The Birth of OpenBSD

Theo de Raadt was a NetBSD developer. After many strong, broad, and long-running disagreements with other NetBSD team members on how the project should be run, he went out on his own and founded the OpenBSD Project, attracting like-minded developers. The OpenBSD team quickly established an identity as a security-focused group, and it is now one of the best-known BSD descendants.

The OpenBSD team developers have introduced several ideas into the open source operating system world that are now taken for granted, such as public read-only access to the CVS repository and commit logs. They’ve also created several pieces of software that have become industry standards across many operating systems, such as sudo and the ubiquitous OpenSSH.

Today, many major companies rely on OpenBSD as a reliable, secure operating system with fanatical attention to security, correctness, usability, and freedom. OpenBSD runs on many different sorts of hardware, including the standard 32-bit and 64-bit “Intel PC” (i386 and amd64), Apple’s PowerPC Macintoshes (macppc), Sparc (sparc and sparc64), and obscure platforms such as the Sharp Zaurus PDA, the Lemote Yeeloong, and antediluvian VAXes. OpenBSD puts almost all of its effort into security features, security debugging, and code correctness, and has demonstrated in the process that correct code has a much lower failure rate, and hence greater security. OpenBSD strives to be the ultimate secure operating system.

The OpenBSD team continually improves the operating system. New features are added only once they meet the team’s code and documentation standards. Even if new software is added before it is feature-complete, it is expected to have full documentation and correct code.