The Future of NetBSD

ErisCalmsme writes "In this email Charles Hannum (one of the founders of NetBSD) tells us that 'The NetBSD Project has stagnated to the point of irrelevance. It has gotten to the point that being associated with the project is often more of a liability than an asset. I will attempt to explain how this happened, what the current state of affairs is, and what needs to be done to attempt to fix the situation.' What will happen to NetBSD?"

This is too important NOT to RTFA

[RLiegh]

So, for your convience, I'm posting it here:

The NetBSD Project has stagnated to the point of irrelevance. It has
gotten to the point that being associated with the project is often
more of a liability than an asset. I will attempt to explain how this
happened, what the current state of affairs is, and what needs to be
done to attempt to fix the situation.

As one of the 4 originators of NetBSD, I am in a fairly unique position.
I am the only one who has continuously participated and/or watched the
project over its entire history. Many changes have taken place, and at
the same time many things have remained the same -- including some of
our early mistakes.

I'd like to say that I'm some great visionary, who foresaw the whole OSS
market, but the fact is that's BS. When we started the project, Linux
and 386BSD were both little hobbyist systems, both pretty buggy, and
both lacking a lot of important hardware support. Mostly we were
scratching an itch: there was no complete package of 386BSD plus the
necessary patches to make it run on more systems and fix bugs, and there
was no sign that Bill Jolitz was going to resurface and do anything.

Much of the project structure evolved because of problems we had early
on. Probably our best choice was to start using central version control
right off; this has enabled a very wide view of the code history and
(eventually) made remote collaboration with a large number of developers
much easier. Some other things we fudged; e.g. Chris got tired of being
the point man for everything, and was trying to graduate college, so we
created an internal "cabal" for managing the project, which became known
as the "core group". Although the web was very new, we set up a web
site fairly early, to disseminate information about the project and our
releases.

Much of this early structure (CVS, web site, cabal, etc.) was copied
verbatim by other open source (this term not being in wide use yet)
projects -- even the form of the project name and the term "core". This
later became a kind of standard template for starting up an open source
project.

Unfortunately, we made some mistakes here. As we've seen over the
years, one of the great successes of Linux was that it had a strong
leader, who set goals and directions, and was able to get people to do
what he wanted -- or find someone else to do it. This latter part is
also a key element; there was no sense that anyone else "owned" a piece
of Linux (although de facto "ownership" has happened in some parts); if
you didn't produce, Linus would use someone else's code. If you wanted
people to use your stuff, you had to keep moving.

NetBSD did not have this. Partly due to lack of people, and partly due
to a more corporate mentality, projects were often "locked". One person
would say they were working on a project, and everyone else would be
told to refer to them. Often these projects stagnated, or never
progressed at all. If they did, the motivators were often very slow.
As a result, many important projects have moved at a glacial pace, or
never materialized at all.

I'm sorry to say that I helped create this problem, and that most of the
projects which modeled themselves after NetBSD (probably due to its high
popularity in 1993 and 1994) have suffered similar problems. FreeBSD
and XFree86, for example, have both forked successor projects (Dragonfly
and X.org) for very similar reasons.

Unfortunately, these problems still exist in the NetBSD project today,
and nothing is being done to fix them.

--

I won't attempt to pin blame on any specific people for this, except to
say that some of it is definitely my fault. It's only in retrospect
that I see so clearly the need for a very strong leader. Had I pursued
it 10 years ago, things might be very different. Such is life. But
let's talk about the situation today.

Today,

Not a great loss, I'm sorry to say.

[Cicero382]

The great advantage that NetBSD had was its fast and secure network facilities. Unfortunately, for many potential users the problems far outweigh the benefits. And the situation has been getting worse for some time now.

Bye-bye NetBSD, it was good while it lasted.

Give me a break.

[ad454]

NetBSD is not dying. It is getting better and better with new features and improvements being added all of the time. In addition to steady developments, Google summers have really boasted NetBSD.

I guess for some, having a lightweight, decent, and stable OS that does what it is suppose to do not enough. Admittedly their are many needed userland applications, epecially commercial applications that won't run on NetBSD. But if that was my primary concern than I would only run Windows XP. And when it comes to userland opensource, nothing beats PKGSRC. Especially when compaired to Linux equilibrants like SuSE yast.

