Linus takes a jab

[Tsuroerusu]

Did you not read the rest of my post?

Yes. I was only responding to one point, though. You said Linus' argument was completely unfounded. There IS a foundation for this argument. You have made an extreme exaggeration.

(Emphasis is mine)
OK, fair enough, I just don't see it, please enlighten me.

I don't know about FreeBSD, but if you think OpenBSD is "fighting so hard to differentiate themselves in a narrow market" you're seriously mistaken. If OpenBSD were really "competing" with GNU/Linux for market share, why do you think they have this big big focus on software freedom?

Again you miss the point. I don't think the BSDs compete with Linux so much as they compete with each other. The BSD market is pretty narrow and they're all trying to find a niche. I'm not arguing whether that's bad or good, but I do think it's happening. That could lead people to think they're ignoring the bigger picture.

That's actually not how the BSD community is organized, OpenBSD honestly doesn't care about competing with FreeBSD or NetBSD. They really don't, and neither are they trying to find a niche, they make the OS for themselves basically. If they are trying hard to compete, why do you think OpenBSD constantly makes decisions that totally contradict what most people might want. They have not had WPA support until recently, they still doesn't support 3D acceleration (Although that is now being worked on). FreeBSD has had both for years. OpenBSD doesn't include proprietary drivers, FreeBSD and NetBSD does. OpenBSD also performs poorly, to be frank and honest, compared to GNU/Linux and FreeBSD, and they deliberately do that, they don't do a lot of performance, they focus more on producing correct code and security.

[Gomer_X]

OpenBSD also performs poorly, to be frank and honest, compared to GNU/Linux and FreeBSD, and they deliberately do that, they don't do a lot of performance, they focus more on producing correct code and security.

There you go. You have made my point.

[Tsuroerusu]

OpenBSD also performs poorly, to be frank and honest, compared to GNU/Linux and FreeBSD, and they deliberately do that, they don't do a lot of performance, they focus more on producing correct code and security.

There you go. You have made my point.

Well, I guess you and I simply have different views on the BSDs, you seem to believe that they have some big rivalry going on, which I don't see, as they each specialize on something they WANT TO DO, not really to differentiate themselves. Look at history. FreeBSD wanted to focus on ease of use and the x86 architecture. NetBSD wanted to keep the sort of university spirit of research and make the system small, run on lots of platforms etc. OpenBSD came about purely because of a dispute within NetBSD. And the reason for the name OpenBSD, was because it had a public CVS repo, which pretty much no other project did at the time, as far as I have heard. I have listened to like 20 or 30 interviews with OpenBSD developers, and I conclude that they create the OS for themselves, not to compete with each other. "Most of us stay involved with the project, because it's fun and it works for us" - Bob Beck on bsdtalk.

I give up trying to explain it to you, if the above still wasn't good enough. And I still say that Linus' statement was unfounded and based on pure ignorance. Let me reiterate:

Security people are often the black-and-white kind of people that I can't stand. 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.

If you go to www.openbsd.org, you will find the following RIGHT ON THE DARN FRONT PAGE!

Our efforts emphasize portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptography.

And if you go to the security page, they explain their methods even further:

We are not so much looking for security holes, as we are looking for basic software bugs, and if years later someone discovers the problem used to be a security issue, and we fixed it because it was just a bug, well, all the better.

I don't see how that doesn't simply totally invalidate Linus' statements, because what he claims OpenBSD does is completely the opposite of what they actually do.

[Patrick]

More on this:
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/20046/53/