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NetBSD Project Calls for Donations
A reader writes:"Thor Lancelot Simon from the NetBSD project recently made a post to the netbsd-advocacy mailing list, outlining the project's desperate need for monetary donations from its users and supporters to help improve NetBSD for everyone. Please read Thor's post here and think seriously about helping out this excellent open source project. Even the smallest donation counts, if enough people pitch in."
I'll second that. I think it's unfortunate that when people are summing up the BSD's, they often go for the age-old "Free for performance, Open for security, Net for putting on a toaster". This gives people the impression that NetBSD is only worth checking out if you want to run it on bizarre or outdated hardware, and consequently it never seems to get considered as an OS in its own right. I urge those with the time and interest to at least check it out. Even on run of the mill x86 systems that will run any other OS, NetBSD provides a clean, minimalist, reliable Unix that's a pleasure to use. Just because it doesn't have a whole lot of hype doesn't mean there's not a lot to be excited about.
A lot of people really prefer donating money to buying CDs, even if the project has a lot of value to them. I hear this a lot about OpenBSD, where a lot of supporters will make an FTP download and donate $50 rather than buy the CD simply because it's more convient for them.
At any rate, I don't see how this would help. Presumably they aren't going to stop letting you download it for free. In that case, buying a copy is really not very different to just downloading it and donating some money - which is really all they're asking for now.
Of course, there are a lot of places that do sell NetBSD CDs for those without the bandwidth to just get it themselves, and I would suppose those places contribute some of the profits to the project. There's also the NetBSD store (although unfortunately the stuff there just isn't that flash)
I'm willing to give it a try though. Mainly because some of the pkgsrc features seem nice. Of course I might run into other neat stuff while playing around with it
One of the niftiest non-technical things about OpenBSD (up there with the release songs ^_^) is the quality of the merchandise. They have a wide range of tshirt designs in all main colours and levels of seriousness, and also some really nice posters. NetBSD's merchandise leaves a lot to be desired, admittedly, although I think I read somewhere that even they acknowledged this and were working on it.
:(
Wasabi Systems used to make a nice black t-shirt that said "This Brain Runs NetBSD" and had a picture of their green samurai Beastie on it, but I can't seem to find any these days. Shame.