When you ask the average person, all that they care about is the bells and wistle in the window manager and not much else. Think aqua in MacOSX or aero in WinVista.

Alicia.

Re:Not surprized

[Renegade88]

What I'm surprised about is that you read the email chain but came to the conclusion that Theo's ideas were "ignored". That's not what happened. They desperated wanted his ideas and his code, but they told him he could not COMMIT the code himself, but rather work through an intermediary, one that had no technical skill. It's like telling the former CEO to report to the janitor. You got it half right, but either you didn't read the whole chain, or your memory is failing you.

Re:Nature doing what it does best...

[Silver Sloth]

Windows survives, nay prospers, because it is the 'fittest' at surviving in the market place. If one of the other OSes could persuade practically every PC manufacturer to install it as default then Windows would be dead within months. So, as an analogy, lets try cockroaches, which, whilst not particularly appealing (except to other cockroaches) come as default in any environment (and yes, I know that the biology doesn't stand up)

Re:Not surprized

[PrayingWolf]

True. I WAS trying to bring up precisely the problem of COMMITTING (the quote from the article, hello?). So what I basically meant was that effectively the system ate Theo's work... or at least hindered it. Maybe I wan't entirey correct, but that's what the article seems to imply also.

For anyone intrested, the email chain is here [theos.com]. Everyone can make their own conclusions. And yes, I did read the entire chain, long ago.

Re:What goes around comes around

[Renegade88]

I read the email log extremely closely. Charles was in the process of creating a "special" set of rules for Theo, that only Theo had to agree to. While he was being jerked around, five additional people earned commit priviledges, but where not made to agree to these "new" criteria. This set of rules was never completed, it was dragged out intentionally, basically "you have to agree to these rules first, but you can't do that until we write them, and we can't give you a date when we will write them even though it's already been weeks".

I would love to post the link to the email log but it would crash the server it's on.

Even though the developer put in charge of Theo's sparc port wanted Theo to have his commit priviledges restored, and asked for it a couple of times, the core refused. The only "workable" solution that was offered was that Theo could pass his diffs on to the port developer and let him merge them. Basically it was a set of conditions that nobody would agree to. The email chain is quite clear that Charles was instrumental in Theo losing the commit priviledges and never intended to restore them. It is also obvious they were jerking him around until he just quit on his own.

My take on Theo:
I think his "utter asshole" reputation is not accurate. He's said some things he probably wants to have back, and likely hurt some feelings. I also think he was cordial during this 7 month jerk-around session, enduring it FAR longer than most people would, and he said all the right things to earn the commit priviledges back. He was willing to "play ball".

Charles might be a good guy, but he wasn't well like during this time in 1995 and forcing Theo out is a black mark on his record. You can't tell me NetBSD is better off now (dying) without Theo then they would have been with him on their team.

Re:Not surprized

[Renegade88]

The short version is Theo said that he would not hand over 10,000+ changed lines of code UNLESS he could merge them himself. The guy who was assigned Theo's sparc port requested twice that Theo's priviledges be re-instated for this purpose, but the Core ignored the the new head of the Sparc port. Theo actually did agree to their demands of being cordial WITHIN reason. The problem was three fold:

1. They didn't really want him to agree, they wanted him out.
2. If he did agree, it would be without condition. Theo wanted extenuating circumstances to be considered
3. In the original incident, Theo did not verbally abuse some poor random user on the NetBSD mail list. Some guy repeatedly provoked Theo on his private email account. It did not come out of the clear blue and the "victim" was not innocent. He basically got what he deserved. The NetBSD didn't agree though

Re:What goes around comes around

[dolmen.fr]

The fork was a good decision as Theo seems to be a good leader for OpenBSD, while NetBSD has none.
And Theo also also has more strict principles than Linus, in particular in the definition of "free". (See the kerneltrap interview [kerneltrap.org]).

