NetBSD Makes Plea for 'Cold, Hard Cash'

daria42 writes "NetBSD has e-mailed its user community asking for donations. "There are many upgrades we'd like to make to the NetBSD project infrastructure," said the e-mail, "but which we cannot make because, to be blunt, our project is poor. Not poor in innovation nor poor in developer resources nor poor in features -- poor in cold, hard cash, the kind we need to buy hardware that would let us better serve our users." The e-mail pointed out while sister projects OpenBSD and FreeBSD had received tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, NetBSD had up until now been embarrassed to ask its users for money."

Trouble is, the VAX port is going nowhere

[Anonymous Coward]

The GCC compiler has recently dropped support for the VAX architecture, so unfortunately, I'm stuck at the current version and probably will stay there until 2038.

(and no, don't mod me as "funny"...I have a bunch of VAX systems and I run NetBSD on them)

TDz.

Re:Trouble is, the VAX port is going nowhere

[Anonymous Coward]

I am unfamiliar with all this, my understanding is the VAX is an old arch and isn't that fast the cases also look fair big from a couple of googles.

In terms of cubic centimeter volume of the cases and power consumption - what are *your* personal reasons for still having a "bunch of VAX systems". Nostaligia?

I mean, I am serious, if you can get a A64 3000+ to outperform them (I dunno if it can, but I assume so, moores law vs how old they are) and put it in a nice case and have low power consumption at a very reasonable cost... what are you reasons for keeping them?

I can only think of nostaligia or you are dirt poor, but elighten me if there are other reasons.

Re:Diversification is needed

[Gary W. Longsine]

Seriously though, I bet some sexy PG pics on t-shirts and coffee mugs, sold via something like Cafe Press might work. A hot babe with one of those skimpy little halloween costumes that get trotted out on halloween should do the trick -- little satin horns, red bikini, tail, pitchfork, and a smile.

There is apparently no shortage of sexy she-devil costumes [google.com].

If NetBSD doesn't jump on this chance, some other open source project will, undoubtedly.

Re:Trouble is, the VAX port is going nowhere

[Gendalia]

I just asked one of the maintainers and he said that a.out support has been dropped, but that vax support itself has not been dropped.

Seriously tho

[william_w_bush]

If you have are an admin, or your company uses linux or anything please donate. So much of the cross-architecture, and device driver support for the BSD's and linux comes from NetBSD you'd be surprised. I gave 50 just cause I remember back in the day when they were the only group to support my old SGI Indigo2, and they still lead in most wierd architecture support.

If you have a wierd or rare architecture they probably support it, or have something that can be hacked to work, and that kind of resourcefulness is why we aren't all running windows 3.3, TPM Borg edition.