OpenBSD Journal

Good software isn't like a real-world monument; people don't spend effort to go back and revisit it later and gawk at it. Good software either gets championed by someone, or it fades forever into obscurity. (I wrote a really amazing hack years ago ... in COBOL. Maybe you've heard of me?)

Likewise, the people that are contributing to BSD right now are doing so because they believe in what they are working on. Although some of them are true cross-platform developers, many others would never make the switch. It would be agony trying to work in Linux if you're, say, Theo de Raadt. Seriously, I wonder if that might be his own personal version of hell.

I use a lot of both -- Debian, an Arch-like thing, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and have for years. The only reason that I know that iptables has serious shortcomings is because I've used pf. If I had never used the BSDs, I would have no idea what I was missing out on. If I had twenty more hours in a day, I might even be tempted to make iptables more pf-like.

pf is kind of my go-to for BSD cheerleading, but it shines in other core areas too. For instance, Linux is really only just now getting stuff that looks like a distributed or cluster file system; but BSD has had this for quite a while already. Heck, one of the best options for a while in this area was HAMMER, developed by one guy for his personal BSD. And if you wanted something a little bit more mainstream, FreeBSD has supported ZFS for a long time -- Linux is still catching up there.…

People love to talk all sorts of trash on this kind of stack but it's really quite solid for what it does. If anyone was ever curious what a sizeable codebase in this kind of code would even look like, check out the source code for undeadly.org [1]. Yeah these people may be crazy but they're also OpenBSD developers and we really love to see what we can get away with using nothing other than what's available in the base distribution. I think a lot of what you see being written for production ends up being very similar to this kind of approach, maybe just utilizing rust or golang as the web application backend language if that's what is the more comfortable thing. Nothing but the base system and a single binary, not relying on an entire interpreter stack, sure can be smooth.

There's other examples of this kind of approach, too, writing straight C Common Gateway Interface web applications in public-facing production use - What comes to mind is the version control system web frontend that the people who write wireguard use, cgit [2] - If it's really so crazy then how come the openbsd and wireguard people - presumably better hackers than you - are just out there doing it?

Other places you see C web application interfaces include in embedded devices (SCADA, etc) and even the web interfaces for routers, which unfortunately ARE crazy because check out all the security problems! Good thing people at our favorite good old research operating system have done the whole pledge(2)[3]…

I disagree. ;)

In my dozen or so years of experience with Theo, we've disagreed and
argued many times and he's always been reasonable. For the record, if I
had bothered to keep track of our debates, he's ended up being "right"
far more often than I have. Yep, I've been wrong, quite often, and he's
been kind enough to drop-kick me in a better direction. He's a friend
and I've learned a lot from him over the years.

Your misconception comes from people showing up on the OpenBSD mailing
lists with a prideful hostile attitude intending to prove how much they
know, when in fact, they haven't done their homework correctly or
completely. Things often go sideways in a hurry if people aren't willing
to look at their own opinions critically and do the additional work to
see the other sides. Of course, if you walk into someone else's home and
shit on their couch, you get what you deserve.

There are edgy debates between developers, particularly in code reviews
and proposed patches, but the reason for them is simple; everyone wants
to get to the "best" and "most correct" answer. In other words the goal
is the same, but the opinions vary.

Being friends with the person/people on the other side of a pointed
debate is important, particularly across (human) language barriers. Jake
Meuser recently wrote about this on undeadly.org and I can't express it
any better than he has:

http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20101206081625

It's a worthy read.

What the Internet is really doing away with is a giant industry
that used to be useful, but now is merely parasitic.

That can go both ways: the Internet is also breeding a generation of customers that used to value and support music & books, but now is merely parasitic.

we can just give $1.50 to the author directly

I'm all for eliminating middle-men, but free is still a whole lot better than $1.50; and when downloading hundreds of songs from PirateBay, that's several hundreds of dollars versus free.

Musicians who embrace the new reality are doing fine.

Citation needed.

I would also love a functional gift economy, instead of one of scarcity ... but on the Internet a gift economy doesn't really work, because most users are not giving back. How many users of open-source software are giving back contributions and donations?

Even when your software is used by lots of corporations; you either have to beg, or your software has to be broken (in need of a fix).

And I quote from http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20060321034114 ...

OpenSSH is in use by millions around the world
however the revenue stream just simply isn't there.

Music, books, software: all of them require effort and lots of it.
Being able to work on such things full-time is wonderful; and if broken technologies/legislation like DRM are the only solution for it, then that will be the future.

> Under a regular user account?

Yep. Only special factors I can think of are VirtualBox guest additions and passphraseless sudo - though I don't recall any similar problems when I last had it on my laptop which had neither.

Also starting from console and not a display manager, because they're vile things that are almost as bad as splash/boot screens.

> I know their team is much smaller so it's just not feasible, but it's definitely something that would be greatly appreciated.

Very much so - the biggest thing I miss from the Debian world is unattended-upgrades. Maybe with some more commercial support..

> Is OpenBSD's MP-safe yet? I believe that's partly related to why FreeBSD's has ALTQ disabled

It's still under a big giant lock as far as I'm aware. They're also removing ALTQ in favour of a simpler framework: http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140419151959

OpenBSD had Soft Updates, which isn't really journaling but sort of similar. It was suppose to help with with file system integrity, in the case of crashes. OpenBSD removed it last year because it got in the way of VFS updates, and was hard for the team to maintain[1].

I love OpenBSD, but it really does need a modern filesystem. The current team might be to small or just not have the right people to do a new filesystem. HammerFS2 could maybe be ported (and one has to wonder if that's not one of the thing that would requires VFS layer updates). Much of the current work on filesystems are being poured into GPL licensed code or ZFS, which also have an unfortunate license, so OpenBSD either has to borrow HammerFS, or do their own thing, which they probably don't have the resources for.

1) https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20230706044554