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Old 21st May 2008
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ai-danno ai-danno is offline
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Wow, good question. I'd say OpenBSD... but I'm sure some FreeBSD fans would have some convincing arguments to the contrary.

First a comment on BSD and UNIX (and yes I'm lumping a lot of history into two lines)- University of California at Berkeley put together the first BSD OS (Berkely Software Distribution) because it wanted academia to be able to use a UNIX-like system without having to pay all the licensing costs associated with actual AT+T UNIX. Since all the current BSD's use original code from UC Berkeley's original BSD, that's why you see the attribution when booting up any BSD system.


So I think it would be more accurate for me to say- OBSD is more in the original BSD UNIX-like tradition because it's code is completely transparent. There is no section of the code that is a pre-compiled binary that you can't review. Other BSD's will use this type of code (aka "binary blobs") to bring it's own OS into the 'modern day' functionality- a perfect example is 3d graphics hardware drivers, and also certain SCSI drivers. With OBSD sometimes this means that you will lose the ability to use certain hardware- OBSD developers respond to those non-cooperating hardware vendors with, "Make your driver source available and license-free - only then will we think about including support for it."

The other thing about OpenBSD that's really great is it's documentation. I can't speak for the documentation efforts of the other BSD's (so I can't say whether OBSD is better in this respect), but OBSD is routinely praised for it's depth and completeness of it's documentation, which in official terms relates to it's MAN pages and the OpenBSD FAQ. Of course, we're here to help, too .
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