NetBSD seems to be thriving of late: as the Linux world goes pro-AI, some of the AI-averse are turning to this explicitly AI-free project.
The NetBSD project’s Mastodon feed reports that it received a record 120 donations last month, and it has far exceeded its target:
“We received $120,282 USD in total. Naturally, this has completely filled up our donations target bar which was set at $50,000. Time to fund some projects!”
It’s a welcome contrast to the usual stories of under-funded FOSS projects, and it follows a visible uptick in people asking about NetBSD in the FOSS Unix groups we read, ever since Emperor Penguin Torvalds said that Linux was not an anti-AI project back in July, and the following month, the Debian project polled its developers on AI use, and they chose to permit AI-generated contributions.
I thought net occasionally lifted code from Linux or others especially for of drivers or graphics etc. If that is right I wonder how that will match this policy as AI code spreads elsewhere
Has anyone used a *BSD lately? Genuine question. I have tried one of them in the past and it wasn’t really something that you can use as a daily driver. Have they improved? If so, I wouldn’t mind taking another dive.
I gave it a try in a VM , because I do that kinda thing for fun.
I couldn’t figure out the DE install, but I really didn’t try nor do any research.
Compared to my experience with arch or fedora, it’s not something to half ass on a whim.
I suppose that diversity in… let’s be honest: Unix-y operating systems is a good thing, and I personally think that this should be the “center of gravity” or the more-or-less common ground as far as OS design goes.
Still, besides windows, I am quite dissatisfied that so much talent and brain power goes into pretty-much-redundant OSes.
I do wonder if we would be better off if Plan 9, Herd, maybe BeOS (haiku, I know) also received OSS coders’ attention and saw development into the modern age…
More diversity, more ways of thinking about how an OS could be built instead of 600 Linux distros, a dozen package managers, etc.
There is no central institution which organizes or has authority to direct FOSS developers to do this or that. If you want something to be done, your best bet is to do it yourself.
I have no idea how these things are differentiated but I guess that means NetBSD does not use the Linux kernel but something else? Sorry for the naive question.
Correct. BSD is a separate family of operating systems. Like Linux, they are Unix-like but they use their own kernel(s). The original BSD is way older than Linux, I think from the 70s. These days, the most popular BSDs are FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Darwin (the lower layers of macOS, originally based on FreeBSD)
I’d just like to throw out that the BSDs including netbsd are unixes and not unix-like.
From the NetBSD Website:
NetBSD is a free, fast, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system. It is available for a wide range of platforms, from large-scale servers and powerful desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices.
I wonder why they would write that as they are a direct descendant of BSD, a Unix, making them a Unix and therefore not unix-like, but the real thing.
Unix is a licensing issue. Linux BSD or even Mac OS could likely get Unix certification. Mac OS technically had it even though it shouldn’t have for about a decade. However, none of them are Unix because none are currently paying the hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly. Or have made the niche compliances necessary.
That is like Khronos’s CTS for vulkan. It is still vulkan without it, just not necessarily compliant with the whole standard. Same applies top Unix. macOS 26 and older is certified and 27 probably is in the process of being done.
thank you RedWeasel-like commenter
I came running with my axe at first. Thanks for making this comment. lol
I was going by Wikipedia which calls NetBSD „Unix-like“ but to be honest I have very little BSD experience.
The whole BSD family are THE unix.
No, THE Unix is the original AT&T Unix from 1969. BSD is a derivative of that from the late 70s.
I can agree with that, yes, but BSD was an extension and a modification of the AT&T bell labs Unix. So essentially the same.
… A thing is not like itself?
The modern compound phrase “X like” implies that something is similar to another thing while NOT being the thing itself.
A rogue like game has characteristics similar to the 80’s video game titled Rogue. But is not the game Rogue. We don’t say Rogue is a rogue like. Rogue is just the game Rogue.
Just like you are not a Skullgrid like user, you are the Skullgrid.
If I said could you hand me that gold-like thing I point at would you actually think it was gold even if it was?
Yes, it has its own kernel, and it is included with a distribution of software with 29,000 packages (about the size of Debian IIRC). Many POSIX compatible programs and collections / desktops such as KDE will build on it, but it also has own versions of tools close to the system.
This is possible because a UNIX or Linux kernel is a strong abstraction of the hardware, and software designed for POSIX compatibility will run on most of it. There are also kernel-layer subsystems like the ZFS file system which will run on a number of different kernels.
Yes, you are right. The Berkeley Software Distribution is a free Unix operating system and associated software distribution, much like Linux. It uses a different, more permissive license. And the kernel is separate to Linux.
The two distributions share a lot of software these days, but the kernel is the defining difference. The Wikipedia page has the nitty gritty.
thriving
I still remember NetBSD from the memes where it runs on ANYTHING.
“I just threw a dead squirrel into a shoe box and installed NetBSD on it”
But can it run in Doom?
Interesting that it’s NetBSD on the receiving end of this, I thought it was effectively extinct compared to FreeBSD and OpenBSD
Perhaps the other sets of maintainers signalled differently or something?
Glad to see it of course, just curious
Edit: read again that they’ve explicitly said NetBSD is AI-free
