
Crowding out OpenBSD - Xyzodiac
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/524606/611b3cb2f33e32ae/
======
ghshephard
" OpenBSD simply does not have enough developers to influence the direction of
projects like X.org, GNOME, or KDE. "

I, and several of my colleagues, have been running dozens of OpenBSD systems
for about 10+ years. In particularly, OpenBSD had an elegant IPv6
Firewall/failover mechanism about 5 years before Cisco finally decided to port
Active/Failover to their ASA platform - so we were forced through sheer
necessity to deploy OpenBSD in what was otherwise an all Cisco shop. Further
to that, OpenBSD's ability to track several hundred thousand shortlived UDP
sessions state fully on inexpensive x86 systems saved us several 10s of
thousands of dollars over the equivalent Cisco systems.

At one point, all of HPs internal infrastructure was transitioned off of the
Cisco ASA onto OpenBSD firewalls - OpenBSD is reliable, and industrial.

Needless to say, I'm a fan of OpenBSD and consider it critical to the various
infrastructures that we deploy.

I've never been tempted (nor, to my knowledge, have my colleagues) to even
consider installing X-Windows on an OpenBSD system. So the entire thesis of
this article is beyond silly to me.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Well, the question is how long OpenBSD will continue to survive without a
modern desktop version. Linux has been enjoying a remarkable growth of support
over the last few years thanks primarily to its slow incursion of the desktop
market. Can OpenBSD continue to live only as a server / router / network
service operating system for the long term? I don't know.

And, even in the server market, it's falling behind in terms of support. The
VPS market has gotten really big really quickly; the OpenBSD team has
legitimate concerns about trying to run a "secure by default" operating system
in a virtualized environment, but unfortunately that point of view has
resulted in OpenBSD being completely unavailable on Linode, prgrmr, EC2,
Slicehost/Rackspace, etc.

I have no idea if OpenBSD's installed user base is growing or shrinking
overall. But, I expect that it's rapidly shrinking relative to the amount of
support that Linux is currently enjoying, and that's going to lead to OpenBSD
getting less and less upstream support, which is eventually going to strangle
the project. The small OpenBSD development team simply won't have the
resources to rewrite all of the big upstream packages. (And I'm not talking
about Gnome here; OpenBSD already has its own httpd and its own smtpd, for
example.)

~~~
ghshephard
"Well, the question is how long OpenBSD will continue to survive without a
modern desktop version."

How long will Cisco IOS continue to survive without a modern desktop version?

Even our most die-hard OpenBSD "everywhere" fanatics (and we have a number of
them) don't run it as their Desktop OS, and have never suggested you should.
OpenBSD is a server/router/network service OS.

OpenBSD has found it's sweet spot. It owns the market for stable, well
defined, well documented, consistent, x86 Firewalls and secure servers. People
need to realize that trying to shove OpenBSD onto the desktop is the ultimate
case of square peg/round hole.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Fair point, but Cisco IOS is supported by a large company with deep pockets
and a vested interest in its continued development. And, OpenBSD is far more
complex than IOS; it has a much larger problem set to solve.

Also, I'm not arguing that OpenBSD needs to _compete_ as a desktop OS. I agree
that that is not its niche. But I _am_ arguing that without a desktop
presence, upstream support for OpenBSD will continue to diminish, and at some
point that is going to seriously harm the project. Today, it's Gnome; imagine
if tomorrow the Samba team decided that future versions of smbd would require
systemd, and justified their decision by saying, "Well, it's not like the BSDs
have been active on our mailing list." What does OpenBSD do then?

At what point does their niche become too small to sustain the project?

~~~
ghshephard
In 15 years of working in IT organizations at various companies I've seen
hundreds of people run Solaris as their Desktop OS (mostly 1996-1998 at
Netscape), various Macintosh System OS's and Irix as their desktop, at times
everyone was running Linux as their Desktop OS, and nowadays OS X seems to be
popular (obviously there has always been a lot of Windows Desktop Usage)

I have never, once, seen OpenBSD run as a Desktop OS. This despite working at
several companies where OpenBSD was actually core to our entire
infrastructure.

