*BSD News Article 97165


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From: cshapiro@ic.sunsyb.edu (Carl S Shapiro)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc
Subject: Re: Is NetBSD alive?
Date: 5 Jun 1997 19:27:14 GMT
Organization: State University of New York at Stony Brook
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Peter Berger (peterb@hoopoe.psc.edu) wrote:

[...]

: Uh, gee.  This sounds like why NetBSD supports DECstations, to me.

I think that statement was a little bit i386 specific... the preceeding
sentances kind of give it away:

> Certainly we have a smaller user community than FreeBSD.  We don't go out of
> our way to bend MI abstractions to fit the i386 -- never really have; FreeBSD
> is better about this now, but they haven't always been -- and thousands of
> device drivers for Neato Keen Stuff isn't a top priority, either.  So you'll
> find less i386 NetBSD users than FreeBSD users, because many users don't care
> about clean machine-independent abstractions, and many users also seem to have
> this funny desire to have support for their wacky, already-paid-for hardware,
> even if that support doesn't always work 100%, rather than to build machines
> just to run NetBSD, even if they'd perform better and wouldn't cost any, or
> much, more.


Carl