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.
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.