Dear NetBSD staff and community,
I propose an open source framework or standards of BSD operating systems and software, to increase collaboration and progress between the BSD's while NetBSD and other BSD's can still work independently of each other.
An opensource framework would like how there are different organizations and projects that use XMPP, SIP, ePUB, IAX, WebRTC, MQTT, MGCP and CAP. Such organizations that govern this include IETF, XMPP foundation, Oasis and W3C.
It doesn't have to be a strict set of standards, and all BSD's don't have to comply perfectly, but can be voluntarily endorsed as applying to a specification. It can also be for software standards, which are volunarily verify themselves by those standards, and software isn't required to follow.
The point would be to promote progress on different opensource software used by NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD, etc while each operating system remains on its own terms.
For instance, OSS implementations are already used. It can get developers from all of these operating systems working together, for standardization among OSS, Sndio or a BSD implementation of Portaudio. One standard in this would be the equvalent of an XEP or RFC of IETF. And NetBSD can choose to take part in one or multiple of these, which it already uses some implementations for audio.
Other standards that would be beneficial are :HID standards (which many BSD's already use or adopting to), compiling tool chains, development utilities, build utilities, display servers (Xenocara, Xorg and/or Wayland collaboration) implementations, printer drivers, scanner driver standards, Zeroconf implementations.
It also doesn't have to be limited to operating system, as it can be a style of software, which is commonly used with BSD's. A standard can also be applied to software.
There can be multiple standards for licenses as well, which are optional, including permissive and non-viral.
The best way forward with a standards organization, which can be of multiple BSD's or any BSD working as an organization, would be for loose criteria for what makes a BSD at its core, and the full operating system doesn't have to be fully under those basic standards. The purpose is that it's inclusive of BSD's, based on what they're known for, and even if a BSD doesn't fit all of the standards, a portion of its base can be endorsed as complying to a proposed standard. As in IETF or XEP, many standards are optional or unofficial, but even the unofficial ones have been implemented in a professional capacity.
Thank you!