[spongle]

It's important because it is the last bastion of simplicity in the UNIX world. It's open, a single cohesive system, is cleanly documented, cleanly engineered and small enough to retain knowledge on.

It's the ideal foundation to build research upon which is where standards can be developed.

Everyone has benefitted from NetBSD being around and will probably continue to for a long time yet.

[4ad]

OpenBSD is much simpler than NetBSD these days, but NetBSD now has rump kernels which are very interesting: http://www.netbsd.org/docs/rump/