I'd disagree. As I wrote in the second half of my post, they do the same thing for OpenSSH, and I don't think anyone will say OpenSSH has had a minimal impact o

I'd disagree. As I wrote in the second half of my post, they do the same thing for OpenSSH, and I don't think anyone will say OpenSSH has had a minimal impact on IT security. One of the reasons they develop this way is that they can work with a known set of functions, etc, which may not be available on other platforms, and then have people who grok portability handle that part of the puzzle. Additionally, functions and libraries that are not used in the OpenBSD world, like PAM integration, can be maintained by people who understand all the security implications of those libraries. I don't use OpenBSD for my own environments, but at the same time, I can understand why they code the way they do. Everyone ends up a biased toward their platform of choice in how they code, what functions they use, etc, it's just that the OpenBSD team is militantly upfront and open in their biases. Given their track record in creating secure software, and in auditing others' software, I'd argue their end result is appreciable, even if I'm not directly using those results.