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Comment by ivanbrussik | Hacker News Reader

what percent of internet servers run NetBSD?

Probably quite a low percentage however it seems to be used as the proving ground for new tech such as IPv6 and ISC seem heavily into it so it's still really important regardless of market share.

How so? I mean, why is it important? Was my first BSD system (was the only one to boot at an old compaq laptop I owned in 1999), but I don't see why would anyone use it now, since you have Free/OpenBSD which offer much more up-to-date systems, support for more architectures (RPi) etc.

Your comment above states that you'd go for Windows Server instead of NetBSD anyway... So I don't see how is this project "important".

It's important because it is the last bastion of simplicity in the UNIX world. It's open, a single cohesive system, is cleanly documented, cleanly engineered and small enough to retain knowledge on.

It's the ideal foundation to build research upon which is where standards can be developed.

Everyone has benefitted from NetBSD being around and will probably continue to for a long time yet.

OpenBSD is much simpler than NetBSD these days, but NetBSD now has rump kernels which are very interesting: http://www.netbsd.org/docs/rump/

The portability argument is laughable:

http://www.netbsd.org/about/portability.html

http://www.netbsd.org/ports/

Not sure where you're getting your information..

http://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/raspberry_pi/

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