Forwarding this on demand (I'm not on the list). It's longish,
but when I read that fishy article I got a little carried away... :-)

-- 
/ali: Computer Science Major and aspiring cartoonist. :-) 
(dept) dat94ali@ludat.lth.se - http://www.ludat.lth.se/~dat94ali
(home) ali@h543.sparta.lu.se - http://h543.sparta.lu.se/
* A4000/040-40/CV3D/Ariadne·AmigaOS·NetBSD·A3000/040-25/Ariadne *

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2001 05:21:29 +0100 (MET)
From: "ali (Anders Lindgren)" <dat94ali@ludat.lth.se>
To: comments@tucows.com
Subject: Nice to see NetBSD mentioned. However...

As a NetBSD hobbyist end-user I must say I found your NetBSD preview at
http://bsd.tucows.com/conhtml/preview/74141.html quite disturbing,
seeing as it is cluttered with factual errors all over. That, and I 
don't agree with the opinions expressed.

Let's start with the outright lies:

 o Download: This is probably just a typo, but I think neither
   the NetBSD nor the FreeBSD teams want NetBSD-1.4.2 listed as
   a version of FreeBSD.

 o License: GPL. While much of the userland codebase is GPL,
   just as Linux relies totally on GPL for userland, pretty
   much nothing in the NetBSD system is GPL. It is released
   under a BSD license, something large parts of the BSD community
   feel is of utmost importance.

 o No official commercial support: If you'd care to check, you'd
   notice there's a list of companies supporting NetBSD on the
   NetBSD homepage, such as consultants. It's admittedly not very
   impressive, but it's as incomplete as it is short. If you meant
   to say "there are no NetBSD distributions like Linux ones", you're
   just pointing out a design-difference. NetBSD already comes as
   a complete system. Linux is just a kernel. It requires somebody
   else to build distributions of it. I think you will notice most
   people are grateful for the lack of self-incompatibility this has
   saved the BSD communities from. Furthermore, both FreeBSD and
   NetBSD (and IIRC OpenBSD as well) provide CD-images on their sites
   and pointers to where you can order complete CDs.

Looking at the opinions expressed, I'd like to respond:

"support for network application seriously lacking". I'm not sure
what this means. TCP/IP *comes* from BSD. I can think of a handful
of ICQ-clients, equally many talk- and IRC-clients etc. as well as
several networking-games. The IPNAT/IPF address-translations and
filtering-packages are excellent and are used in many firewalls.
There are network monitoring & tuning tools, libraries for
distributed computing and whatnot. The statement lacks any
supporting arguments in the article -- and I frankly can't think of
what they'd be.

"but configuring it is an adventure every time". Every *IX looks
different from an administration perspective. NetBSD was the
first *IX I installed myself. I think it took perhaps twenty minutes
to understand the entire boot-process, and this was a first time for
me -- I had never installed a unix box or read /etc/rc before. Now
as a more experienced user, although I still think of myself as a
newbie, I still can't see how NetBSD would be any more complicated
to configure than other unices.

"but on many of the other platforms you have to set it up manually
to boot from another machine". Which ones would those be? I've only
tried NetBSD/port-amiga (1.3.1 and onwards), NetBSD/port-sparc (1.5)
and NetBSD/port-i386 (1.4.1->1.5) and all have supported installation
from a variety of media. All of them have supported installing NetBSD
from an other OS running on the machine, or over a network via NFS
or FTP, or via boot-floppies, or via CD... Are you sure there are
any architectures which require installation from an other machine?

"The installer is not for the timid though, it is an old style text
based installer". Points like these will always be a matter of opinion.
I installed -- as a total newbie -- NetBSD/port-amiga before the sysinst
menu-driven tool became available. I'm not overly proud I succeeded
without problems on the first try; the INSTALL-document (you should've
read it before making statements of this sort, IMHO) stated in explicit
detail every single step I had to take, and covered two or three
ways of getting the system onto the disk depending on install-media.
Some time around 1.4.1, Sysinst appeared, making it further easier.
The text-based installer is a positive thing. It's so small it enables
you to install from virtually any media, including a single floppy.
Furthermore, there's no GUI (e.g. X) there to fail on you if your funky
combination of hardware happens to be unusual. If you mean that it
is not for people who are afraid of reading the *detailed* installation-
intructions first and following them, or "timid" means a person who
just freezes in utter apathy at the sight of a console instead of a
shiny GUI with blue little wizards, I guess you're right. I have to
wonder if that kind of people oughtn't be running Windows instead,
though.

I can't speak for the user-friendliness of FreeBSD because I have
never used it, but I do have to wonder about your statements and
their lack of substantial arguments. Personally I tried NetBSD
because I was curious, but have stuck with it because it is a
lean, efficient, very consistent, easy-to-learn and easy-to-use
system, with a helpful community to match.

Regards,
 Anders Lindgren

-- 
/ali: Computer Science Major and aspiring cartoonist. :-) 
(dept) dat94ali@ludat.lth.se - http://www.ludat.lth.se/~dat94ali
(home) ali@h543.sparta.lu.se - http://h543.sparta.lu.se/
* A4000/040-40/CV3D/Ariadne·AmigaOS·NetBSD·A3000/040-25/Ariadne *