NetBSD may have found a new role: The AI-free FOSS OS

NetBSD seems to be thriving of late: as the Linux world goes pro-AI, some of the AI-averse are turning to this explicitly AI-free project.

The NetBSD project’s Mastodon feed reports that it received a record 120 donations last month, and it has far exceeded its target:

“We received $120,282 USD in total. Naturally, this has completely filled up our donations target bar which was set at $50,000. Time to fund some projects!”

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It’s a welcome contrast to the usual stories of under-funded FOSS projects, and it follows a visible uptick in people asking about NetBSD in the FOSS Unix groups we read, ever since Emperor Penguin Torvalds said that Linux was not an anti-AI project back in July, and the following month, the Debian project polled its developers on AI use, and they chose to permit AI-generated contributions.

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This is the moderate, centrist stance. The most recent Ubuntu Summit was heavily AI-flavored. The heads of Red Hat Global Engineering sent out a memo about transitioning to an Agentic Software Development Lifecycle. But once it’s in the kernel, then no distro can totally avoid it. This stance is profoundly offputting to those who prefer hand-crafted code.

Last week, the Reg FOSS desk attended the Open Source Summit Europe in Prague. This event reflects the tendencies of the increasingly mainstream open-source world: Linux is pretty much the only OS in evidence, although many attendees tote around (and present from) MacBooks, and both Microsoft and Windows were visible. The event overlaps with Embedded Linux Conference, so the Zephyr RTOS was also visible on some robots and other gadgets.

The Open Source Summit gives the overall impression that Linux is the only general-purpose FOSS OS. We saw no mention at all of any of the BSDs; indeed, when we mentioned NetBSD, some of the folks from Let’s Encrypt looked puzzled and asked us “What’s ‘net bee ess dee’?” Sadly, this is probably a reasonably fair representation of its presence at the event and in the FOSS mainstream. For us, the single most dominant theme in the talks, the materials, the stands, and even the T-shirts was AI. It’s everywhere, and every exhibitor was keen to talk about how they’re using AI, deploying AI, scaling AI, or managing AI.

The louder the noise about AI gets, the stronger grows the aversion of those of us who actively wish to avoid it. The NetBSD project, on the other hand, came out early and strongly: it banned AI-generated code back in 2024, just a month after the project celebrated its 30th anniversary.

This vulture attended the project’s talk at that year’s FOSDEM: NetBSD 10: Thirty years, still going strong!. As ever, the question of differentiation between the BSDs, and between Linux and the BSDs, came up.

NetBSD’s slogan is “Of course it runs NetBSD,” but in 2024, its ubiquity was looking threatened: Linux is comparable, and FreeBSD boast close integration with ZFS, Linux-compatible Podman containers, and more.

The following year, though, FreeBSD 15 appeared, dropping support for 32-bit x86 (and 32-bit POWER). Debian 13 dropped x86-32 too, as well as MIPS CPU support. That year, the RHEL 10 release went further: it not only requires 64-bit x86, it demands x86-64-v3. This cut off so many older machines, it forced CERN to start switching to Debian.

From 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. We can personally attest to this: in the course of our review of NetBSD 11, we tried to install the veteran CDE desktop. We couldn’t get it working, but the folks on the NetBSD mailing list tried very hard indeed to help.

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Although it also has very broad platform support, OpenBSD’s focus is on security, to the extent of dropping the entire Bluetooth subsystem because it didn’t measure up. Its community is far less tolerant: indeed, when this vulture’s latest OpenBSD review was posted on the OpenBSD sub-Reddit, we were banned from the group for pointing out errors in their negative assessments of a very positive article.

OpenBSD project lead Theo de Raadt has said it cannot accept AI-generated code: any submitter lacks the right to place a license on it, because it’s impossible to trace which humans originally wrote any code that LLMs regurgitate. However, this guideline seems permeable: the tmux app, the terminal multiplexer included in OpenBSD, has already accepted AI-assisted changes. We asked de Raadt for official comment on this and he declined. 

FreeBSD is the 362.87 kg gorilla of the BSDs, to the extent that the mainline OS has its own distros, such as GhostBSD, plus MidnightBSD. There’s also the recently-revived experimental NextBSD, and a couple of NAS distros. There’s a live OS called NomadBSD too, although we had little success with this.

However, FreeBSD’s central committee has been debating whether to permit AI-generated code for over a year now: we first reported on it in September 2025, and there’s still no consensus. We are sure there is a large helping of “AI is just a tool”, and we suspect side-dishes of “AI is here to stay” and “don’t get left behind.” If anyone dares point out failings, doubtless they’re using the wrong model, or not prompting it correctly.

NetBSD’s position is clear:

“Do not commit tainted code to the repository.

“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.”

So far, this seems to be serving it well. If as a result, it remains relatively tiny and minimal, and gets left behind by the AI wave, we plan to be right there with it. Long may the project continue.

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Bootnote

We won’t wish to omit anyone. There is another BSD: Dragonfly BSD, which is experimenting with the kernel and filesystem design. We gave version 6.4 a spin in 2023 and since then there have been only two minor point releases: version 6.4.2 was nearly a year and a half ago, although development is still active. We are not aware that the project has made any statement for or against LLM code generation. Perhaps it should. ®