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"I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them." - Linus Torvalds

http://www.openbsd.org/goals.html - OpenBSD goals (security is #3).

I still think it was a cheap shot and not representative of the project. Goal #2 seems to get a lot more play in heat from the OpenBSD project.



Linus likes to run his mouth about things he doesn't know, and unfortunately, people listen.

OpenBSD is great because of everyone's obsessive focus on quality. This means fixing bugs (all security exploits are bugs), providing clean interfaces, and keeping garbage out of the system.

Linux development tends to be a lot more "pragmatic," which in practice means trying to hide bugs (http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2008/Jul/276), being ok with providing a crapload of weird, incompatible, non-unixy interfaces to do things (compare Linux wireless configuration vs. OpenBSD's ifconfig), including binary blob garbage with the kernel, and relying on bloatware like Gnome.


I must say that Linux managed to beat them at goal #1 ("including the ability to look at CVS tree changes directly") by using git instead of CVS.


I don't think choice of git over CVS really has anything to do with the goal or history of why it is a goal.


git is easier to use than CVS and more practical because of its speed and distributed nature. Add the (controversial) topic branches to the mix and you have an easy way to contribute the project or make your own custom fork.

Sure if you look just at the source code, I agree that the one for OpenBSD looks better than the one for Linux.




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