest free Intel/PC based unix around, FreeBSD or
Linux might win out simply because their dev teams aren't also trying to
keep up n other ports.
Just my 2 small montary units worth.

			Benno.

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   / / / /___  / /___  _________ _(_)___  ___   Holocaine the Aimless,
  / /_/ / __ \/ / __ \/ ___/ __ `/ / __ \/ _ \   Giver of Free Lollipops
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/_/ /_/\____/_/\____/\___/\__,_/_/_/ /_/\___/   aka Benno Rice

Email: brice@ist.flinders.edu.au		IRC: Holocaine, Erratic