Linus likes to run his mouth about things he doesn't know, and unfortunately, people listen. OpenBSD is great because of everyone's obsessive focus on quality.

Linus likes to run his mouth about things he doesn't know, and unfortunately, people listen. OpenBSD is great because of everyone's obsessive focus on quality. This means fixing bugs (all security exploits are bugs), providing clean interfaces, and keeping garbage out of the system. Linux development tends to be a lot more "pragmatic," which in practice means trying to hide bugs (http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2008/Jul/276 http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2008/Jul/276), being ok with providing a crapload of weird, incompatible, non-unixy interfaces to do things (compare Linux wireless configuration vs. OpenBSD's ifconfig), including binary blob garbage with the kernel, and relying on bloatware like Gnome.