I hung out with Theo and his team years ago at a security conference. At the time, Subversion was the new hotness, sweeping away CVS as the source code managem

I hung out with Theo and his team years ago at a security conference. At the time, Subversion was the new hotness, sweeping away CVS as the source code management system de jour. I asked Theo why they didn’t already move to Subversion. His answer stuck with me: CVS is dead simple, everyone understands it, and it just works. Why complicate things? And that’s the philosophy behind much of OpenBSD. They focus on being able to understand everything from the build tools to the command line tools. Nothing random ever makes its way into OpenBSD (aside from the random number generator, which is ubiquitous). Only a few chosen hands ever commit a line of code to their holy codebase.