[ On Tue, October 27, 1998 at 12:48:02 (-0500), Dennis wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: T3/T1 cards - interest 
>
> But they can, because they can use FreeBSD, which fits your
> description,

FreeBSD is not (yet) extremely portable.  By the time they do make their
kernel as portable as NetBSD's I do hope that drivers will again enjoy
the same API (or rather device-driver/device-kernel programming
interface), if not even ABI (or rather device-driver/device-kernel
binary interface on any given platform), between the two operating
systems.

> at least in the i386 world which is all that matters to us.

Ah, well there you go.  Making that statement about the focus of your
market up front might have made it easier to give advice to your
question.  I realize you posted to port-i386, but you must realize that
NetBSD runs on many different architectures and indeed more than i386
support PCI and even ISA cards.  Indeed not all i386 machines are PCs
either (though currently I don't think NetBSD supports any other than
perhaps PC104 machines, and maybe with luck CompactPCI -- I'd love to
see i386/vme supported and may someday even get a chance to make it so!).

> Clearly your words indicate that you are not interested in having a widely 
> popular OS, which certainly is a major criteria for a vendor.
 
I'm interested in having a complete; extremely portable; highly
interoperable; well designed, stable, and fast; freely available and
redistributable; highly standards compliant; UNIX-like operating system.

The "extremely portable" part is extremely important to me because in
general I try to avoid "PCs".  The "freely available" part is also
extremely important to me, and that goes for *all* the software I run,
from the device firmware all the way up to the applications.  (Naturally
I'm forced to use some proprietary stuff, such as the system firmware in
some cases, primarily because I run lots of legacy hardware, but I don't
mind too much because the firmware rarely gets directly in my way.)

As I'm sure others may point out, and should be self evident if only
from my .signature:  I do not speak for The NetBSD Foundation.  Neither
am I every potential NetBSD customer you might encounter.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
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