NetBSD

NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was forked. It continues to be actively developed and is available for many platforms, including servers, desktops, handheld devices, and embedded systems. The NetBSD project focuses on code clarity, careful design, and portability across many computer architectures. Its source code is publicly available and permissively licensed. NetBSD supports over 59 hardware platforms across 16 instruction set architectures, ranging from VAX minicomputers and vintage home computers to modern ARM-based systems, Raspberry Pis, and RISC-V hardware. Portability is assisted by a hardware abstraction layer that separates machine-independent and machine-dependent driver components, allowing a single driver to operate on multiple platforms. The pkgsrc package collection, introduced with NetBSD 1.3 in 1998, provides more than 29,000 third-party software packages and has been adopted by other operating systems including SmartOS and Minix 3. The operating system is developed by the NetBSD Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that holds the project's intellectual property and trademarks. The latest stable release is NetBSD 11.0 (30 July 2026).