I'm not saying that nobody does (I expect the OpenBSD developers probably do),
but I am strongly suggesting that OpenBSD needs _no_ desktop presence
whatsoever to be extraordinarily successful. I've never installed it on the
desktop. I've never seen anybody install it on the desktop. Not once in 15
years. There is no rationale reason to run OpenBSD as a desktop, and I'll go
further and say I will likely never see X-Windows run on OpenBSD.

And, as for a niche - I consider OpenBSD to be the pre-eminent platform for
Firewalling, IPsec, IPv6. Their continual focus on consistency makes the
system a joy to use - all of the lessons I learned in 2001/2002 are almost
100% (hell, they might be 100%) applicable to managing an OpenBSD system
today.

They may be a _niche_ but it's a pretty darn big one.

With regards to your argument regarding "upstream" support - most of the
upstream support required is around elements that are not associated with the
desktop, and, in many areas, openBSD has just decided to rewrite the upstream
contribuions in their own "OpenBSDsh" way anyways.

I'm confident they will do fine even if upstream support for desktop, and
associated applications, no longer considers BSD as a first-rate platform.

~~~
klibertp
> I'm not saying that nobody does

I did, once, for a year or so. It was around 2004, I think, and what caused me
to transition was a slightly too big number of bugs in FreeBSD at the time.
And not too good support for USB and sound, IIRC.

OpenBSD was stable like mountain, rock solid, ran xfce (my second favorite WM)
without any problems and was even better documented and even tidier in it's
design than FreeBSD. It supported all of my hardware at the time, the sound
card was enabled by default and the ports were in much better shape than in
FBSD - they actually compiled, every single one that I tried, while FBSD had
quite a few broken ones. Overall, the experience was very good and I migrated
back to FreeBSD much later than I was able to (ie. when all the issues were
fixed) just because of this.

So no, I would say that this entire thread is missing the point - OpenBSD has
a potential to be a good desktop OS, at least at one point in time it actually
_was_ a good desktop OS and it could benefit from being one once again (if it
somehow ended not being one now, I don't know about present).

I hate Linux with it's numerous distributions with passion - any BSD is just
so much more elegant, consistent, intuitive (probably I just got used to them)
and clean - and I won't use Linux anymore (I did, for a few years back when
Y2K bug was popular). For people like me FreeBSD is an obvious solution, but
if it irritates me again I'll look in OpenBSD direction. I'd be very happy if
it was ready to accept me as a desktop user then.

------
ari_elle
I am very disappointed by this article, since it in my opinion clearly
misrepresents the things Marc Espie said:

If you look at his original:

-) _"Those vendors say "we're not in the distribution business, distribution problems will be handled by OS vendors. We can break compatibility to advance, and not think about it, this is not a problem." [...]_

 _"This is a mindset we need to fight, and this has to be a grass-roots
movement._ "

-) _"in some cases, you even have some people, who are PAID by some vendors, agressively pushing GRATUITOUS, non compatible changes. I won't say names, but you guys can fill the blanks in._ "

-) _"Either you're a modern linux with pulseaudio and pam and systemd, or you're dying._ "

Source: <https://lwn.net/Articles/524608/>

Not being a BSD guy myself, but being a fan of minimalistic linux systems,
being a fan of keeping dependencies low, of not necessarily throwing out
software that has done it's job for 10+ years to just get the newest gadget
in, i actually think he's right with many things he says.

~~~
meaty
Well it is LWN which has a history of crappy reporting. It's like reading an
East German newspaper in the 1980s.

~~~
4ad
Yeah, LWN is pretty bad, I wonder why does it have so much appeal?

~~~
hendi_
Honestly, I don't understand your and the parent's comment. I really, really
like LWN and appreciate what it does for the Linux and broader FOSS community.
In my opinion LWN doesn't only shine when compared to some crappy "linux news
pages" _cough_ phoronix _cough_ but also when compared to higher-quality,
"traditional" media.

