20 years back from today, NetBSD was initially checked into CVS. Revision 1.1 of src/Makefile was committed on March 21st 1993 on 09:45:37 by Chris Demetriou (cgd@):

% cvs log -Nr1.1 Makefile
...
revision 1.1
date: 1993/03/21 09:45:37;  author: cgd;  state: Exp;
branches:  1.1.1;
Initial revision 

Personally, I've followed NetBSD since the day in 1993 when the Amiga port popped up, which was the first platform that the newly forked operating system was ported to after its separation from BSD.

Many things have happened in the past 20 years, and a lot could be shown and told for the history books at this point. But I guess that can be done later - I'd be happy to help out with such a project if someone wants to start it, though :)

For today I'm very happy that NetBSD is available on a wide range on platforms, runs the software that I want and gives me the assurrance it will be around tomorrow and hopefully for the next 20 years, too.

Cheers, NetBSD!

Update: Jeremy Reed pointed me at his BSDnewletter posting, which gives a number of details of NetBSD's history. Recommended reading!

[Tags: history, netbsd]

The article continues to name a few of the key items that were part of the latest release, NetBSD 4.0, and the changes that were added after that, and which will be in the next major release, NetBSD 5.0. Also, there are a number of roadmaps for the areas of networking, storage, the NetBSD operating system core, and virtualization.

See Alistair Crooks' announcement for all the details!

[Tags: netbsd]

``Charles had been asked to sign a developer's agreement, as had every other NetBSD developer, and he was unwilling to do that.

For almost 18 months prior to that, Charles's ssh access to all of the project machines had been suspended, as described in the mail below which I sent to an internal project list. The reason for the insistence on a completed developer's agreement for people with write access to the repositories is hopefully apparent.''

So in retrospect, it can be said that Charles' original mail was more of a frustrated reaction on the direction in which the NetBSD project went, and that it was not in the way of (one of) the original project founders.

Instead, in order to be able to protect the NetBSD project's assets, The NetBSD Foundation (TNF) was founded to claim copyrights and trademarks, to protect the NetBSD code base, the NetBSD project machines and in effect also the NetBSD userbase from ill meaning. NetBSD developers are members of TNF and have to sign developer agreements to ensure they know what they can and can not do -- the NetBSD Foundation Membership Agreement can be found at [4].

While a lot can still be said about the state of NetBSD, Alistair Crooks continues to point out the important part that eventually counts:

``As far as the "NetBSD is dead" thread - if anyone thinks that, they have obviously not read source-changes or pkgsrc-changes just recently.''

[1] http://mail-index.NetBSD.org/netbsd-users/2006/08/30/0016.html
[2] http://mail-index.NetBSD.org/netbsd-announce/2006/09/01/0000.html
[3] http://mail-index.NetBSD.org/netbsd-advocacy/2007/04/18/0000.html
[4] http://www.NetBSD.org/developers/agreement.txt

[Tags: netbsd, tnf]

$ cd /usr/src
$ cvs log Makefile
RCS file: /cvsroot/src/Makefile,v 
...
revision 1.1
date: 1993/03/21 09:45:37;  author: cgd;  state: Exp;
branches:  1.1.1;
Initial revision
...

$ date
Wed Mar 21 10:11:08 CET 2007 

Cheer, dance, party!

[Tags: netbsd]

Update #1: RC5 was tagged shortly after detecting a few more buggos. Again, see src/doc/CHANGES-3.0 on the netbsd-3 branch for all the details!

[Tags: netbsd]

(Yeah, I'd still prefer a decent logging filesystem, but well :)

[Tags: netbsd]