Confessions of a Recovering NetBSD Zealot

debilo writes, "ONLamp.com is featuring a lengthy interview with Charles M. Hannum, to Slashdotters probably best known for his wake-up call aptly titled The Future of NetBSD that generated a rather vocal discussion. In the interview, Charles speaks about his role in and the beginning of The NetBSD Project, shares his thoughts on software licenses, discusses the popularity of Linux and its development model, and further addresses the problems that NetBSD is facing. Some notable quotes include: 'If I were doing it again, I might very well switch to the LGPL. I'll just note that it didn't exist at the time.' And: 'There was a lot of FUD around this issue — some of it from Linus, actually — and it did cause us some problems.'"

Comments

Re:All "in the family."

[smash]

I still read amusing little pro-Linux rants that are actually just pro-open source Unix userland, not pro-Linux as they believe themselves to be. Don't get me wrong, there are definite differentiators between BSD, Linux, running GNU tools on Solaris, OS X etc. but that's not the point I'm interested in here. For this discussion, I'm interested in seeing many of Unix per-se's benefits being described as Linux benefits when they are nothing of the sort.

Why, oh why can more people not see this...

Linux is a kernel (as opposed to the BSDs which include a set of integrated userland tools - not just package a bunch of independently developed GNU tools), that really, these days is nothing particularly special, other than being "free". I mean sure, certain aspects of it may be cutting edge, but for the most part they're not "must have" features that will make or break it's usage in a particular application.

As much as I think RMS is a idealist nutjob, I can see his point regarding the whole "GNU/Linux" thing here (even though simply tacking "GNU" on the front isn't fair to other developers, without which the system would be useless for certain purposes, such as xfree.org).

Re:We need a NetBSD

[mnmn]

Free, sure. But I dont know about lean and mean.

The whole point of NetBSD is portability. If it weren't for portability, NetBSD might as well not exist. But the problem is Linux has taken over as the portability leader and has a huge margin.

Every 32-bit cpu out there has a corresponding Linux BSP or distro. At least ones with enough ram or external bus interface. To compete, NetBSD will have to do without MMUs in some cases, and allow the kernel to be configured to be really small. Linux can scale and has enough configuration options to be able to produce a 200kb kernel and boot in under 1MB on an ARM7TDMI.

Given its license and code cleanliness (and maturity) I'd prefer NetBSD if it was portable enough. Its not.