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 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:
https://www.netbsd.org/
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.
https://www.opengroup.org/certifications/unix
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.
Yes and no. Kronos doesn’t really care as long as you’re compliant. The open group will come after you for licensing fees and take you to court. That’s the difference. Therefore, Linux and the BSDs are just Unix like and not actual Unix. It may only be a technicality, but it is a significant one.
Sounds super “open” :) . I looked on their site and it used to list macOS under Unix 03, but now it is not. It had a LOT of caveats as you had to turn off a lot of security features. Apple may have decided that security was more important than having the certification.
Note: comment is in part in relation to prior message and the above.
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.
And for the 30 years where Unix was a big thing, BSD was one of the big 2 “flavors” of Unix.
… 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.