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 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.
Rob Pike wrote this 26 years ago: “Linux is the hot new thing… but it’s just another Unix.”
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.