Julio Merino is not renewing his membership of the NetBSD board of directors; he wrote an extensive post as to why. I agree with some of the issues he raised; they are possible on any open source project. I don’t necessarily think the solutions he proposes are correct.
I am clearly biased on this, but I think NetBSD needs a ‘NetBSD Digest’, to talk about the changes being made and the work being done. I once asked someone experienced in dealing with volunteers how you motivate people without a paycheck, and he said “Celebrate their accomplishments”. All the BSDs could use that. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Good post, Justin. One of the things I like most about OpenBSD (the BSD I use most ) is that it’s really easy to tell what’s going on with the project. Not only can we look at the daily changelog, which is consistently updated and displayed prominently on the project’s homepage, but we have nice sources of info such as undeadly, and mailing lists that are very public. I have no idea how this compares to NetBSD, so I’m not trying to slag them, just mentioning that it’s a selling point for an OS.
If any BSD could improve its communicating with users, IMO, it is FreeBSD. Again, this is an outsider’s perspective, but their webpage’s news section is not updated as often as you’d expect from such a large project.
FreeBSD have many blogs and subprojects https://wiki.freebsd.org/, http://blogs.freebsdish.org/, http://www.freshports.org/ and more. Although official news would not prevent :)
I wish all the BSDs that aren’t DragonFly would go to Git, for the entirely selfish reason that having the first line as the commit message subject is much, much more helpful when looking through a lot of messages for interesting stuff.
It’s a lot easier to pick out worthwhile posting material that way.
All being said, NetBSD is still the safe choice for a life support system.