Jim Ray wrote:
OpenBSD is much more centered on security, being very svelte, and very much forging it's own way. FreeBSD by comparison, is more "Linux-like" in that it has both a larger developer and user-base, has better hardware / driver support, and adapts a fair bit of technology incubated in OpenBSD. Good examples of things brought out from OpenBSD into the rest of *NIX world include OpenSSH and OpenSSL, the PF firewall and ALTQ traffic shaping (in FreeBSD 5.x), and numerous other goodies. As Marcus (?) was pointing out the other day, OpenBSD folks tend to be a little more crotchety and disgruntled, and more in-your-face about their politics and policies, but that's generally true of all of the BSD world in comparison to the Linux world. The camps are both indicative of their leaders, with Linus the easy-going centrist leading the Linux camp, and at the opposite extreme is Theo de Raadt leading the OpenBSD crowd. A google on either one of these charismatic characters will turn up plenty of examples. By contrast, FreeBSD is lead by a team of people, with no central figure that I'm aware of, that all slowly and methodically plug out better code, and continuous revisions. Not to say that both OpenBSD and Linux don't have equally diverse developers, just that they have their "figure heads" that symbolise their general slant a little better. You might could interject at this point that RMS symbolises another whole slant of the Linux community, but I'll leave that part of the discussion to the side. :)That sounds like how I have run my firewall machine for quite some time.
First under Linux and now ( recently ) OpenBSD
[Jim Ray sez:] ever compared OpenBSD to FreeBSD? I'm curious.
I suppose in summary, that you could say they are variously similar or different, depending on how closely you look. From 10,000 feet, they sound different, as they are two different OSes maintained by two different groups of people. Get in a bit closer and you see that things look very similar, and they share code frequently between the OSes, and they're not as different as you might think. Get closer still, into the internals of the OS, or the politics of their seperations, and you see once again that they are not the same.
Hopefully that's a starter of a comparison. Enjoy!
Aaron J. -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
