Quote:
Originally Posted by gpatrick
NetBSD received donations of $150,000 in 2009 and more in 2010 that left them with a final balance which is about what it is today. They spend about what their donations are.
|
That was 5 years ago. Do you know how long is 5 years in Tech industry? What is more troubling is that the money has NOT being spent, which means there is no activity.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gpatrick
If you think their ship is sinking, then I'd assume you'd feel the same way about OpenBSD which was in worse shape because they had no money to pay their light bill.
Seems OpenBSD likely receives less money than NetBSD.
|
OpenBSD electric bills alone are over $150 000 so yes OpenBSD has to plea people to get serious about funding and community responded. You can check that the goal of 150K was reached within a week. More importantly the sign of the community vitality is that even increased founding level (I think they ended up with close to 300K) was also spent and they could spend even more if they had money.
Now politics aside OpenBSD is associated with the following significant coding projects:
OpenSSH, OpenBGPD, OpenNTPD, OpenSMTPD, OpenIKED, mandoc, LibreSSL. LibreSSL alone would be enough to make a big splash.
Now tell me one, just one significant NetBSD project in the last five years which was absorbed by other BSDs or OSs. Now I am fully aware of WAPBL and excited that it is part of Bitrig and possibly in the future of OpenBSD. However WAPBL is Wasabi Systems' file system and it has been released to public after Wasabi went out of business in spring of 2009 (that is more than 5 years ago). NPF is vaporware. What else? Porting ZFS and HAMMER went nowhere. Famed portability is reduced to cross compiling everything on amd64. Compare the state of Sparc64 in OpenBSD and NetBSD or something similar. pkgsrc doesn't work as advertised on anything but NetBSD and more testing and less talk would help (DragonFly people bailed out of pkgsrc, Minix seems to stick with it for now). Xen is cool but is it maintained? How does it compare to Jails+Behyve? NetBSD documentation feels like from the previous century. There is nothing new added there in the long, long time. New books are written about OpenBSD. None so far has ever been written about NetBSD.
Nobody here hates NetBSD. I am personally worried about once mighty NetBSD (it was more popular than FreeBSD in mid 90s). NetBSD is very important for the BSD and UNIX ecosystems. Something has to happen to shake that community because otherwise will just further sink into obscurity. They have to come up with something cool to work on and more importantly they have to finish it, test it, and brag about it.