On 20-Oct-04, at 3:08 PM, Andy Ruhl wrote:
> > There seems to be this sense among people that if you don't have some
> > obsure platoform, then there's no reason to use NetBSD. Where does
> > this come from?

Herb Peyerl <hpeyerl@beer.org> replied: 
> It's a notion that started as an incorrect meme and turned into a truth 
> when we didn't do anything to actively dispell it.

 Most people are not going to want to take the time to do the comparisons
themselves.  I think a lot of people are "hobbyists," and the week or two
it would take to install each *BSD on a machine, then all the apps, and
then run performance tests probably seems like too much work.  It did to
me, when i brought home my first Unix machine (a SPARC 1+) in 1996.

Confronted with the choice of three different BSDs, most people will look
for the one-line summary of the most important differences between them.
FreeBSD has always looked very x86-centric, and appears to be the most
commercially accepted of the three.  OpenBSD professes to be obsessed
about security, and NetBSD's most distinctive attribute appears to be that
it runs on everything.  So many of the unwashed masses will stop there.

  There are two issues:

1) Do NetBSD advocates want to actively encourage people to run NetBSD,
   even if it means a bit of (what will seem like) pandering or bragging?

2) What's the best way to propagandize?

If someone has asked me a week ago, i would have guessed that the answer
to #1 was "Not really." My assumption was that the abscence of propaganda
was an intentional "filter."  The desired results was that people who are
easily attracted to shiny objects and don't do their own research tend to
wind up elsewhere.

#2 is much harder.  What would be good?  Comparisons of performance,
usability, and security? pkgsrc?  Things change pretty quickly in the BSD
worlds.  I think it would be a constant endeavor to stay abreast of the
diffs between the BSDs.

On 20-Oct-04, at 3:08 PM, Andy Ruhl wrote:
> > There's also some other sense that, since OpenBSD was spawned from
> > NetBSD, NetBSD must be insecure. Where does this come from?

Herb Peyerl <hpeyerl@beer.org> replied: 
> Because The0 said it was so enough times that his legions of 12 yr old 
> fans started chanting it, and we didn't do anything to dispell the 
> notion.   Once it became so ingrained, then even when openbsd bugs 
> appear, that don't exist in Net/Free, and were fixed back in the late 
> 80's in other distributions; it doesn't matter because everyone is so 
> blind to "the truth" that any further truths are irrelevant.

OpenBSD people (and others) really do propogandize.  They have BoFs at
USENIX; they sell OpenBSD swag with cute pictures, and they sell
themselves in the media.  Given that it's a "fork" from NetBSD, they've
always had to do this, otherwise people would have just written them off
as sour grapes rejects from NetBSD.  So the way they've differentiated
themselves is by proclaiming how much more secure their OS is.

 I've run all three BSDs as well as many other commercial Unixes.  I think
all three of the BSDs are relatively secure.  Some of this is simply
obscurity. (More Windoze, Linux, or Solaris to exploit.) Some of it is
policies (E.g. nothing listening on the network in the default install).
I'm neither skilled nor informed enough to make any comparision of the
source code.


Personally, the last time i made this decision in 2001, i chose NetBSD
over the other options for two reasons:

1) I run on sun4m and Alpha, which excludes FreeBSD (lack of sun4m).
   OpenBSD's Alpha port seemed kind of shakey the last i looked at it.

2) I prefer the tone of the interaction in NetBSD over OpenBSD.


 I have other reasons for prefering *BSD over Linux, Solaris, etc.


 -johan