The NetBSD Foundation 2003 Annual Report

On February 7th 2004, The NetBSD Foundation had its annual meeting, and here's a report on what happened in the past, what's in for the future, where we stand WRT the 2.0 release and many other things of general interest.

This report gives a general overview on what happened in NetBSD in the past year, and then goes into details from each of the groups inside NetBSD to detail status of what was, is and will be.

First thing to note was the tenth anniversary year of the NetBSD Project. Over the past ten years, hundreds of people have come to develop a world-class freely redistributable operating system, NetBSD. Other groups have done the same, but NetBSD as a project was one of the first to try, and has done a good job.

NetBSD started as a group of people who wanted to do something useful, and while most of the growth of NetBSD is spurred by similar-minded volunteers, NetBSD hasn't been limited to hobbyists. Companies have used NetBSD to build products, numerous engineers are employed building things with and based on NetBSD, and the NetBSD project helped save people a lot of time and effort, by both producing a good operating system, but also through tools like pkgsrc which help system administrators do their jobs more easily.

Before going into detail on the various subgroups, let's mention a few achievements of the NetBSD Foundation from the past year. First is that we now have an active Board of Directors, elected by members of the Foundation, i.e. developers of the NetBSD project. Along with that, policies have been put to papers to create a better decision making process in the Foundation. There's also a new Core team in place, to guide the technical direction of the project even better than before.

Another important thing to run the project is that the NetBSD Project has applied for US Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit status, and as of January 22nd 2004, the NetBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization, which will ease donations to the Foundation.

Besides project financials the Foundation has also worked successfully towards registering the “NetBSD” trademark, and a similar undergoing for registering the “pkgsrc” trademark is in process to get appropriate recognition for the work done on the pkgsrc framework and it's now more than 4,400 packages.

Great progress was made in the technical development arena, in particular the scheduler activations-based threads, the sysctl interface, better toolchain (compiler) support, Java, ports to new platforms, and a lot of work in pkgsrc, like pkgviews and buildlink.

In the future, NetBSD will continue its tradition of technical excellence by working toward the upcoming release, NetBSD 2.0, complete with all the features that users are expecting, with multiprocessor support on common hardware and high-quality threading being the two most important.

Second, it is an important point of the NetBSD project to increase the visibility of the operating system, of pkgsrc, and of the NetBSD Foundation. Everyone is welcome to publish high-quality information like articles, papers and other documentation, and participate in community events such as conferences, that help people learn about NetBSD. Getting people to know about NetBSD will help them build better products and do their jobs better and more efficiently. And it will get the NetBSD project more users, and more developers, which in turn helps NetBSD to grow and improve.

Finally, problems that might harm NetBSD in the long term have to be addressed. Management of the NetBSD Foundation, continuing the high standard of technical leadership guiding NetBSD and pkgsrc development are key issues. Licensing is also important so vendors wishing to distribute NetBSD can comply more easily.

The following sections will go into details for all the groups within the NetBSD project and their reporting of status.

Chris Demetriou reported about activities in NetBSD's project management, the NetBSD Board of Directors. The NetBSD Board of Directors gets its members elected for a period of two years. Two of the now-former board members then had their term finish at the date of the meeting, and two new members filled their position.

Former board members that led the NetBSD project through the past were Scott Reynolds and Alistair G. Crooks, and with the new board members Tracy Di Marco White and Lex Wennmacher, the new board consists of (alphabetical order):

In order to get better organization and better decision-making capabilities, Executive Committees (ECs) and Project Management Committees (PMCs) were formed.

Lex Wennmacher gave the report on the project's "human resources" department. Notable things here includes a standardized membership application procedure, including a step where NetBSD developers are formally asked for comments to be considered before making a membership offer. New developers are now required to have PGP keys which are signed by at least one current NetBSD developer on a public key server. In the past year, 20 new membership applications were processed (and accepted). A list of "active members" is established for voting and elections, and accounts of inactive developers are currently being closed.

Things currently being worked on are a new membership agreement form as well as documentation on PGP key management for developers.

