"This project is dead due to a lack of interest from users."
Do they really mean "lack of interest from other developers"?
They shouldn't be doing it for users, they should be doing it for themselves, and to their credit, I think that's often why they do what they do. They have more common sense than the usual. That's why their work is so good. (It's also because they have more of a cathedral-like structure, and not just with respect to the kernel.)
Who are these "users" we need interest from? How do we measure interest? Among OS's NetBSD's user base (non-corporate) is very small.
This developer chose the Linux kernel not to please users by making the "popular choice" or because it is necessarily the easiest to work with. As the blurb says, it's a matter of driver support.
In the case of the NetBSD project, users and developers were the same people, and there wasn't much interest.
When looking for people with the necessary skills to contribute, you'll find that the majority qualified individuals are Mac OS X kernel/systems engineers, who already have Apple hardware, and don't have any particular need to support an alternative clone of their existing target platform.
This was certainly the case with the NetBSD project. When it was contemporary, I kept tabs on it, but never bothered to contribute -- Mac OS X worked fine for me.
Revisiting the problem space now, my development time would be better spent working on the open source alternatives (such as Android), rather than attempting to clone Apple's stack. It's just too big. Personally I work with Android on OMAP4 hardware.
Palm-sized "UNIX". A true opens source "UNIX phone". No company-controlled virtual machines or high level GUI frameworks. Lower complexity, less bloat, same communication functionality.
Any chance you could add a database description, e.g., the date range of coverage?
"This database covers all HN content from YYYY-DD-MM to YYYY-DD-MM." Something like that. A user might wonder: What is the earliest content? How frequently does it update? Etc.
If this is already documented somewhere my apologies for not being able to find it.
"This project is dead due to a lack of interest from users."
Do they really mean "lack of interest from other developers"?
They shouldn't be doing it for users, they should be doing it for themselves, and to their credit, I think that's often why they do what they do. They have more common sense than the usual. That's why their work is so good. (It's also because they have more of a cathedral-like structure, and not just with respect to the kernel.)
Who are these "users" we need interest from? How do we measure interest? Among OS's NetBSD's user base (non-corporate) is very small.
This developer chose the Linux kernel not to please users by making the "popular choice" or because it is necessarily the easiest to work with. As the blurb says, it's a matter of driver support.
Yes, Godspeed.