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> I've heard that the project has made a number of questionable choices in terms of development, and something about the security team being slow, but I really

> I've heard that the project has made a number of questionable choices in terms of development, and something about the security team being slow, but I really don't know too much on the subject, so it didn't get a chance to change my opiniong of this project. See this thread from 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11318508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11318508 (and others: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mrsk.me https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mrsk.me)

alxlaz 8y ago
Yeah, I remember reading that. It was a little horrifying to read but, in my experience, stuff that's written in an inflamatory tone is about 50% less dangerous than it seems.
- moviuro 8y ago
  Inflammatory tone or not doesn't change the fact that FreeBSD does some "interesting" choices, even if they choose to "keep running" instead of "keep secure" (OpenBSD-like). Note that OpenBSD devs have always been doomsday apostles,... and they've been right to (privsep, SSH, SSL, now pledge, etc.).
  - alxlaz 8y ago
    They have, and broadly speaking I certainly agree with how they choose to engineer their software, to an even higher degree than (whatever I still know about how) the FreeBSD team choose to engineer their software. (FWIW, that's why I actually run OpenBSD on the few non-Linux machines that I use :-) ) However, it seems to me like this is one of those cases where there's more than one way to skin a cat. FreeBSD is missing a lot of useful hardening features, such as ASLR (yay, it's 2003 again!), and has made a couple of "interesting" security choices, but judging by the number and scale of FreeBSD deployments, it seems like there are convincing ways to work around these problems in practice. That document suggests there's a lot of work involved in working around them reliably; again, the number and scale of deployments would suggest that the trade-off is considered reasonable by a lot of people.

alxlaz 8y ago

Yeah, I remember reading that. It was a little horrifying to read but, in my experience, stuff that's written in an inflamatory tone is about 50% less dangerous than it seems.

moviuro 8y ago
Inflammatory tone or not doesn't change the fact that FreeBSD does some "interesting" choices, even if they choose to "keep running" instead of "keep secure" (OpenBSD-like). Note that OpenBSD devs have always been doomsday apostles,... and they've been right to (privsep, SSH, SSL, now pledge, etc.).
- alxlaz 8y ago
  They have, and broadly speaking I certainly agree with how they choose to engineer their software, to an even higher degree than (whatever I still know about how) the FreeBSD team choose to engineer their software. (FWIW, that's why I actually run OpenBSD on the few non-Linux machines that I use :-) ) However, it seems to me like this is one of those cases where there's more than one way to skin a cat. FreeBSD is missing a lot of useful hardening features, such as ASLR (yay, it's 2003 again!), and has made a couple of "interesting" security choices, but judging by the number and scale of FreeBSD deployments, it seems like there are convincing ways to work around these problems in practice. That document suggests there's a lot of work involved in working around them reliably; again, the number and scale of deployments would suggest that the trade-off is considered reasonable by a lot of people.