OpenBSD 3.7 Reviewed

busfahrer writes "Jem Matzan has written a review of OpenBSD 3.7 for Newsforge. He talks about their licensing issues, network features, upgrading packages and the new supported architectures."

Comments

Declare your bias, why don't you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Opening line:

The operating system world has been blessed by another regular release of OpenBSD.

And, no, it doesn't get any more objective further down. Nor does he talk about the licensing issues or new architectures in any detail at all - less detail, in fact, than he talks about the theme tune.

Re:Declare your bias, why don't you?

[millahtime]

licensing issues

You have issues with BSD licensing? How much freeer do you want it?

Re:Declare your bias, why don't you?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have issues with BSD licensing? How much freeer do you want it?

RTFA. The issue mentioned is that OpenBSD folks object to the Apache 2 licence, and so OpenBSD won't get Apache 2.

In fact you won't even find Apache 2, because its license is more restrictive than its predecessor. OpenBSD 3.7 includes a heavily modified version of Apache 1.3.29 instead.

Re:Declare your bias, why don't you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fact 1: BSD license isn't free enough to allow merging in GPLed code.
Fact 2: GPL isn't free enough to allow merging in BSD licensed code.

No, the modified BSD licence - which everyone uses nowadays - allows you to mix BSD and GPL code. The result is always GPL.

But that's not the issue here - RTFA.

Re:Declare your bias, why don't you?

[compass46]

The drivers are open source. The board firmware is closed source. They got permission to distribute the blob for the card firmware to make wi-fi setup easier for users so they didn't have to jump through hoops to get their cards to work.

Re:Declare your bias, why don't you?

[Caligari]

Who said anything about closed source wireless drivers?

The whole point of the recent OpenBSD wireless developments are that the drivers are completely free!

Stallman gave Theo de Raadt the 2004 FSF award in Febuary as recognition for crying out loud!

Actual information

[slavemowgli]

Is there *any* actual information in this article at all (useful information, anyway)? The only tidbits I could find boil down to things like "my on-board controller didn't work", "I couldn't compile KDE myself", and "this and that specific option to this and that program gives a warning when you use it".

Outside of these things, the only pieces of information I could find boiled down to "there's two new ports", "it still doesn't include Apache 2.x", and "you get daily (in)security reports mailed to you". If it wasn't for the irrelevant fluff mentioned above, I'd assume the author of this article hasn't even installed OpenBSD and instead just looked through the website and maybe Google'd for some extra information.

I really hope the author didn't get payed too much for this, because no matter how much he got, the article wasn't worth it.

Re:Actual information

[LWATCDR]

I have to admit I am disappointed. No benchmarks. No list of new features, No detail on setting up a server running it.
Heck it was more of a bad press release than a review.

I expected more, but of course...

[dayid]

As someone who replied to the original article (see bottom of original link) mentioned, it would've been interesting to have seen a true comprehensive analysis of OpenBSD, rather than a lot of "I think" and "I liked".

I would have appreciated the article more if it were a lot more in-depth, but perhaps that would've ward off others. I would like to see him not just talk about the install process (initially), but also how easy it was to install applications (and not just "I had to type too much"), configure them (interface-configuration, or purely text-editing), and finally - how well they all interacted. Now, I know that sounds more like an analysis of the individual applications rather than the operating system, but what is an operating system if not a platform that you use to interact with applications?

We also hear about the "new wireless" stuff... where was that? Test with multiple cards? USB-Wireless perhaps? PCMCIA Wireless? To tout such things (even in the review) and then not do anything with them is rather disappointing.

The shot at RMS for the day

[The Slashdotted]

From the article:

The theme of the OpenBSD 3.7 CD set is The Wizard of Oz, and the cute little CD jacket cartoon strip shows the OpenBSD mascot and friends on a journey to achieve better wireless card drivers. Their adventure takes them to the Emerald City to meet the great and powerful Wizard of OS himself -- an effigy of a crown-wearing penguin. The man behind the curtain turns out to be a Richard Stallman-like character with GNU horns. The characters are disappointed because the Wizard ends up being "all talk -- no action!" So they decide to code the wireless driver by reverse-engineering the device.

Re:BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, from an admins point of view, the BSDs are easier to learn than any linux distribution. That is not to say they are easier to use, but they are simpler when it comes to managing the system:

Less complicated init;
MUCH better documentation;
Less painful filesystem management (though LVM2 is really nice);

The downsides are significant however:

Bad support for esoteric hardware;
Less vendor support;
Fewer eyes looking over the code (though, to be fair, there is MUCH less code for them to look over)

Re:BSD

[PapaZit]

Fewer eyes looking over the code

I don't know if this is really true. There are three major BSD "distributions" with subtle differences. Fans of each routinely look over the code for the others looking for good, "stealable" code. Not only does that mean that people are looking at the code, but informed "outsider" coders are looking at it with a critical eye. So, even if the code is reviewed by fewer people, it's reviewed by people who are more likely to notice, report, and fix bugs.