Crowding out OpenBSD

" OpenBSD simply does not have enough developers to influence the direction of projects like X.org, GNOME, or KDE. "<p>I, and several of my colleagues, have been running dozens of OpenBSD systems for about 10+ years. In particularly, OpenBSD had an elegant IPv6 Firewall/failover mechanism about 5 years before Cisco finally decided to port Active/Failover to their ASA platform - so we were forced through sheer necessity to deploy OpenBSD in what was otherwise an all Cisco shop. Further to that, OpenBSD's ability to track several hundred thousand shortlived UDP sessions state fully on inexpensive x86 systems saved us several 10s of thousands of dollars over the equivalent Cisco systems.<p>At one point, all of HPs internal infrastructure was transitioned off of the Cisco ASA onto OpenBSD firewalls - OpenBSD is reliable, and industrial.<p>Needless to say, I'm a fan of OpenBSD and consider it critical to the various infrastructures that we deploy.<p>I've never been tempted (nor, to my knowledge, have my colleagues) to even consider installing X-Windows on an OpenBSD system. So the entire thesis of this article is beyond silly to me.

I am very disappointed by this article, since it in my opinion clearly misrepresents the things Marc Espie said:<p>If you look at his original:<p>-) <i>"Those vendors say "we're not in the distribution business, distribution problems will be handled by OS vendors. We can break compatibility to advance, and not think about it, this is not a problem." [...]</i><p><i>"This is a mindset we need to fight, and this has to be a grass-roots movement.</i>"<p>-) <i>"in some cases, you even have some people, who are PAID by some vendors, agressively pushing GRATUITOUS, non compatible changes. I won't say names, but you guys can fill the blanks in.</i>"<p>-) <i>"Either you're a modern linux with pulseaudio and pam and systemd, or you're dying.</i>"<p>Source: <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/524608/" rel="nofollow">https://lwn.net/Articles/524608/</a><p>Not being a BSD guy myself, but being a fan of minimalistic linux systems, being a fan of keeping dependencies low, of not necessarily throwing out software that has done it's job for 10+ years to just get the newest gadget in, i actually think he's right with many things he says.

I'm surprised that nobody has brought up the 5.2 song[1]. The 5.2 song is about these problems with upstream and confusing Linux for posix, the "liner notes" for <i>"Aquarela do Linux!"</i>:<p><i>"Just as the original song professed its love for Brazil, "World, you'll love my Linux" is the passionate call of an idealistic dreamer who can't bear the thought of software that will only run under Windows, and yet loves the situation with software that will only run under particular Linux distributions. This problem has proliferated itself into the standards bodies, with Posix adopting Linuxisms ahead of any other variant of Unix.<p>Posix and Unix have made it where you can write reasonably portable software and have it compile and run across a multitude of platforms. Now this seems to be changing as the love for Linux drives the standards bodies into accepting everything Linux, good and bad.<p>We also are faced with groups writing software that only works with particular distributions of Linux. From this we get software that not only isn't very portable, but often not particularly stable. Our idealistic dreamer in the song loves running one, or more than one distribution of Linux for a particular purpose. Unfortunately, the rest of us are left with the unattractive choice of doing the same, or relying on herculean efforts to port software that is being actively developed in a way to discourage porting it to other platforms."</i><p>[1] <a href="http://openbsd.org/lyrics.html#52" rel="nofollow">http://openbsd.org/lyrics.html#52</a>

Part of the reason Linux has such a huge number of devs is because the community is welcoming and forgiving of noobs.<p>OpenBSD was my first unix, and as much as I tried to contribute, I didn't last through their toxic developer community long enough to be a useful contributor.<p>This high bar is required to keep the system as secure as they want, but the trade off means scaring off devs, which is the real core of the bsd/Linux divide.

OpenBSD isn't for desktop, it is a small networked server. (And what modern X environments you're talking about without nvidia/radeon drivers and accelerated OpenGL?)<p>I have built a firewall from an old slow 1U Sun Netra "server" with OpenBSD/spark64 and it is still in production after almost 7 years? Why? Because punks cannot hack it with Linux/x86 exploits.) Because it has enough resources to be a gateway (firewall, openvpn, secondary dns, etc.)<p>Well, nowadays you anyone could buy a $50 box with linux flashed inside to do some fire-walling and some routing, and the art of making BSD-based gateways and servers almost disappeared.<p>Nevertheless OpenBSD is a multi-platform network server, secure and stable, in the first place. Modern X11 is irrelevant.<p>btw, they finally implemented kernel pthreads in the last release, so, our postgres...))

The article suggests OpenBSD lacks support for newer hardware. Not sure if that's true today, or in certain categories (graphics cards?).<p>But, credit where credit is due: Around 2005-6, I chose to run OpenBSD on my desktop computer at home because its support for wireless network interfaces was far and above better than Linux or any other open source OS. At that time, getting on my home network with Linux was a complete no-go, while OpenBSD worked flawlessly out of the box.<p>At that time there were several OpenBSD devs doing the hard, ugly work of reverse-engineering the crappy binary blobs that were accepted in mainstream Linux distros (and FreeBSD), and instead turning out reliable, open-source drivers.<p>Today I find Linux more practical to run on my laptop, but I really hope OpenBSD never goes anywhere. We need different approaches like theirs. (Actually, the non-availability of Flash was a big reason I switched back to Linux, and that's becoming less of an issue with HTML5...)

Let me guess, this is about Gnome3 and systemd (and other poetteringisms)? I think that maybe dropping Gnome3 and focusing on alternate desktops would be the way to ensure survival. Trying to keep up with Gnome3 is an uphill battle. And in smaller projects BSD developers would have proportionally larger voice.

It would be nice if there was a unified driver model that the OS developers could easily add a wrapper level to accomodate there needs. If hardware companies had full open source drivers then this would be less of an issue, this is not the rosey situation we have and in many area's we have binary blobs. Binary blobs targeted at an OS and CPU.<p>Now with the advent of ARM, the sence to have open source drivers becomes more palatable and hopefully sainer. More options for your hardware to run upon and be sold upon is more sales. If you open source things and let the community help then they help and you get more win win. It is the area's were companies want to protect IP they have above and beyond the patent protection. There are cases if they are using others IP in there product which they pay to use that prevents them from releaseing the source and at best able to do binary blobs. If we had binary blobs that you could add your own wrapper around and accomodate a OS's needs, then you would still have more platforms than not open to you.<p>But this realy is mostly down to fancy networking cards, graphics cards and anything with a radio in it mostly. But there are always options and with the right purchaseing you can vote with your money. Support the ability to change your OS even if you don't plan on it today, think of the children :).

Nonsensical article: In the game of big numbers Linux is almost irrelevant in the Desktop as well, but it is winning like crazy in the server market, where <i>BSD could compete.<p>So </i>BSD is being marginalized for other reasons, not desktop software.

Previous discussion: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4772133" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4772133</a> (104 comments).<p>The lwn article here is pretty vacuous.<p>edit: I'm happy to see some people in this thread already coming to OpenBSD's defense. It is really really fine software, built by a team of really smart people. If you haven't donated to the project, or at least bought one of their CD sets, please do. It does help.

&#62; BSD is a place where developers can experiment with different approaches to kernel design, filesystems, packaging systems, and more.<p>that is most certainly true, but I am wondering, has any of the work done in BSDs in recent years influenced linux development in any way?

If Linux developers were to adhere to the POSIX standard, would compatibility be an issue?