On Mon, Sep 04, 2006 at 10:16:20PM +0200, Timo Schoeler wrote:
> as stated, 'There are rumors about it [the "NetBSD Project" is
> controlled by a possibly commercial entity]'.
> 
> let's start here. as all of you might know, Wasabi Systems [0] is for
> whatever reason (former) employer of a number of NetBSD developers or
> core members (!). a quick investigation built the following list:
> 
> Luke Mewburn
> Allen Briggs
> Nathan Williams
> Bill Studenmund
> Perry Metzger
> Frank van der Linden
> Jason Thorpe
> Alistair Crooks
> Simon Burge
> Todd Vierling
> 
> this list can be verified by having a look at [1] and [2] as well as
> searching for posts of the mentioned people on the mailing list archives.
> 
> if in doubt (and at the moment the whole NetBSD community should be, a
> part of it already is), those people are the ones that can prove that
> every single person involved in both NetBSD and Wasabi Systems was *not*
> influenced by their employment at Wasabi Systems.

It's been a while since I had a good look at Wasabi Systems' web
site.  It's pretty hard to find any kind of reference to NetBSD
there at all, now.  There are references in older PDF documents
and white-papers, but there seems to have been a systematic
clean-up and corporatisation of the working web pages, which now
refer exclusively to "Wasabi Certified BSD" or just "BSD" or
wc-bsd.

So it looks as though the wasabi-influenced part of NetBSD has
already forked?

[Personal perspective: I've been using NetBSD on-and-off since
it was first forked from 386BSD.  I remember the USL-suit
upgrade and purge.  I switched to FreeBSD on my personal
workstation when NetBSD took too long to work around the 386/ISA
bus bounce buffer issue, but I've been back for a year or so,
using NetBSD on a diskless machine as a router, coming up to
speed on the cross-build tools for a putative project to use
it on some custom ARM (XScale) based hardware, in an embedded
capacity.  Not sure what to make of the current situation at
all.]

Re: the developers agreement: I can't see myself ever signing
such a thing, and I think that my current employment contract
would probably prohibit it anyay.  I don't see that there's
any strong incentive or reason to, either.  I can submit code
and fixes through send-pr, which can be incorporated by people
who are committers, and I can access the whole repository
through CVS, and participate in the mailing lists, which is all
that I need to work on it.  I don't need to be able to vote for
the group that maintains the servers.  Good on 'em, and thanks
for that.

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew