On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 1:48 PM, Henry Sieff <henry.si...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 5:18 AM, Donald Allen <donaldcal...@gmail.com> wrote: > > [SNIP] > >> I realize that I'm preaching to the choir -- you know all this. But I >> think it's a mistake for (especially) the OpenBSD community to speak >> of OpenBSD as just about security, when it's so much more than that. > > I think I would rephrase that - OpenBSD is just about security, and > security implies far more than simply patching holes. Stability, > administrative transparency, and thorough documentation are all > critical and overly neglected aspects of security. If you don't know > the proper way to configure feature X, you cannot be sure it is > configured securely. > > OpenBSD simply looks at security in a holistic fashion, while every > other OS I have to suffer through views security as a 'feature'.
Perhaps. I don't presume to know enough about what Theo and the other developers think or how the development is done to have an opinion on that. But my point is that whether your assertion is true or not, the net result is the best platform for general computing that I know of, and not just in situations where security concerns are (or should be) paramount. OpenBSD has been a type-cast as a smart choice in high-vulnerability situations (where you certainly wouldn't dare use Windows or Linux), which is true, but the problem is that the descriptions tend to *limit* its usefulness or applicability to such situations, leading to questions like "does OpenBSD run on a laptop?". My point is that OpenBSD is also the best choice (except if you care a lot about Flash :-) in situations where you *would* dare to use Windows or Linux . If I were doing software development on a machine located in a bank vault with no network connection, that machine would be running OpenBSD. /Don
