Hey everyone,

I've been using netbsd for a few months now, and just wanted to say
thanks to everyone who has contributed for what a great job they've
done. If I had loads of money, I'd give you some of it; in the absence
of that, you'll just have to make do with this little email :-) 

I first heard of "UNIX" in 1998 when I was 15, when I accidentally stumbled
on an article in a British PC enthusiasts magazine that mentioned "Red
Hat Linux." One thing led to another, and I ended up with a the
Slackware Linux "A" series on a stack of ~15 disks -- my computer didn't
have a modem or NIC, and I had no CD burner. I downloaded them overnight
on my parents' AOL UK account.

After several years of happiness using Linux, I tried FreeBSD a few
months ago. I had become rather dissolusioned with the "Linux
community." So much seems to be motivated by "Conquering the Desktop,"
"Defeating Microsoft," passing laws mandating open source in government, and
other irrelevent or negative goals. 

Of course, this is not an entirely new thing: the GNU people have always 
been vagely anti-corporate, and the slashdot crowd are only unusually 
pathetic advocates of a position I'm rather skeptical of on a personal 
level. However, the GNU people have several million lines of code to
their credit -- something that can't be laughed at.

I liked FreeBSD, but there were several irritations: most of them
fixable, but some rather deeper. In particular, I didn't like how
"ports" were installed into /usr/local. Much of my hardware either
didn't work or required undocumented kernel options to work.

I resolved to look into the other BSD's: and the next I thought of was
NetBSD. I read up about the project and realized this was my home from 
home. Technical excellence, freedom, and the absence of hype are notions
that float my boat. I installed NetBSD, and found that, yes, it lives up
to it's billing. More importantly, the community that surrounds it is
small, competent and at peace with what NetBSD is.

An operating system, by definition, is a project that is only complete
when the hardware it runs on is dead. "Immortality" is a silly word, but 
by that definition of "dead," NetBSD may well live forever. I am not
naive enough to believe that NetBSD is perfect, or that it's management
is free from politics, but it seems to me that the people here share a
similar view of life's priorities: to tinker, to think, and not to
fight.

This is turning into a very lengthy thankyou note, and I could still 
write a page more. I planned to work one more item into the above, but I
shall simply place it here for simplicity: I intend to port NetBSD to
the Motorola MPC8xx. I am still preparing for this, gathering
documentation &c, but I have reason to be cautiously optimistic that I
can do it. I shall discuss this soon on netbsd-ports.

Once again, I'd like to thank everyone who has worked or is working on
NetBSD. You make lots of people very happy.

-- 
Bruce J.A. Nourish <bjan+JUNK@bjan.net>
+JUNK is a bit-bucket: remove it to email me.