FreeBSD wins because the development process is nowhere near as ego-
driven as OpenBSD's, or, for that matter, the linux kernel engineers
and the GNU project people. Or, we can look at the politics behind
distros... witness debian .vs ubuntu and the entire gentoo-board .vs
Daniel Robbins debacle.
Moreover, OpenBSD repeatedly breaks things (see 'openntp' issues, such
as <http://lists.ntp.isc.org/pipermail/questions/2004-October/002764.html
>, or their f**ked-up "openHAL" which is greed-based copyright
infringement, pure and simple), and then politicizes their 'security
features' as better, no matter what they've broken. Any real
security work by OpenBSD is quickly copied into FreeBSD and NetBSD,
and even then, OpenBSD's implementation of OpenSSH has more bugs than
other implementations, despite their "we check every line" religion.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Over?
And then there are they numerous examples of when OpenBSD doesn't have
some feature, such as Xen support, the OpenBSD community responds with
"you don't need it". See this: <http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/openbsd-misc/2007/10/24/352059
> for a recent example.
OpenBSD is what you run or work on when FreeBSD and NetBSD won't let
you have write access to their tree. Its a pit of trolls.
Linux wins at getting on new hardware faster, and supporting new
features faster (though ZFS and dtrace are effectively blocked from
linux, both are available for FreeBSD).
For my money, its FreeBSD, except where the hardware (nominally non-
x86 CPUs) isn't supported. (And yes, I've thrown good money into the
freebsd-on-arm (specifically ixp42x xscale parts)).
Technically 8.0 is HEAD, I think.
In direct response to Angela's query;
Would it be irresponsible extrapolation upon only a few data points,
to conclude that your conclusion is, that Linux has surpassed
OpenBSD,
in both speed (both network speed and development speed), and
security?
Linux is undoubtedly faster on common hardware than OpenBSD. FreeBSD
can be faster than linux though, depending on the benchmark. Instead
of focusing solely on performance, Linux afficionados should recognize
the importance of other factors such as good documentation, stability
of programming interfaces, backwards compatibility, designing for the
future, source control, and release engineering. FreeBSD produces a
high quality UNIX operating system by following these principles.
Take a look at FreeBSD subsystems like GEOM, DevFS, kqueue, and then
look at the history of their counterparts in Linux (devfs/udev,
dnotify/inotify). FreeBSD gets it right the first time, while it
takes Linux several attempts to find the right solution. This pure
'cathedral .vs bazar', and interestingly both arrive at the
destination at approximately the right time.
Perhaps ESR was wrong.
All systems can coexist and learn from each other, and I'm glad to see
that FreeBSD has continued to improve despite being overshadowed by
the growth of Linux and shouted down by the cacophony from the OpenBSD
corner.
Jim
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