NetBSD Breaks Donation Record as AI-Averse Developers Turn to AI-Free BSD Project

Record Donations

The NetBSD project's Mastodon feed reports that it received a record 120 donations last month. The project collected $120,282 USD in total, completely filling up its donations target bar set at $50,000. The project stated: "Naturally, this has completely filled up our donations target bar which was set at $50,000. Time to fund some projects!"

This is a welcome contrast to the usual stories of under-funded FOSS projects and follows a visible uptick in people asking about NetBSD in FOSS Unix groups.

AI Context

The uptick in interest began after Linux creator Linus Torvalds said in July that Linux was not an anti-AI project. The following month, the Debian project polled its developers on AI use and chose to permit AI-generated contributions. The Ubuntu Summit was heavily AI-flavored, and Red Hat Global Engineering sent out a memo about transitioning to an Agentic Software Development Lifecycle.

NetBSD, by contrast, banned AI-generated code back in 2024, just a month after the project celebrated its 30th anniversary. Its commit guidelines state: "Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as GitHub/Microsoft's Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta's Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core."

BSD Landscape and Mainstream Open Source

The Open Source Summit Europe in Prague reflected the tendencies of the increasingly mainstream open-source world. The single most dominant theme in the talks, materials, stands, and T-shirts was AI. No BSDs were mentioned at all at the event, and when NetBSD was mentioned, some attendees from Let's Encrypt looked puzzled.

Within the BSD world, the differences between the various projects are fairly clear. NetBSD is minimal, highly portable, and takes great pride in its very friendly, welcoming community. Its slogan is "Of course it runs NetBSD." OpenBSD focuses on security and its project lead Theo de Raadt has said it cannot accept AI-generated code because any submitter lacks the right to place a license on it, as it is impossible to trace which humans originally wrote any code that LLMs regurgitate. FreeBSD is the largest of the BSDs, with its own distros including GhostBSD and MidnightBSD, plus the recently revived experimental NextBSD. Its central committee has been debating whether to permit AI-generated code for over a year with no consensus reached. Dragonfly BSD is experimenting with kernel and filesystem design and has not made any statement for or against LLM code generation.

Recent releases have shifted the landscape: FreeBSD 15 dropped 32-bit x86 and 32-bit POWER support, Debian 13 dropped x86-32 and MIPS CPU support, and RHEL 10 demands x86-64-v3, forcing CERN to start switching to Debian.

NetBSD's AI-free position seems to be serving it well. As the Linux world goes pro-AI, some of the AI-averse are turning to this explicitly AI-free project, and the donations reflect that shift.

Sources: Theregister