The NetBSD Project celebrates its 15th anniversary!
The Internet, March 20 -- This week marks the fifteenth anniversary of

the beginning of development of the NetBSD Operating System, one of

the oldest actively maintained, freely-available operating systems.

NetBSD runs on everything from embedded systems to desktop

workstations, from handhelds to big-iron servers, and is developed by

the NetBSD Project - http://www.NetBSD.org/ - one of the first Open

Source projects.
The first commits were made to the NetBSD source code repository on

March 21, 1993, and the first release of the NetBSD Operating System,

NetBSD 0.8, was announced on USENET shortly thereafter.  Throughout

the past fifteen years, NetBSD has increased the portability and security

of the 4.4BSD operating system on which NetBSD was based, and added

support for new processor and system families, while enhancing the

system's performance to such an extent that NetBSD has become known as

the most portable operating system in the world. Innovations in the

storage, networking and virtualization arena have been added, and much

work has been done recently on performance, especially with multi-core

and multi-threaded machines in mind.
NetBSD 4.0, the latest release, includes support for most major

current processor architectures, including x86, x86_64, SPARC,

ARM, M68K, MIPS, PowerPC, and SH, as well as several legacy processor

architectures.  It supports 13 different system architectures.
The next major release, NetBSD 5.0, will continue the tradition of the

last fifteen years by providing additional features and hardware

support while maintaining the stability and performance that users

have come to expect from NetBSD.  NetBSD 5.0 will include a rewritten

threading implementation based on a 1:1 threading model, support for

different scheduler implementations, and support for dom0 ("host") and

domU ("guest") domains for both Xen2 and Xen3 virtualization, as well

as PAE domU support, a new power management framework, iSCSI target

and initiator support, and file system improvements.  It will support

over fifty platforms, including support for symmetric

multiprocessing (SMP) on x86, Alpha, and SPARC systems, on

PowerPC-based Macintoshes, and even on VAXen.
The NetBSD project and its developers are proud of its operating

system, and would like to share its development plans.  A number of

roadmaps for future development covering storage, networking,

virtualization and the system itself have been developed, and can be

found in:
    http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/doc/roadmaps/networking

    http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/doc/roadmaps/storage

    http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/doc/roadmaps/system

    http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/doc/roadmaps/virtual...
Code from NetBSD has been included in countless other projects, Open

Source and otherwise.  It has been used in research and education as

well as in commercial products.  Literally thousands of third-party

applications have been made available for use under NetBSD through the

use of ``pkgsrc,'' the NetBSD Packages Collection.  Keeping with

NetBSD's goal of portability, pkgsrc also supports numerous other

operating systems, thereby allowing consistent installation and

management of third-party software across multiple platforms.
Birthday celebrations will be listed on 
   http://www.NetBSD.org/gallery/events/index.html
so if you plan to hold a NetBSD birthday party and would like to list

its details on that site, please send an email to www@NetBSD.org

All pictures, party reports and other feedback would be gratefully

received.
For more information on the NetBSD project, please visit the NetBSD

Project home page at http://www.NetBSD.org/ or contact www@NetBSD.org.

In addition, selected links to more information are provided below.
NetBSD Project home page:

    http://www.NetBSD.org/
The NetBSD 4.0 release:

    http://www.NetBSD.org/releases/formal-4/NetBSD-4.0.html
pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection:

    http://www.NetBSD.org/docs/software/packages.html

    http://www.pkgsrc.org/
Platforms supported by NetBSD:

    http://www.NetBSD.org/ports/
Products and projects using NetBSD:

    http://www.NetBSD.org/gallery/products.html

    http://www.NetBSD.org/gallery/research.html
The first commit, and the NetBSD 0.8 release announcement:

    http://cvsweb.NetBSD.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/Makefile

    ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/release/NetBSD/NetBSD-0.8
NetBSD release history and the BSD family tree:

    http://www.NetBSD.org/about/history.html

    http://cvsweb.NetBSD.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/share/misc/bsd-family-tree
``NetBSD'' and ``pkgsrc'' are trademarks of The NetBSD Foundation,

Inc.  All other trademarks referred to herein are the property of

their respective owners.