Commit by Theo de Raadt: Everything is different now with OpenBSD
OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt replaces a data file – and thus the last unchanged part of the original OpenBSD 1.1.1.1 disappears.
Artwork of the current OpenBSD 7.5 by the artist Stipan Morian, currently living in Croatia, who also contributed to 20thCENTURY MEN by Image Comics.
(Image: Stipan Morian / OpenBSD)
- Michael Plura
The ancient BSD game quiz(6) asks random facts on various topics in a rather rudimentary and sometimes cynical or satirical way. It has several data files for this purpose. Theo de Raadt found the questions and answers on the subject of "greek" too obscure and therefore removed this data file from the OpenBSD repository with a commit.
A (meaningful) milestone?
There are many meaningful and even more nonsensical metrics to measure the progress of projects: Time periods, version numbers, number of developers or users, amount of code, and so on. For FreeBSD, for example, Rodrigo Osorio analyzes all commits since the beginning of FreeBSD development and makes this data available in ASCII format. With the OpenBSD commit by Theo de Raadt and his comment "This commit changes the *LAST UNMODIFIED ORIGINAL FILE* (meaning revision 1.1.1.1) from the original import that created OpenBSD on Oct 18, 1995." there is another metric for statistics lovers: When was the last original file of a fork changed?
(Image:Â Screenshot)
Because: OpenBSD was born out of a dispute over the allegedly too rough manners of NetBSD co-founder Theo de Raadt. The rest of the NetBSD core team withdrew de Raadt's access to the servers, followed by a discussion that dragged on for over a year. At some point – and with 19,000 lines of unmaintained NetBSD code – de Raadt became fed up with the stalling tactics and, as a logical consequence, created a fork of NetBSD on October 18, 1995: OpenBSD. Together with Chuck Cranor, he set up the world's first public and freely usable CVS server with the entry "initial import of NetBSD tree" and allowed Unix programmers around the world to contribute directly to the development of the system.
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Security through stripping down
The focus of OpenBSD is on all aspects of security. The developers regularly clean out existing code and have code audits carried out. Useful security functions are regularly incorporated into the code base, even if they are inconvenient. After a few years, other BSDs, as well as Microsoft, Oracle and Apple, adopt the innovations of OpenBSD, while Linux likes to go its own way. And manufacturers of high-security solutions such as GeNUA also base their firewall appliances on OpenBSD and its packet filter pf.
(mki)
