NetBSD may have found a new role: The AI-free FOSS OS
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.
This is the moderate, centrist stance.
The most recent Ubuntu Summit was heavily AI-flavored.
The heads of Red Hat Global Engineering sent out a memo about transitioning to an Agentic Software Development Lifecycle.
But once it’s in the kernel, then no distro can totally avoid it.
This stance is profoundly offputting to those who prefer hand-crafted code.
Last week, the Reg FOSS desk attended the Open Source Summit Europe in Prague.
This event reflects the tendencies of the increasingly mainstream open-source world: Linux is pretty much the only OS in evidence, although many attendees tote around (and present from) MacBooks, and both Microsoft and Windows were visible.
The event overlaps with Embedded Linux Conference, so the Zephyr RTOS was also visible on some robots and other gadgets.
The Open Source Summit gives the overall impression that Linux is the only general-purpose FOSS OS.
We saw no mention at all of any of the BSDs; indeed, when we mentioned NetBSD, some of the folks from Let’s Encrypt looked puzzled and asked us “What’s ‘net bee ess dee’?” Sadly, this is probably a reasonably fair representation of its presence at the event and in the FOSS mainstream.
5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on www.theregister.com — the content belongs to The Register.
