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Squaring the Open Source/Open Standards Circle
Andy Updegrove writes "Before there was Linux, before there was open source, there was of course (and still is) an operating system called Unix that was robust, stable and widely admired. It was also available under license to anyone that wanted to use it, and partly for that reason many variants grew up and lost interoperability - and the Unix wars began. Those wars helped Microsoft displace Unix with Windows NT, which steadily gained market share until Linux, a Unix clone, in turn began to supplant NT. Unfortunately, one of the very things that makes Linux powerful also makes it vulnerable to the same type of fragmentation that helped to doom Unix - the open source licenses under which Linux distributions are created and made available. Happily, there is a remedy to avoid the end that befell Unix, and that remedy is open standards - specifically, the Linux Standards Base (LSB). The LSB is now an ISO/IEC standard, and was created by the Free Standards Group. In a recent interview, the FSG's Executive Director, Jim Zemlin, and CTO, Ian Murdock, creator of Debian GNU/Linux, tell how the FSG works collaboratively with the open source community to support the continued progress of Linux and other key open source software, and ensure that end users do not suffer the same type of lock in that traps licensees of proprietary software products."
A great Unix, not the widest support and not the most user friendly, but it does several jobs for me. Server or desktop, I've learned to get OpenBSD to meet all of my computing needs, with the obvious exception of PC gaming, for which I keep a 'legacy' w2k install and never let it on the network.
OpenBSD's code correctness and elegance through simplicity is what got me hooked and for me, it is the most logically designed and thus, managed, operating system that I have ever used. I'm not out to start a flame war, just evangelising what I love to use.
It has its faults and is not the ideal choice in every scenario, but it gives me everything I need and it doesn't get in the way of me developing things to meet my needs, where they don't already exist. I still run a few Linux boxes and one FreeBSD box, but I seriously prefer my OpenBSD boxes for day to day usage and web serving.
Offtopic: I'm I the only one who believes that the various color schemes provided with those desktops must have been designed by blind monkeys?