3 ms·

For those critical of his personality, imagine being constantly trolled by script kiddies and others with malicious (such as government actors) intent. You'd pr

For those critical of his personality, imagine being constantly trolled by script kiddies and others with malicious (such as government actors) intent. You'd probably get a little grumpy, too. The fact that Theo and the OpenBSD crew have been so uncompromising ideologically is a large part of its attraction. The support for "antiquated" architectures has a lot to do with them being OPEN, e.g. SPARC. This crew is some of the first along with rms to really push not just open and free software but also the hardware it runs on for a variety of solid reasons.

kjs3 6y ago
Well...OpenBSD runs on a lot of "antiquated" architectures because it started as a fork of NetBSD, which supports/supported even more architectures. Both Open and Net have pared down the definition of 'supported' and the number of archs they support over the years. The support for "antiquated" architectures has a lot to do with them being OPEN Not exactly...I recall Theo called it OPEN because he felt the NetBSD crew wasn't. NetBSD was around first, recall, and one of their core principles is wide portability, where OpenBSD took on the mantle of correctness and security and portability came along for the ride. Both side of the unpleasant history are documented; the truth is somewhere in the middle, of course. That said, both crews advocate building on multiple architectures as a solid best practice to turn up 'interesting' programming issues. For example, Theo has stated that SPARC/SPARC64 porting is particularly useful for finding unaligned memory accesses (Alpha didn't like them either). I'll leave out my own experience in dealing with the 'OpenBSD attitude' other than to say 'generally less than pleasant'. I still use OpenBSD daily, tho more for infrastructure (FW, DNS, DHCP, LDAP) than as a desktop.

3 ms·

For those critical of his personality, imagine being constantly trolled by script kiddies and others with malicious (such as government actors) intent. You'd pr

by kyuudou 6y ago

kjs3 6y ago
Well...OpenBSD runs on a lot of "antiquated" architectures because it started as a fork of NetBSD, which supports/supported even more architectures. Both Open and Net have pared down the definition of 'supported' and the number of archs they support over the years. The support for "antiquated" architectures has a lot to do with them being OPEN Not exactly...I recall Theo called it OPEN because he felt the NetBSD crew wasn't. NetBSD was around first, recall, and one of their core principles is wide portability, where OpenBSD took on the mantle of correctness and security and portability came along for the ride. Both side of the unpleasant history are documented; the truth is somewhere in the middle, of course. That said, both crews advocate building on multiple architectures as a solid best practice to turn up 'interesting' programming issues. For example, Theo has stated that SPARC/SPARC64 porting is particularly useful for finding unaligned memory accesses (Alpha didn't like them either). I'll leave out my own experience in dealing with the 'OpenBSD attitude' other than to say 'generally less than pleasant'. I still use OpenBSD daily, tho more for infrastructure (FW, DNS, DHCP, LDAP) than as a desktop.