Hello all.
I'm looking at getting together some sort of mailing list for people who
are using FreeBSD/NetBSD in serious applications.

Partly this is to be able to show people that BSD can be used seriously,
and partly to help foster this sort of activity.
Those of us interested in this sort of thing are sparse enough on the ground,
that it's doubtful that we would be in direct competition with each other,
so It's not unlikely that as a group there may be enough synergy to
save each member some work at times..
e.g. If person  A has a driver for board X, person B might 
be able to use it..

By serious work, in this context I'm thinking of the following
types of applications:

process control
serving video streams (see the USENIX paper)
clusters for large scale computing..


I'm not really thinking of those using BSD as a router, unless it's part 
of something bigger, or it's hidden (embedded)in a product,
(e.g like whatever it is that ipsilon are doing ) :)
use of BSD on the desktop or as an ISP are covered adequitly
elsewhere.

The sort of problems I see as being discussed include:

embedding BSD using flashrams and memory filesystems etc.
totally stripped down systems
BSD on single-board systems.
power management
reliability issues.
real-time issues. (what-ever your definition of real-time
			might be this week)


etc.

If interested, send email to serious@ref.tfs.com
and if there is enough interest, I'll set up the mailinglists.

I know of at least 5 groups of people doing this sort of thing,
so there should be more..
research groups doing work on related topics are invited to show up too.







julian