Small form factor and an honest to god *nix

[Vulcann]

I have been a user of NetBSD since version 1.6 upto version 3.0. I have always used NetBSD over Linux since my student days for reasons which I'm sure will apply equally to a lot of people even today. 1) The complexity of NetBSD is just enough to handle for a person attempting to get into OS kernel development. Its a lot simpler than deciphering a current Linux kernel. 2) It runs surprisingly quick even with very little resources but is yet fully functional for most student projects. I used to run NetBSD off 16 MB of RAM inside a VMWare virtual machine running on a dog slow 333 MHz Celeron. Tried to run Linux inside a similar setup but it was just too bulky. 3) It has all the tools any CS guy would need for course projects. Everything from gdb to gcc to perl to bash. If you're one of those GUI folks theres a decently functional X running off it. All of this while being prudent with resources. 4) Being BSD, its more Unix than Linux is. Granted this may not be a huge plus but with folks who want to develop software targetting other BSDs its prolly a better place to start off on. 5) Blazing fast protocol stack. Its a great case study for a Networking/Protocol course Considering students stand to benefit so much from such a system its a wonder why more students dont work on this system and eventually develop for it. Perhaps its the Linux hype generated the world over that precludes other choices for young college folks.

Re:Sounds bleak

[bradkittenbrink]

I thought it wasn't referring to anything in particular, but I think it should have been referring to Debian kFreeBSD [debian.org]. That's the clear migration path for linux users if linux goes belly up.

Re:Not surprized

[NuclearDog]

More like this:

1. Some user gets into a flamewar with Theo, getting personal and then mail-bombs Theo's server.
   
2. Theo responds with some rude comment.
   
3. User forwards e-mail to core group, even though the whole situation was unrelated to the NetBSD project.
   
4. Theo is removed from the core group because they believe he's a bad representative of the NetBSD project. They don't give Theo a chance to defend himself, and the one post he did make to a mailing list defending himself was deleted by one of the core group.
   
5. They revoke his CVS access at the same time, even though he could have kept it and stayed on as the sparc port maintainer even if he was removed from the core group.
   
6. Theo asks for CVS access back. Says he doesn't care about the core group and hates politics anyways. Refuses to work with the new sparc port maintiner to merge over 10'000 lines of diffs including several new files. ("It's like the CEO reporting to the janitor.")
   
7. The sparc port maintiner asks the core group to give Theo CVS access.
   
8. The core group refuses unless he agrees to be a 'professional' in all his e-mail.
   
9. He argues that this is unfair because other committers are not held to any standard, and is not going to agree to have all his e-mail be included, arguing that private messages are private.
   
10. Core argues that private messages can still be related, kind of agreeing but not really to the fact that private e-mail should not reasonably be covered (making sure to remember that the original reason this all started was because of a private e-mail, he mentions that he thinks that they wont agree to this because it would be admitting they made a mistake originally).
    
11. Theo asks that a clear line be drawn so he knows what is considered NetBSD-related e-mail and is covered under the policy and a general outline of expectations are drawn up, and all committers agree to it (not just him).
    
12. Core agrees, says they're working on an agreement.
    
13. Months later, Theo gets fed up and walks out and founds OpenBSD.
    

Or at least that's how I remember it.

ND

Re:Mergers and Acquisition

[Tuzanor]

Precicely. OpenBSD's approach to security is to fix bugs because most security holes are quite plainly software bugs/poor coding. Porting your software on differnet architectures, little/big endians, etc can show some pretty nifty bugs or bad design that could be exploited across platforms. Plus, having good portable code makes it easier to port to new architectures that have expanded security support like W^X.

Re:What goes around comes around

[Renegade88]

Not bad, wrong on all three counts. count 1: He said he would abide by the cores wishes as long as they were state the difference between NetBSD mail and private mail AND that they applied to everyone. count 2: He was in charge of the sparc port. They ripped those priviledges from him without cause or warning. He said NetBSD was welcome to have 10000 lines of bug fixes IF he could merge them himself because he didn't trust anyone to do it. count 3: Besides contributing to a few OSS projects, I am the architect and project lead of one, used by 1000s downstream. How many OSS projects are you in charge of? Be careful with your arrogance. Abrasive yes - short fuse no.

Re:Sounds bleak

[Nimrangul]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBSD [wikipedia.org] Or you could just look at the OpenBSD article on Wikipedia which clearly states it out, 32.8 percent of the people surveyed by the BSD Certification Group said they use OpenBSD, 77 percent of the people said they use FreeBSD, 16.3 percent of the people said they use NetBSD and 2.6 percent said they use DragonFly BSD - none of these were exclusive uses, so a person who uses both NetBSD and FreeBSD is counted in both percentiles.