Submitted by For a couple of months, the french speaking NetBSD advocacy group, NetBSDfr has started a series of interviews called “Discussing with a NetBSD developer”. The first developer that has been interviewed was Soren Jacobsen, NetBSD 5.0 release engineer, shortly after NetBSD 5.0 was released. In July, we had the opportunity to talk to Adam Hamsik, known for porting LVM and ZFS to the NetBSD OS. S.P. Zeidler was our third victim, one of the Project’s admins and member of the pkgsrc-releng team. This month, we had the chance to interview Alistair G. Crooks, actual president of The NetBSD Foundation. Alistair gave us a unique historical point of view as one of NetBSD’s early hackers. He also shared with us his thought about the future of NetBSD and explained what makes this operating system so special. The interviews can be read in english at blog.NetBSD.org by clicking on the links above, and in french at www.NetBSDfr.org.
Why is this article in Page 2?
Last time I asked such question, I got replies saying the size of the article decides if the article goes on Front Page [a large article] or on Page 2 [a smaller one].
What criteria were taken to decide that this article must go to Page 2 if the article is as extense as be in your Front Page?
Please, be consistent with your publication policies.
Edited 2009-09-22 22:13 UTC
NetBSD is the future of open source.
They have a plan, make money, produce great tech and have fun doing it.
Long after Linux has collapsed into a singularity after committing tty_graphical_smilies.patch to mainline, NetBSD will be there, powering the future.
I wouldn’t overstate it that much, but it is a d*mn fine UNIX system. It is not cluttered, and there is some very good engineering going on. The system is fast and consistent, but never really seems to catch much mainstream attention.
If there’s one thing I’d like to see OSNews cover more, it is the BSDs.
Then help us out and submit news about them
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The issue which you raise is more to do with the distribution rather than GNU/Linux itself. If you get something horribly crappy like Fedora, OpenSuSE or god forbid, Ubuntu – then it’ll appear to be a giant mess when compared to BSD. If you grab something like Archlinux or Slackware which has minimal patching, sane compiler flags and a focus on allowing a person to build a system from the ground up – you won’t have a problem.
I guess there is an idea within the Linux world of replacing everything command line with either something around XML, using a registry of some sort or having a graphical front end. Many times the simplest solution is normally the best. I look in horror when I see traditional linux boxes with a mountain of different run levels – for what? whose benefit? give me rc.local and rc.conf and leave me to it
While I love, use and recommend Arch Linux that’s simply not true. Arch Linux doesn’t (yet?) have NetBSDs quality. In fact it’s pretty far from it. Slackware (which I haven’t used for a long time now) is nearer.
The main problem with with Linux Distribution is the lack of a solid base system to which applications can be added. Of course there are things like repositories why try to establish something similar, but until now I have not seen anything coming close to it in Linux land.
In NetBSD they are very serious about branches. Release, Stable, betas/rcs, current and in pkgsrc quarterly stables, etc.
“Features” like this allow BSDs to be as stable and as up to date as you want.
Even if the BSDs a _very_ different from each other this system is very proven and is shared across all of them.