> Im going to chime in here a second, even though it probably is not my
> place.
>
> I am not a network guru, or computer wizard. I have made a living for
> the last 5 years by networking. We use nothing but OpenBSD routers for
this.
> With the help of the community I have been able to learn and market a
> superb firewall/router for clients. Some versions are many years old
> and still out there running for that client. Try doing that with
> Cisco.... (lol) we will not go into the differences there....
> Kudos to this community for the help they provide...You show up in a
> forum or community and complain, whine and bitch about things that
> have to do with the community or project. Why do you waste your time
> here and the leaders of this forum. NOBODY is making you use OpenBSD
> and NOBODY wants to hear the bashing of their community within the
> city limits.
> This might sound harsh but people that go into a community or group
> and start whining should be shot. This is the problem with America
> today. One person is moving into a city and trying to make that city
> conform to that one person's ways and beliefs.... Seems to me the city
> should be able to shoot that person.
> What you are doing is just like if I was to go into Cisco Forums or
> Communities and start bashing and beating on the company and leaders
> in the forum.....Winks.... Do you think they would really care....
> Humor in this is what I see, not a valid user with a valid complaint
> about anything that is worth listening to ....
>
> My two cents worth, I will not respond again to this thread.
>
> Written by a cowboy wannabe that couldn’t make money doing it, now a
> half assed networking tech making money....

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-m...@openbsd.org [mailto:owner-m...@openbsd.org] On Behalf Of
Peter N. M. Hansteen
Sent: Sunday, October 18, 2015 6:51 AM
To: misc@openbsd.org
Subject: Re: Because Theo and various users told them that the projects
GnoBSD and Comixwall were worthless and that they weren't contributing to
OpenBSD?

On 10/17/15 15:59, français wrote:
> I always find it amusing how OpenBSD is "audited", yet there's not one
> audit report on the OpenBSD website. The closest answer I've been able
> to find on the mailing list is to review all of the CVS commit logs.
> Yeah, that's not opaque in the slightest...

I was going to let this just pass because my day is a bit overfull already,
but I guess I'm a glutton for punishment. Note that I don't have any formal
attachment to the OpenBSD project, so what follows is my opinion only,
formed by some years of interacting with the OpenBSD project as well as
other parts of the open source world.

Your choice of words is a bit curious - 'opaque' is certainly not what I
would have called providing full access to the source code with close to
real-time access to commits as they happen, in almost all cases with
informative comments for each step. A potentially valid criticism at some
level would have been to say that this provides too much detail and making
sense of the overall picture is too hard for a newcomer.

But keep in mind that OpenBSD is developed and maintained primarily for and
by its developers, who are most certainly capable of making sense of source
code and commit logs. We all get to use the system and enjoy the benefits,
but if you're looking for a high-level executive summary style document,
that's simply not something that's useful to the project itself. (Then
again, I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find that such documents have
been produced for their own internal use by organizations that were
considering implementing OpenBSD in their systems.) You will find quite a
few summaries of work done and planned at various stages in the papers and
presentations collection http://www.openbsd.org/papers/, some of them may
even be high level enough to give the less tech minded some idea of the
overall work.

And of course, by now we're looking back at a full 20 years of work, so even
a very high level executive summary would either need to be quite a few
pages or be essentially useless handwaving.

That said, if reading commit logs and source code (even via the friendly
cvsweb interface http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/) is too much
work, start with the papers and presentations at
http://www.openbsd.org/papers/.

> The bigger problem with OpenBSD is it's community. In the FreeBSD
> world, you have PC-BSD and pfsense, both of which are generally
> welcomed by the community. With OpenBSD, there were two sister
> projects that tried to target a similar audience: GnoBSD and
> Comixwall. Comixwall was the equivalent of pfsense for easy
> router/firewall management and GnoBSD was an attempt to make an
> easy-to-use desktop. Both, however, ended up shutting down after Theo
> and various users told them that their projects were worthless and that
they weren't contributing to OpenBSD.
>
> Because Theo and various users told them that their projects were
> worthless and that they weren't contributing to OpenBSD?

If OpenBSD users and developers said that these projects were useless and
that the people behind them were not contributing back to OpenBSD, maybe
that was the (possibly unpleasant to some) truth?

It's been a while since both and I can't be bothered right now to look
things up, but I can say this: I have yet to find a web interface to
firewalls adminstration that I personally found useful, and barring exotic
hardware trouble, I can get a useful desktop with OpenBSD up and running
within 20 minutes from bare metal, and it's a reasonable assumption that
most misc@ posters know enough pkg_add and package names to do the same.

So essentially the projects were packaging of something that was either
trivial or not needed (or actively harmful, depending on who you ask), and
if the people marketing these trivial efforts were seen to be unlikely to
maintain a healthy relationship to their upstream project, I would call them
useless too.

If you're doing a derivative of an open source project, keeping a sane
relationship to your upstream is is an essential part of your self
preservation. If those derivative projects were run by people who didn't see
that fairly basic fact, that's their loss, not ours.

--
Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team
http://bsdly.blogspot.com/ http://www.bsdly.net/ http://www.nuug.no/
"Remember to set the evil bit on all malicious network traffic"
delilah spamd[29949]: 85.152.224.147: disconnected after 42673 seconds.

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