Increasing awareness and adoption, followed by increasing donations

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.

    • cenzorrll@piefed.caEnglish
      1·
      22 minutes ago

      It was pretty easy for me to run KDE on freebsd following these steps. I’m running it in a VM, mostly just to become familiar with it, so there’s probably a lot I don’t have to fuss with.

      It’s basically just install sddm and KDE then enable them in sysrc.