Hello Charles,

Some parts of your message seemed to be flames resulting from some
past personality conflict that I know nothing about, so I won't
comment further on those.  Clearly you are more familiar with BSD
internals than I am.  I imagine others will pickup various technical
points such as LFS and threading.  I can only write from my own
personal perspective as just one ordinary user of NetBSD.

  CMH> The NetBSD Project has stagnated to the point of irrelevance.

Relevance to whom?  It's relevant to me because I use it every day.

  CMH> As one of the 4 originators of NetBSD, I am in a fairly unique
     > position.  I am the only one who has continuously participated
     > and/or watched the project over its entire history.

Sincere thanks for the contributions you have made to my favorite
operating system.

  CMH> Power management is very primitive.  Etc.

I'm not sure what this means.  All I can say is that it works for me:
suspend and resume work on my laptop.  I know that work is being done
on PowerNow! for AMD K6-2+, Athlon etc.  I don't presently use Intel
chips, so I don't know about SpeedStep.  Hopefully someone who knows
will clarify this point.

You make several references to a "flash-friendly file system", which I
assume means one that somehow spreads out data to avoid wearing the
carpet too thin.  NetBSD works well with my flash cards and JumpDrive,
but I would not want to use either for something heavy like swap
because the nature of the technology (its finite number of write/erase
cycles) does not suit that.  That's not NetBSD's fault and does not
pose a problem for me in any case.

  CMH> terrible support for kernel modules;

I understand that other operating systems have loadable kernel
modules.  Perhaps NetBSD has them too.  I don't know because I have
never needed one.  If I need a special device driver, I compile a new
custom kernel.  It's quick, easy (once you know how) and in my
experience both painless and beneficial.

NetBSD works very well for my modest server-side needs: it's fast,
light, absolutely rock solid, consistent and does not make assumptions
about the work that I need to do or the software that I will choose to
install.

As a desktop operating system it's not quite there yet (depending on
the application). I understand that support for hardware accelleration
of things like MPEG decode and 3D graphics are not yet working. I will
be happy if someone corrects me on this point.

One very underestimated assett of NetBSD is its user and developer
community.  The mailing lists and #netbsd on the freenode.net IRC
network have provided me with far superior support than I have
received from any proprietary software vendor and also better than
other open-source products that I use.  I have found the people there
friendly, patient and very, very helpful.

This is just my inital reaction to your post, which I fealt like
sharing.

- Andy Ball