The Finance Committee maintains the financial records of the foundation, pays bills, accepts and documents donations, and files financial forms. The report was given by Christos Zoulas.

The most important milestone, conversion of the Foundation to a 501(c)(3) publicly funded, non-profit organization was already mentioned above. In addition, the "NetBSD" trademark application has been published for opposition, and will soon be completed see the application for more information.

The financial status of the project is better than previous years thanks to many generous donations. In addition since the last annual meeting the number of donors increased significantly, while the amount of individual donation amounts dropped. This is a desirable change because it asserts that the NetBSD project can maintain a certain level of donations without depending on large individual contributions.

Expenses last year (2003) were:

Plans for this year (2004) include purchase of:

Everyone is welcome to keep donations coming. Donations are accepted via check or paypal. See http://www.NetBSD.org/donations/ for details.

Tracy Di Marco White works in the team of administrators who "establish guidance over and are responsible for the operation of the services and servers used to develop and distribute the products of the Foundation."

Other projects' security problems caused a reevaluation of the architecture of the NetBSD project's services. Among other things, SSH protocol 1 access as well as password based access are now disabled on all machines, and shell access to the CVS server is restricted. Software like cvs, ssh and others was upgraded numerous times to keep them up-to-date and avoid security problems.

The machines of the release engineering group were moved from New York City to the machine rack kindly provided by the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) which gives them a lot more bandwidth. A new and faster CVS server was bought, configured and installed at ISC too, and the Mail server was moved from Redback Networks to the ISC as well. There's also progress towards a standardized machine configuration based on the latest stable release of our fine operating system.

Call duties for admins is now handled by a rotation scheme, with one admin being "on call" for a week.

Plans for this year include a new console server, web, mail and admin server, moving to a ticket tracking system and getting more people involved.

Luke Mewburn talked about the Communications EC. Activities in the past year included updates on the web site about donations and the NetBSD Foundation, as well as setup of regional mailing lists, see the regional-* lists at http://www.NetBSD.org/gallery/groups.html#regionallists.

A logo design contest was announced with more than 100 submissions three weeks before the competition closes - outcome of this will be made public when the competition is closed and a new logo has been chosen.

Jan Schaumann talked about the "WWW" group, which maintains the NetBSD project's web-presence, but also acts as the first point of contact for many users by performing what might qualify as ``customer-service'' or ``tech-support'' by answering every incoming mail to www@NetBSD.org quickly, politely and of course accurately.

Many of the goals established in last year's meeting were achieved, among them are better internal documentation, updating a wide variety of documentation (e.g. building), and moving towards a better documentation framework based on XML. Ownership of the NetBSD Guide was taken and TNF licensed as well as getting it up to date - several chapters have undergone major work and corrections, several chapters have been written from scratch and been added to the NetBSD Guide. Initiative and leading this project was taken by Jay Fink.

For the coming year, the plan is to provide more accurate information for mirror maintainers (esp. for anoncvs), simplifying maintenance of ports-pages for port-master, XMLizing all documents, bringing translations of the NetBSD Guide up to date as well as improving communication with other teams.

Other issues that need addressing are the Projects Server (http://projects.NetBSD.org/), fine-tuning CVS access, improving the mailing list archives, making public keys for developers (PGP) and machines and mirrors (SSH) available online, working more tightly with developers and other teams for press releases and news announcements as well as general advocacy by making printed documentation available for trade shows, e.g. via some web shop.

Alistair G. Crooks gave this introduction to how technical development is managed. The committee for technical development is the board committee which oversees the technical development of the project. There are four Project Management Committees, or PMCs, which tech-exec oversees. These are (in no special order except importance):

This report gives an overview of past, present and future of the NetBSD Project, the NetBSD operating system, pkgsrc and the NetBSD Foundation both in general and from the perspective of each group, to give users and people interested in the NetBSD project insight into the project. Please join our mailing lists for participating in ongoing discussion, and see our web site for more information about the NetBSD project, http://www.NetBSD.org/.

Hubert Feyrer <hubertf@NetBSD.org>, Communications Executive Committee, The NetBSD Foundation