Hello,
On 12/20/25 09:50, Sad Clouds wrote:
> ...
is. Since the NetBSD foundation is a charitable organisation, they may
be constrained in what they can do. It would be good to have commercial
versions of "enterprise" NetBSD where users who paid for a valid license
have access to support and advanced features not available in the free
version. This can fund the development of features like ZFS and these
can later be backported to the free version once the return on
investment has been achieved.
Without significant commercial involvement, NetBSD will always lag
behind Linux and others.
I understand the motivation behind this suggestion, and I agree that
sustainable funding for development is a very real concern. However, I
would like to gently disagree with the idea that an “enterprise” version
with feature-gating is the right path for NetBSD.
From my perspective, this would be at odds with NetBSD’s DNA. NetBSD
has always been about technical clarity, coherence, and shared ownership
of the system as a whole. Introducing paid-only features creates a
two-class ecosystem, splits incentives, and ultimately weakens exactly
the qualities that make NetBSD attractive in the first place.
What also makes me pause a bit is that we already have counterexamples
in the BSD world. The FreeBSD Foundation is also a non-profit, yet it
recently received substantial public funding via the German Sovereign
Tech Fund to work on reproducible builds and supply-chain transparency.
That money was used to pay developers to do the work directly in the
open source codebase—no enterprise label, no feature gating, no delayed
backports. Everyone benefited immediately.
Getting to that point does require effort beyond coding: visibility,
communication, and advocacy. Funding bodies need to understand a project
before they can recognize its value. One concrete takeaway for me is
that we could do more to make NetBSD better known—not as a “lagging
cousin” of other BSDs, but as a project with its own value system and
strengths.
NetBSD offers something increasingly rare: a design-driven system with a
strong emphasis on consistency, correctness, and long-term
maintainability rather than organic growth at all costs. In some
respects, that makes it more elegant, not less—while still preserving
the core BSD traditions many of us care about.
So rather than introducing an enterprise/free split, I would personally
prefer exploring ways to attract funding that strengthens the single,
shared NetBSD codebase. That seems more aligned with both the project’s
history and its long-term health.
Best regards
Matthias
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