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.

  • RedWeaselEnglish
    10·
    2 hours ago

    I’d just like to throw out that the BSDs including netbsd are unixes and not unix-like.

    • ComradeMiaoEnglish
      3·
      29 minutes ago

      From the NetBSD Website:

      NetBSD is a free, fast, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system. It is available for a wide range of platforms, from large-scale servers and powerful desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices.

      https://www.netbsd.org/

      • RedWeaselEnglish
        1·
        12 minutes ago

        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.

    • dfyx@piefed.socialEnglish
      3·
      1 hour ago

      I was going by Wikipedia which calls NetBSD „Unix-like“ but to be honest I have very little BSD experience.

    • SkullgridEnglish
      21·
      57 minutes ago

      … A thing is not like itself?

      • dustyDataEnglish
        5·
        34 minutes ago

        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.

      • RedWeaselEnglish
        3·
        39 minutes ago

        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?