Mike M Volokhov wrote:

>Hello!
>
>While browsing various Open Source and NetBSD related materials for
>advocacy, I've found interesting article, written by "Corporate IT
>executives":
>
>	http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2005/opensource/070405-what-users-want.html
>
>"Comfortable with Linux, organizations look for new open source tools".
>While reading the article, I just realize, that NetBSD already matches
>all of these needs :-)
>
>Let me *very briefly and incomplete* comment on them:
>
>- More enterprise-class support. Please take a look to our long list of
>consultants for hire: http://www.ua.netbsd.org/gallery/consultants.html.
>Read the NetBSD flyer, section "Help is only an e-mail away!" at the
>http://www.ua.netbsd.org/gallery/advocacy/
>
>- Better documentation. The comprehensive set of manual pages is always
>available and up to date (it's really amazing), the NetBSD Guide may
>help with step-by-step procedures, all from the one source.
>
>- A sense of stability. The stability, interoperability, and well
>designed fashion are the primary goals for the project (from bylaws).
>The NetBSD is extremely mature system, developed over 10 years, and any
>changes always discussed very carefuly. "We won't disappear and leave
>you alone or stop supporting your platform."
>
>- Access to more platforms. Again, interoperability always were the
>strong side of the NetBSD. Trough pkgsrc we made a lot of 3rd party
>projects available on platforms, on which developers of these projects
>has been never tried. NetBSD itself runs on over 50 hardware platforms.
>
>- A commitment to stay open. From bylaws: "NetBSD [must be conformant]
>to widely accepted industry standards, and provide compatibility with
>popular system extensions, wherever is practical and does not unduly
>compromise the other technical merits of the system." Moreover, there
>are "no hacks, only solutions!" 
>
>- A focus on the end user. Hmmmm... No comments :-) Someone?
>
>--
>Mishka.
>  
>
I believe that a focus on tools like sushi can bring user-friendlyness  
to text-mode, this way we could get more confortable even on headless 
servers.
Also NetBSD lacks more keyboard layouts supported under text mode, I 
think this one is easy to get from other projects.
And the BSD license doesn't get in the way :)

We should remember that making NetBSD easier to use makes more people 
try it, more people advocating it, and more companies curious It already 
deserves to become a trend as much as FreeBSD 4.x was. It's the fastest 
BSD OS for the great majority single-processor systems.

I think projects like NetBSD Office should be supported to become 
NetBSD's "OS X", while NetBSD itself continues to be the core like Darwin.
A desktop project based on NetBSD but not completely integrated like OS 
X and Darwin is the way to grow without being in the way of current 
NetBSD objectives IMHO.


Bruno