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  • [object Object]zzt@mas.to
    Oct 17, 2026, 3:04 PM

    the big men of FOSS told you that you were no good at organizing, at the messy legal bits, at licensing, at the social bits. they demanded fealty and money because they were the organizers. how could you hope to come up with a (laughably weak) document like the GPL? with 1000 variants of the BSD license? how could you get money and housing for giving (frankly universally terrible) talks for your knowledge? you were told that the only thing you were good for was your technical skill, and someone else would worry about the rest.

    none of those big men are special. all of us are organizers. all of us can do what we will with our labor. all of us have proven to be better at both organizing and technical labor than any of the big men. they keep proving it every day.

    why do we have to follow their marching orders? why do we have to act like switching operating systems is resistance?

    be impolite. be a fucking nightmare. they owe us for everything they are now.

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Replies

  • [object Object]zzt@mas.to
    Oct 17, 2026, 3:08 PM

    you think I’m a psyop? I fucking love BSD and I’d love to close my eyes and go back to tinkering with my system, on old hardware I purchased specifically to work with a specific kernel, doing nothing of value for anyone but myself

    but doing that wouldn’t fix anything, would it?

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  • [object Object]zzt@mas.to
    Oct 17, 2026, 3:09 PM

    and again if you need stability and netbsd is thiiis close to being perfect on your hardware, please don’t let me stop you from tinkering with it and contributing and making it work

    do let me stop you from pretending it’s a solution to anything but your problems on your hardware, though

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  • MaddieM4MaddieM4@raphus.social
    Oct 17, 2026, 4:47 PM

    @zzt there are parts of this I agree with pretty strongly. One nuance I want to add, and a reason I'm looking to get into NetBSD driver contribution, is that they are the only game in town for "drivers actually designed so you can use them with other kernels." So if you do need or want to switch to some other OS someday, you're less locked-in. I'm literally planning to rely on NetBSD drivers for my microkernel project in a couple years.

    It's honestly a bit damning that none of the other operating system options are trying to contribute to a driver commons.

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  • Ian McDowallimcdowall@mastodon.social
    Oct 17, 2026, 5:33 PM

    @MaddieM4 @zzt can you suggest the best way to get into NetBSD driver contribution - tutorials or ref pages for the NetBSD specifics? I've done comparable work in other OSes.
    Having just installed NetBSD on a secondary machine, the device support feels like an area that would benefit from some work.

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  • MaddieM4MaddieM4@raphus.social
    Oct 17, 2026, 5:53 PM

    @imcdowall @zzt I'm personally a bit too early in my journey to answer that beyond just doing a DuckDuckGo search and regurgitating the answer back at you, and at that point, you could honestly do better to cut out the middlewoman. Though from what I've heard, joining IRC and chatting with the maintainer team is a good first step.

    I have some intentions to figure out how to package `vim-classic` and contribute that to `pkgsrc` upstream later today, but that's just package universe stuff, a bit lower difficulty level (but lets me sort out some basic contribution stuff without the full complexity of driver dev at the same time).

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  • wfkwfk@v.st
    Oct 17, 2026, 10:53 PM

    @MaddieM4 @imcdowall @zzt l guess I'll need to dust off my irc-fu. Now that I appear to be getting more serious about investigating NetBSD for actual operational use, I'm also more seriously starting to think about what I could do to help them. Step one will be: ask.

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  • Hugo Millsdarkling@mstdn.social
    Oct 18, 2026, 3:21 PM

    @MaddieM4 @imcdowall @zzt A couple of people were asking about rump kernels on their IRC channel a few days ago. It seems like there's not much introductory documentation on the subject yet.

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  • George Bgbargoud@masto.nyc
    Oct 18, 2026, 11:07 AM

    @MaddieM4

    Oh that driver commons thing does sound very promising, enough to make me prioritize moving over now rather than putting it off.

    Time to see if NetBSD can run on my laptop, maybe I should start with the old laptop I recovered from my parents' place that just needs a screen replacement to work fine first.

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  • the esoteric programmeresoteric_programmer@social.stealthy.club
    Oct 17, 2026, 7:08 PM

    @zzt no, which is why although I know linux is now contaminated with slopware, I still won't switch to something else, because I'm dealing with enough accessibility and usability issues as it is, there are better ways to resist than switching software every couple years

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