> I got involved with NetBSD because it ran on the systems I wanted to
> use and looked like a fun system to hack on.  There has been much
> discussion recently about how we "must" become more friendly to the
> semi-clued crowd (usually wrt first-time installs) and we "must" become
> more suited to "production" environments (though there seems to be
> disagreement over just what that means).

While I am a strong advocate of making things easier for the "un-clued" I
draw the line at changes which are fundamentally hard to diagnose and
troubleshoot. Unlike SGI or Micro$haft, we do not have to make ship dates.
There are no shareholders suing us because we did not roll out a bloatware
feature to compete with the other guy's bloatware. We can take as long as
we like to refine new features until they are acceptably clean.

But we should realize, that Linux and FreeBSD are taking off precisely
because they cater to the "click and grunt" crowd. It's a lot easier to
sustain the commercially supported conveniences when you have a large
consumer base, which is by definition low on the clue scale.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com