On Mon, 30 Oct 2006 16:21:49 -0500
"Sean Caron" <caron.sean@gmail.com> wrote:

> because i really would have rather ran netbsd than gentoo linux on it
> (i try to avoid solaris if i can help it)
>

And why would that be?? Major governments, commercial and academic
organisations run Solaris, it's good enough for them, why wouldn't it be good
enough for you? Sure some aspects of Solaris could be better, e.g. the
installation is slow and a real pain, but once it's up and running it's rock
solid. In its current state, NetBSD is far behind Solaris on many important
features. I like NetBSD and would like to see it improve at a much faster pace,
however I think there is a lack of interest in NetBSD on SPARC hardware.

The thing that motivates people a lot is money. Sun employ many skilled
software engineers who work on Solaris full time. If you're a software
developer and work on a free software project in your spare time, you can't
expect serious results. I wouldn't mind paying for NetBSD that has a rock
solid, fine-grained multithreaded kernel, that takes advantage of multicore
CPUs like UltraSPARC T1 and has support for the latest SPARC hardware. The
problem is it doesn't exists in a free or commercial form. The same goes for
other software, i.e. desktop applications, multimedia, graphics, etc. I
wouldn't mind paying for good quality software, but there is no such software