Just to show how good OpenBSD's manuals are, look at those:<p><a href="http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=strncpy" rel="nofollow">http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=strncpy</a><p><a href="http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=malloc" rel="nofollow">http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=malloc</a><p>They don't just explain what strncpy & malloc do. They also explain how to use these functions correctly and securely. With examples.<p>Compare that to glibc's manuals (pretty typical of what you can find under Linux):<p><a href="http://linux.die.net/man/3/malloc" rel="nofollow">http://linux.die.net/man/3/malloc</a><p><a href="http://linux.die.net/man/3/strncpy" rel="nofollow">http://linux.die.net/man/3/strncpy</a><p>Clearly OpenBSD folks care.
My play machine runs OpenBSD. I can't say enough good things about it. If you want a (very) secure machine which runs on a slew of different platforms, has an awesome package tree, and a solid developer base of pragmatic and opinionated unix nerds... look no further.
OpenBSD is a fine operating system. In the words of Neal Stephenson: "Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"
Buy the CD, install it on an old machine and play with it over a weekend. OpenBSD has some unique and fantastic features.. everything from PF (its firewall) to spamd (Spam trapping daemon).<p>It's also nice to use a finely crafted piece of software that doesn't feel like it has been bolted together haphazardly (like your typical Linux distro).
It's great to see this post on Hacker News by the way.<p>I think the OpenBSD project encompasses a lot of the values that a majority of the users on this site would agree with.
I don't use OpenBSD - but I plan to some day, and I really like their attitude. Specifically, it is very refreshing to see a piece of software where "Quality is the #1 goal, it takes a back seat to NOTHING else."
I don't want to be killed for asking this (I probably will get buried in seconds), but it's a legitimate question: isn't this precisely the reason why GPL is such a nice license for new projects?<p>If, say, vendor A, gave US$ 1 million to the OpenBSD project, vendor B could pick the improvements and incorporate in their own proprietary products for no cost, creating a competitive advantage unless the improvements are so narrow they only apply to A's products. If, however, vendor A donated the same amount to a GPL-licensed project, vendor B could not take unilateral benefit from the money invested and would have to either use the improvements from within another GPL-like product or not at all, effectively negating any competitive advantage it could acquire from A's investment.<p>I think the AT&T legal imbroglio had little to do to the comparative success of the GNU/Linux system.
I've been procrastinating on my first OpenBSD install, and this pushed me over the edge. I just bought the CD set, and I'll have a go at it this weekend (or maybe next weekend).