I'm really interested in hearing of sites that others assert a high quality
to. Would you please care to elaborate which sites you prefer instead of LWN?

~~~
koide
LWN is, rather obviously, (highly) Linux biased.

The people there tend to make mistakes when talking about other operating
systems.

I guess that's what those comments are about.

------
dfc
I'm surprised that nobody has brought up the 5.2 song[1]. The 5.2 song is
about these problems with upstream and confusing Linux for posix, the "liner
notes" for _"Aquarela do Linux!"_ :

 _"Just as the original song professed its love for Brazil, "World, you'll
love my Linux" is the passionate call of an idealistic dreamer who can't bear
the thought of software that will only run under Windows, and yet loves the
situation with software that will only run under particular Linux
distributions. This problem has proliferated itself into the standards bodies,
with Posix adopting Linuxisms ahead of any other variant of Unix.

Posix and Unix have made it where you can write reasonably portable software
and have it compile and run across a multitude of platforms. Now this seems to
be changing as the love for Linux drives the standards bodies into accepting
everything Linux, good and bad.

We also are faced with groups writing software that only works with particular
distributions of Linux. From this we get software that not only isn't very
portable, but often not particularly stable. Our idealistic dreamer in the
song loves running one, or more than one distribution of Linux for a
particular purpose. Unfortunately, the rest of us are left with the
unattractive choice of doing the same, or relying on herculean efforts to port
software that is being actively developed in a way to discourage porting it to
other platforms."_

[1] <http://openbsd.org/lyrics.html#52>

~~~
merlincorey
You need more upvotes.

------
zaius
Part of the reason Linux has such a huge number of devs is because the
community is welcoming and forgiving of noobs.

OpenBSD was my first unix, and as much as I tried to contribute, I didn't last
through their toxic developer community long enough to be a useful
contributor.

This high bar is required to keep the system as secure as they want, but the
trade off means scaring off devs, which is the real core of the bsd/Linux
divide.

~~~
mintplant
Right, the Linux community is very forgiving of noobs. [1]

[1]
[https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56599...](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-5659970)

~~~
zaius
Linus is a dick. Theo is a dick. No argument from anyone there. That's the
Linux kernel though, and I would argue that has the same problem of scaring
off potential devs.

It's the wider community I'm talking about. Mailing lists, forums, etc. It is
a pain in the ass to entertain dumb questions and give the same answers over
and over, but it's how you turn noobs into developers.

------
dschiptsov
OpenBSD isn't for desktop, it is a small networked server. (And what modern X
environments you're talking about without nvidia/radeon drivers and
accelerated OpenGL?)

I have built a firewall from an old slow 1U Sun Netra "server" with
OpenBSD/spark64 and it is still in production after almost 7 years? Why?
Because punks cannot hack it with Linux/x86 exploits.) Because it has enough
resources to be a gateway (firewall, openvpn, secondary dns, etc.)

Well, nowadays you anyone could buy a $50 box with linux flashed inside to do
some fire-walling and some routing, and the art of making BSD-based gateways
and servers almost disappeared.

Nevertheless OpenBSD is a multi-platform network server, secure and stable, in
the first place. Modern X11 is irrelevant.

btw, they finally implemented kernel pthreads in the last release, so, our
postgres...))

------
graue
The article suggests OpenBSD lacks support for newer hardware. Not sure if
that's true today, or in certain categories (graphics cards?).

But, credit where credit is due: Around 2005-6, I chose to run OpenBSD on my
desktop computer at home because its support for wireless network interfaces
was far and above better than Linux or any other open source OS. At that time,
getting on my home network with Linux was a complete no-go, while OpenBSD
worked flawlessly out of the box.

At that time there were several OpenBSD devs doing the hard, ugly work of
reverse-engineering the crappy binary blobs that were accepted in mainstream
Linux distros (and FreeBSD), and instead turning out reliable, open-source
drivers.

Today I find Linux more practical to run on my laptop, but I really hope
OpenBSD never goes anywhere. We need different approaches like theirs.
(Actually, the non-availability of Flash was a big reason I switched back to
Linux, and that's becoming less of an issue with HTML5...)

~~~
lflux
One data point: the on-board Broadcom NICs (BCM 719) on HP DL360 Gen8 servers
isn't supported in OpenBSD yet.

------
zokier
Let me guess, this is about Gnome3 and systemd (and other poetteringisms)? I
think that maybe dropping Gnome3 and focusing on alternate desktops would be
the way to ensure survival. Trying to keep up with Gnome3 is an uphill battle.
And in smaller projects BSD developers would have proportionally larger voice.

~~~
stock_toaster
Indeed. Maybe focusing on alternative desktops could even be turned into an
advantage for the BSDs.

