Research carried out using NetBSD

I wonder if the popularity of NetBSD for research has to do with how easy it is to compile a version of NetBSD with favorable licenses.

You can opt to build it yourself and exclude anything that is not 2-clause BSD licensed, as some drivers and such are if I recall correctly.

Microsoft brought up an new processor[0][1][2] with NetBSD...

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=524...

[1] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/emips/

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/an-onli...

How usable are the BSDs as a GUI daily driver? Like 99% of Linux applications work out of the box or more like 50%?

With new CVEs being discovered in ancient bedrock code on the daily, it seems prudent to switch to a NetBSD/OpenBSD/Qubes system for the next few years until some vulnerabilities might get smoothed over.