hpeyerl@novatel.ca wrote:
> I think the whole point is that NetBSD is a freely available
> distribution of the technology present in 4.4BSD.  That's all. Sure,
> there may be a few exceptions but generally, that's the flavour.

I'd like to echo this sentiment and note that, as a maintainer of
several parts of a large distributed network, I really appreciate that
NetBSD does not try to ship with all the programs users might some day
want to run.  The student group I'm part of now supports ports of the
Athena environment to both Linux and NetBSD/i386, and Linux support
has been an order of magnitude more difficult simply because there is
no such thing as a standard Linux operating system.  Linux users are
asked if they want to install everything from uugetty to ObjectCenter,
and it's very difficult for a distributed network to anticipate what
exists on any given user's system.  We can provide our own additional
software through the distributed filesystem; we don't need different
versions of it on every user's machine.

I realize that not every user can take advantage of MIT's network
services, and it would be nice if there were a NetBSD equivalent of
the Slackware Linux distribution (done a little bit more cleanly,
perhaps).  I certainly hope people continue distributing the core,
45MB operating system for the sake of people in my situation, though.