On Jan 7, 2005, at 6:52 AM, Andy Ruhl wrote:
> This is indeed about par for the course when "joe unix" talks about
> the BSDs, if they've even heard of them at all. This is probably the
> belief of your average FreeBSD and/or OpenBSD user as well.

That's primarily because NetBSD doesn't lie when it does its PR whereas 
other projects openly lie about their capabilities versus the 
capabilities of other projects...

> One thing that would be nice is some PR work in the area of NetBSD
> being a good way to develop an OS. And when you start from the proper
> foundation, you don't have to hype security. Useability improvements
> would be great, and they are starting to happen. And as we've seen
> elsewhere, performance isn't too shabby either.

We should also concentrate on the many areas in which we're more secure 
than OpenBSD (someone mentioned that OpenBSD's key generation for their 
cgd filesystem is weak, or the many security alerts against OpenBSD 
that don't apply to NetBSD, or the 1980-ish security bugs that were 
re-introduced in OpenBSD)... We too frequently let ourselves fall into 
this trap by not mentioning that we have as great or greater an 
emphasis on security as OpenBSD and as great or greater an emphasis on 
usability as does FreeBSD...   People tend to believe what marketing 
literature tells them. That's how we got into this boat; by not saying 
anything and letting the other projects say stuff...

It shouldn't be a competition but the other projects make it be so...

But that's enough "we should"... Maybe our PR department needs 
volunteers.