Hmm. The old "meaning of life" thread....  Here's my A$0.0267 [ US$0.02 ] worth.

I'm relatively new to NetBSD. Earlier this year I was looking at LINUX, FreeBSD
and NetBSD from my company's perspective. We hang our software off commercial
OS's like OSF/1 and HP-UX. We've always been limited by what the commercial OS
vendors offer and we're too small to do an OS ourselves. So, for us, the future
is with one (or perhaps more) of the freely available OS's. We're interested in
selling our software, not necessarily the OS. As a side line, we think it is
worthwhile to contribute to making a freely available OS successful. A viable
alternative to Micro$oft products is a worthwhile (and sufficient) goal.

So why NetBSD? Well, we have more Alpha's than anything else. Our problem is
that there is that we have one application where DEC's OSF/1 doesn't suit (it
can't run diskless). Another reason is that we *need* our software to run on
more than one platform.

We write our software to be largely non-OS-specific and when I look at
application software that runs on FreeBSD or LINUX, I question why the same
code can't be ported to each OS and maintained in a "contrib" tree rather
than the base OS source tree. Device drivers tend to be architecture
specific, but is there something stopping FreeBSD drivers being ported to
NetBSD/i386? Seems to me that someone (anyone?) just has to go and do it.

John Birrell
jb@cimlogic.com.au