Hmm - sounds like you have the basis of a 'netbsd myths' page
	there... interested? :)

		David/absolute

On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, David Maxwell wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 16, 2000 at 09:49:56AM +0000, David Brownlee wrote:
> > 	Is there likely to be access to a copy online at any point? :)
> > 
> > 		David/absolute
> 
> It probably is on the website - which you need a Usenix membership to
> get in to.
> 
> I don't have a copy of the original article, except on paper.
> 
> Here's the mail I sent. As I said, I haven't seen the paper copy, so
> it may have been edited. Re-reading it, I was probably a bit rougher
> on OpenBSD than I had really intended to be. Hopefully they edited
> that ;-)
> 
> 
> Dear Rik,
> 
> You followed the 386BSD->FreeBSD history, but not the NetBSD one...
> 
> ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/release/NetBSD/NetBSD-0.8
> 
> NetBSD 0.8, also a derivitive of 386BSD was announced/released
> Apr 19, 1993.
> 
> 0.9 was released in Aug of 1993. I remember, because I had
> just taken a new job, and upgrading an 0.8 box to an 0.9 OS
> was one of my first tasks :-)
> 
> http://www.netbsd.org/Misc/history.html
> 
> The NetBSD and FreeBSD developers (to be) had discussed things
> at length before that Apr, and in essence, 'agreed to disagree'.
> 
> The FreeBSD folk wanted to focus on the i386 platform, and 
> put their full energy into it, the NetBSD folk wanted to continue
> in the Unix heritage of portability, and take it further than
> it had been before.
> 
> The FreeBSD folk are generally happier to accept fixes to 
> problems which provide new functionality, while the NetBSD
> core team generally prefers to do it 'slow but right'.
> This is not to say that FreeBSD does it 'quick and wrong'!
> The FreeBSD core, from my experience will be fast to mention
> when a feature is not 100% yet. I am referring more to the
> 'style' of solution.
> 
> A historical example:
> 
> On an i386 with an ISA bus mastering SCSI controller (like an
> Adaptec 1542) the card can only DMA the first 16M of ram.
> The ISA bus doesn't have enough address bits for more than
> that.
> 
> FreeBSD quickly developed 'bounce buffers', which reserved
> some space in the first 16M, which the controller could
> reach, and then copied the data to the >16M location
> 
> During this time, NetBSD machines could not have ISA bus-mastering
> controllers and >16M of RAM installed - without using a
> 'bounce-buffer' patch, which was not included by default.
> NetBSD's core team wouldn't sanction an i386 specific
> solution. About 2 years later, the NetBSD bus_space
> system was introduced, which understands the virtual->
> physical address space of all systems, and provides
> bounce-buffer support where needed.
> (bus_space solves a lot of other problems too)
> 
> In 1994/5 timeframe, Theo De Raadt, who had contributed to
> NetBSD had an arguement with some of the NetBSD core
> team. Not all the details are public. I became aware
> of this when Theo posted a message to one of the NetBSD lists
> claiming that his messages were being censored, and so he
> had put up a web page to express his complaints. I followed
> the link to the page, and I was convinced quickly (in large
> part by Theo's tone) that Theo was in the wrong.
> 
> Theo took the NetBSD 1.1 release at the time, and
> relabeled it OpenBSD. I forget whether he immediately jumped
> the version to OpenBSD 2.0, or if that came a bit later.
> - the BSD license terms allow this kind of thing. As long as
> you acknowledge the contributors, you can do what you want 
> with the code.
> 
> Theo has since then worked to raise the visibility of OpenBSD,
> working specifically on security related work. (Part of his
> argument with the NetBSD core team was over the speed with
> which his changes weren't being integrated into the code -
> it was taking longer than he would like.)
> 
> Theo has been very enthusiastic about calling NetBSD
> an 'Academic research platform' - not worth considering
> for production systems. That's just continuing spite
> on his part. My usual response is to ask 'If NetBSD
> is just an Academic research platform, why was OpenBSD
> completely based on it?'
> 
> I mention this, because in your article you said you
> were told by your 'anonymous informant' that:
> 
> "The NetBSD group... is more interested in experimentation
> than in having a rock-stable version of BSD..."
> 
> That sounds like a small twist on the 'academic research'
> line that OpenBSD tries to sell.
> 
> So here's the sales pitch :-)
> 
> Linux and FreeBSD claim to support multiple platforms.
> I looked today at www.freebsd.org and www.linux.org, and
> I couldn't find any mention of a non-Intel installation.
> I know that Red-Hat and some of the other linux distributions
> provide other platforms, I'm just indicating that it's still
> not an important thing for them.
> 
> OpenBSD has support for 
>            alpha    amiga    hp300    i386     mac68k   mvme88k 
>            powerpc  pmax     sparc     
> 
> 
> This list has grown shorter from previous releases because
> they really don't have a large non-Intel installed base
> like NetBSD does.
> 
> NetBSD has alpha    amiga    arm32    atari    bebox    hp300    
>            hpcmips  i386     mac68k   macppc   mvme68k  newsmips 
>            next68k  ofppc    pc532    pmax     sh3      sparc    
>            sparc64  sun3     vax      x68k 
> 
> NetBSD has not been (and probably won't be in the future) about
> being 'popular', it has been about doing it 'right'.
> The same source tree compiles on all the above platforms. Yes,
> there are some platform specific driver files, but they are kept
> seperate in the system. The same Lance Ethernet driver runs on
> Sun motherboard ethernet ports, ISA cards for PCs, arm32s, sparcs,
> suns, amigas... One update to the driver benefits all the platforms.
> (Lots of other drivers this is true for also)
> 
> Linux and FreeBSD may claim they support multiple platforms,
> but the code is not integrated into their source at this time.
> As changes are made to Intel Linux, the Alpha Linux and Sparc
> Linux and PowerPC Linux(...) development teams must re-work
> that code into their 'out of date' copy of the source tree -
> they must constantly do code-pullups from the main development
> branch. This may change at some date, but only if it becomes
> important enough to the Intel developers - since for the most
> part it doesn't cause them any extra work now, but after 
> changing, it will - it'll be a hard sell.
> 
> NetBSD was the first free Unix with USB support, the first to
> do binary emulation, and others, but I've babbled on long
> enough I suspect. (Hope you're still reading ;-)
> 
> NetBSD is not about 'experimentation' or 'research', but it's
> NOT about doing the 'popular' thing, or having a pretty
> graphical install utility, or having version 0.001 drivers
> for some new card. NetBSDers (and core in particular) isn't
> into wild self-promotion, but what they have accomplished
> deserves a tremendous amount of respect.
> 
> Incidentally, part of the 'research' tag comes from having
> a very clean source-code base. Things are very well organized,
> such that someone who wants to write something new has a
> good idea of the structures they're diving into. Many advanced
> things (software RAID, 0,1,4,5,10,+) such as RAIDframe were
> developed, and integrated into the base code set. IPV6 support
> is standard, as of Nov 21. IPSec is already available as
> patches, and will be in the base very soon. UVM is amazing too.
> 
> Anyway, NetBSD deserved more than 4 lines of mention in
> your article.
> 
> -- 
> David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net -->
> All this stuff in twice the space would only look half as bad!
> 					      - me
>