On 8/30/06, Charles M. Hannum <mycroft@mit.edu> wrote:
> The NetBSD Project has stagnated to the point of irrelevance.  It has

Let me start by saying I'm probably not qualified to reply to this
thread, but I was never worried about making a fool out of myself
before so here goes...

I am a former user of FreeBSD and occasional user of OpenBSD. Haven't
had much experience with either in the last year or so.

So...

Stagnant? Yes. Irrelevance? Possibly.

But, BUT, can anyone tell me where I can get an OS that I can build
easily from the same place to run on my NEC PDA as well as an old IBM
PowerPC box I just happened to have sitting around and doing nothing
else? And I'm typing this now on an AMD64 box that ran stably long
before FreeBSD did (yes, I tested both). Nobody else can say that. Is
it relevant? It's funny how much more relevant NetBSD's philosophy
becomes as i386 becomes irrelevant. While the others (FreeBSD in
particular) seemed to be scrambling for another architecture, NetBSD
just quietly supported them without any fanfare (IA-64 excluded, but
it's more irrelevant than NetBSD!).

There are strengths that go right down to the core of the project.
They are still there. They won't ever be irrelevant. They just need to
be built upon. The cleanliness, portability, and ease of use is there.

So you're probably right. A strong leader is needed to recruit people
to complete new projects and generally keep things relevant. If it's a
people problem, I hope someone can fix it.

Too bad the guy who used to say "I probably don't know what I'm
talking about" isn't here to comment.

Andy