This is spot on. When you hear NetBSD developers arguing about proposals (or commits, ex post facto, like here), there is often mention of "users". But these are mostly fictional.
I think it's safe to say most NetBSD users are comfortable working with C.
I reckon it's not much different with OpenBSD: most changes they make are for the benefit of the developers themselves, to suit personal preferences, than for the benefit of other "users". (And that's perfectly acceptable, I think.) Of course, these changes can benefit users beyond simply those who make them and those who approve them, but those users are not the ones driving the changes.
This is spot on. When you hear NetBSD developers arguing about proposals (or commits, ex post facto, like here), there is often mention of "users". But these are mostly fictional.
I think this is true of much open source software. Just for the sake of example, a few years ago the Gnome devs removed some printer config options because they decided the "users" didn't need so many options. It's not that Gnome doesn't have users, but the developers seemed to have some notion of a type of user that didn't really exist.
I think more often than not, fictional users are used as justification for the addition of some nice-to-have feature, but of course I'm just speculating.
Novice developers should not be writing drivers in any language. If you don't have a C background, you're not going to be able to contribute much code to any OS. Besides config files and scripts, NetBSD is nearly 100% C.
If you really want to get into OS programming, I recommend you start with "Computer Architecture" by Hennessy & Patterson along with a course in C programming.
"Novice developers should not be writing drivers in any language."
Well, it might not be such a bad thing to write your stuff in Lua and get the lights blinking as a way to work your way up to C and mainline device driver development. If the device drivers interest the novice programmer, let's encourage that. Its not like there aren't a ton of safeguards between the novice and getting their driver in the mainline.
This is spot on. When you hear NetBSD developers arguing about proposals (or commits, ex post facto, like here), there is often mention of "users". But these are mostly fictional.
I think it's safe to say most NetBSD users are comfortable working with C.
I reckon it's not much different with OpenBSD: most changes they make are for the benefit of the developers themselves, to suit personal preferences, than for the benefit of other "users". (And that's perfectly acceptable, I think.) Of course, these changes can benefit users beyond simply those who make them and those who approve them, but those users are not the ones driving the changes.