------
Zenst
It would be nice if there was a unified driver model that the OS developers
could easily add a wrapper level to accomodate there needs. If hardware
companies had full open source drivers then this would be less of an issue,
this is not the rosey situation we have and in many area's we have binary
blobs. Binary blobs targeted at an OS and CPU.

Now with the advent of ARM, the sence to have open source drivers becomes more
palatable and hopefully sainer. More options for your hardware to run upon and
be sold upon is more sales. If you open source things and let the community
help then they help and you get more win win. It is the area's were companies
want to protect IP they have above and beyond the patent protection. There are
cases if they are using others IP in there product which they pay to use that
prevents them from releaseing the source and at best able to do binary blobs.
If we had binary blobs that you could add your own wrapper around and
accomodate a OS's needs, then you would still have more platforms than not
open to you.

But this realy is mostly down to fancy networking cards, graphics cards and
anything with a radio in it mostly. But there are always options and with the
right purchaseing you can vote with your money. Support the ability to change
your OS even if you don't plan on it today, think of the children :).

~~~
meaty
ARM is even worse when it comes to binary blobs. Take a look at any major SoC
out there and you will see BLOBs for the LAN and graphics interfaces.
Occasionally boot firmware is a BLOB as well.

We need a completely open patent unencumbered platform as well as software.
Unfortunately the barrier to entry on this is seriously high; much larger than
even bringing medicine to market.

~~~
justin66
I'm sure that's true but it's important to keep one thing in mind: not all
binaries are the result of an Nvidiaesque attempt to keep from open-sourcing
something. Loading updateable binary microcode to implement an ISA is often a
beneficial processor design technique and it dates back to seventies.

There's some irony in the OpenBSD objection to handling binary blobs. A lot of
the cool old systems OpenBSD supports are LOADED with microcode and ROM the
user can never see or understand. It's hidden. To a degree this is even true
in the case of the everyday AMD64 machine (which loads microcode updates and
some of its boot logic from BIOS ROM/EFI, thank you).

OpenBSD's position, in conjunction with its support of these systems that load
all that stuff from ROM at boot time and its lack of support for the ones
without a proper ROM to store the stuff (raspberry pi, for example), keep it
from having to handle these blobs personally. The principle involved here
isn't "let's shun the use of binaries for which we don't have the source
code." The principle is "binaries are yucky, don't get any on you." It's not
hugely impressive.

------
antirez
Nonsensical article: In the game of big numbers Linux is almost irrelevant in
the Desktop as well, but it is winning like crazy in the server market, where
_BSD could compete.

So _BSD is being marginalized for other reasons, not desktop software.

------
thaumaturgy
Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4772133> (104
comments).

The lwn article here is pretty vacuous.

edit: I'm happy to see some people in this thread already coming to OpenBSD's
defense. It is really really fine software, built by a team of really smart
people. If you haven't donated to the project, or at least bought one of their
CD sets, please do. It does help.

~~~
wazoox
I myself wear mostly OpenBSD/OpenSSH t-shirts. Just because Puffy is cool, you
know.

------
riffraff
> BSD is a place where developers can experiment with different approaches to
> kernel design, filesystems, packaging systems, and more.

that is most certainly true, but I am wondering, has any of the work done in
BSDs in recent years influenced linux development in any way?

~~~
bulibuta
Yes it has, just to name a few:

kernel: Wireless drivers, aslr, pf etc. userland: ssh, ntpd, carp, bgpd etc.

~~~
geofft
Nitpick: ASLR was first implemented by PaX for Linux. OpenBSD ported it from
PaX a few years later.

------
D9u
If Linux developers were to adhere to the POSIX standard, would compatibility
be an issue?

~~~
geofft
The usual complaint regarding systemd is about its extensive and fundamental
use of cgroups for process group tracking. There is nothing in the POSIX
standard that offers a feature similar to cgroups -- a simple example is to
track all processes spawned by a given child process (or by anything it in
turn spanws), and be able to kill them all, even if that particular child
process terminates early. So any implemention of this feature, whether or not
it uses Linux cgroups, must be independent of what's specified in POSIX.

POSIX standardizes approximately nothing relating to sound, so the same
problem is there too for PulseAudio. Nor does it standardize anything about
devices being added or removed, so there's no standard API covering udev or
some other hotplug solution.

One argument you could make is that Linux should offer no features that are
not standardized in POSIX. I bet that would not make many developers or users
happy, though.

