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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."
You should contribute it is excellent. Something that you need when you least expect it
If they need money, then they should sell copies of NetBSD, rather than begging for handouts. If NetBSD has any value, then people will be willing to purchase it.
PkgSrc alone is worth a small donation. With it, you can compile the same apps for many different operating systems, including Solaris, *BSD, Linux, and Irix. While not as extensive as some of the Port systems, the fact that it is so standardized across the board is a decent exchange.
Our new office's copier uses NetBSD as it's OS. I'm pretty sure the company hasn't dropped a dime in the foundation's pocket. I'm a supporter of the BSD license, but if companies are using the OS, and not pitching in even a pittance voluntarily, perhaps a gentle reminder of how much expense it would cost to move to a new OS is order? Perhaps another reminder of how if they went to say, ohhhh, Linux, that they'd have GPL issues to deal with? Yeah...that sounds like it's worth a check for a couple of grand to me...
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Don't you remember? BSD and GPL are free as in beer. No cost. Just like music, remember? You remember those pesky RAII guys? Free as in don't have to pay a thin dime free? You feel no reason to pay for corporate sponcered IP, why should I pay for yours?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
...that if they don't cough up, they can go back to using Linux, where (unless they never read news related to the OS) they'll have to endure Stallman's whining, ranting autistic diatribes every other month or so, not to mention his unwavering belief that anybody who uses anything licensed under the GPL has permanently become his bitch by default.
;-)
Once people are confronted with such a ghastly threat, I have a feeling that streams of cash will begin flowing in from all directions.
I would love to see a series of benchmarks covering installation, time to get to useful services, as well as raw speed, or even cooked speed. For all three BSDs, no make that all the *BSDs to include Dfly and Darwin and MirBSD and etc.
FreeBSD held the record for massive amounts of downloads, NetBSD held the record for the LandSpeedRecord, OpenBSD hasn't had a remote exploit for years and years, and recently got a fix in the IDLE loop that is supposed to make it scream even better.
Yet no one is making a series of across the board benchmarks that make sense. Guess I'll go do it.
About the minimalist point of view, NetBSD seems to be better. For example, the distribution size of NetBSD-2.0.2/i386 is only 54MB, that's 30% smaller than OpenBSD/i386 (71MB).
I'd happily donate 20 or even more to NetBSD as I have one netbsd box rnning in an Sun Ultra1 if they had another method of payment than PayPal (credit card is still via pp). They cancelled my account and sucked my funds just because i'm Spanish and my name sounds too "latin" to be doing legal things on Internet.
But this time I wasn't So I made a donation :)
I hope they reach their goal too...