The alpha port does not use the NetBSD toolchain. It uses a separate
   toolchain which is not part of the release (though I shall have a
   stable toolchain snapshot available at the same time as the release is).
   
OK, then please let me ask what the philosophy is _here_ :).  In all
seriousness, saying the toolchain is not part of the release is, in
my view as a commercial adopter, shooting yourself in the foot with a
shotgun, assuming that you still want this OS to be used by businesses.

As a consultant, I get bombarded constantly with "Is this the right
choice for us?  Why did they do that?" and similar questions.

I know it is getting popular to unbundle things in the Solaris, Digital
UNIX, and other UNIX-like parts of the world, and require separate licenses
for the development system.  This is, of course, one of the things that
drives us to use Freeware.  But when the OS code is so intimately
dependent on the toolchain as it is in NetBSD, it is unsettling, TO say
the least, to keep seeing that the toolchain is trying to live as a
separate entity.

I'm working on a project with 70 developers.  We noticed right off that
1.2, the stable release, couldn't build the kernel that came with it on
the Alpha.  We got nervous.  We went to NetBSD-current to see if that
built.  We slammed into the fact that -current only built with a completely
undocumented, unreleased toolchain.  This is the sort of thing that causes
people with money at stake to lose faith in an offerring, right?

I'm not trying to grouse or get someone blamed for things on a new OS when
the labor appears to be volunteer and distributed.  But what I would like
to try and suggest is that NetBSD as an organization and the Alpha port team
as a group adopt a policy of bundling the toolchain, and its sources, with
the NetBSD release (every snapshot!), always.  It would be nice if the
experience above were never repeated....   If you won't do that, we
really need to know why that is a reasonable position.  Who can I ask?