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Why did they decide to fork OpenBSD?

• adamnemecek 12y ago
  "With the goal of bringing more experimental development to the OpenBSD code base, a few developers have announced a fork named Bitrig. According to their FAQ, Bitrig aims to build a small system targeting only modern hardware and "be a very commercially friendly code base by using non-viral licenses where possible." Their first step toward that goal was removing GCC in favor of LLVM/Clang. The project roadmap shows their future goals as adding FUSE support, improving multiprocessing, porting the system to ARM, and replacing the GNU C++ library with LLVM's." http://bsd-beta.slashdot.org/story/12/06/13/1645211/openbsd-fork-bitrig-announced http://bsd-beta.slashdot.org/story/12/06/13/1645211/openbsd-...
  • danudey 12y ago
    Portability and modernity instead of a security focus? I'm not sure why I would use a fork of OpenBSD instead of just FreeBSD though. I've always seen the primary benefits of OpenBSD as deriving from their obsessive focus on security, but if this fork isn't focussed on that I'm not sure what I gain vs. other BSDs that already have these goals and objectives in place/completed.
    • sigzero 12y ago
      Exactly. OpenBSD is very specific in what it is. That description is more a description for a fork of FreeBSD or NetBSD.
      • BBoingo 12y ago
        OpenBSD has always had a strong focus on protability. It's just the focus on portability was never restricted to "modernity" for the reason that there's few interestingly different processors anymore you can compile against to check for breaking errors. It would be interesting though if Bitrig became sort of a DragonflyBSD for OpenBSD, where weird experimental stuff can be tested in a separate playground.
    • renox 12y ago
      > Portability and modernity instead of a security focus? It is you who say "instead", can't it be "in addition to"?
  • ausjke 12y ago
    I thought this is where NetBSD shines, why not just enhance NetBSD? or why pulling OpenBSD into embedded space?
    • Danieru 12y ago
      Forking is the way of the BSDs. The BSD style is to develop the userland along with the kernel. Thus where Linux has multiple distro families BSD has full userland and kernel forks.
      • masklinn 12y ago
        That doesn't explain why you'd start from OpenBSD.
        • clarry 12y ago
          The people who started the fork are ex OpenBSD developers. It makes all the sense. Why wouldn't they start with what they already know, find good, and are happy to work on?
• ukdm 12y ago
  Why did you fork OpenBSD? OpenBSD is an amazing project and has some of the best code around but some of us are of the opinion that it could use a bit of modernization. OpenBSD is a very security conscious project and, correspondingly, has to be more conservative with features. We want to be less restrictive with the codebase when it comes to experimenting with features. https://github.com/bitrig/bitrig/wiki/Faq https://github.com/bitrig/bitrig/wiki/Faq
• kchoudhu 12y ago
  https://github.com/bitrig/bitrig/wiki/Faq https://github.com/bitrig/bitrig/wiki/Faq Looks to be a desire to leave behind legacy cruft, add a better toolchain, and add virtualization.
• chrismsnz 12y ago
  If I had to take a guess... It'd be easier to carefully add specific features to a well-designed and secure codebase such as OpenBSD, rather than try and pare down and audit the huge codebase and large amount of features provided by something like FreeBSD.