OpenbsdEssay Preview: OpenbsdReport this essayIn December 1994, NetBSD co-founder Theo de Raadt was asked to resign his position as a senior developer and member of the NetBSD core team, and his access to the source code repository was revoked. The reason for this is not wholly clear, although there are claims that it was due to personality clashes within the NetBSD project and on its mailing lists.[2] De Raadt has been criticized for having a sometimes abrasive personality: in his book, Free For All, Peter Wayner claims that de Raadt “began to rub some people the wrong way” before the split from NetBSD;[3] Linus Torvalds has described him as “difficult;”[4] and an interviewer admits to being “apprehensive” before meeting him.[5] Many have different feelings: the same interviewer describes de Raadts “transformation” on founding OpenBSD and his “desire to take care of his team,” some find his straightforwardness refreshing, and few deny he is a talented coder[6] and security “guru”.[7]
In October 1995, de Raadt founded OpenBSD, a new project forked from NetBSD 1.0. The initial release, OpenBSD 1.2, was made in July 1996, followed in October of the same year by OpenBSD 2.0.[8] Since then, the project has followed a schedule of a release every six months, each of which is maintained and supported for one year. The latest release, OpenBSD 4.3, appeared on May 1, 2008.[9]
Bar chart showing the proportion of users of each BSD variant from a BSD usage survey. Each participant was permitted to indicate multiple BSD variants
Bar chart showing the proportion of users of each BSD variant from a BSD usage survey.[10] Each participant was permitted to indicate multiple BSD variants
On 25 July 2007, OpenBSD developer Bob Beck announced the formation of the OpenBSD Foundation,[11] a Canadian not-for-profit corporation formed to “act as a single point of contact for persons and organizations requiring a legal entity to deal with when they wish to support OpenBSD.”[12]
Just how widely OpenBSD is used is hard to ascertain: the developers do not collect and publish usage statistics and there are few other sources of information. In September, 2005 the nascent BSD Certification project performed a usage survey which revealed that 32.8% of BSD users (1420 of 4330 respondents) were using OpenBSD,[10] placing it second of the four major BSD variants, behind FreeBSD with 77.0% and ahead of NetBSD with 16.3%.[13] The DistroWatch website, well-known in the Linux community and often used as a reference for popularity, publishes page hits for each of the Linux distributions and other operating systems it covers. As of April 14, 2007 it places OpenBSD in 55th place, with 121 hits per day. FreeBSD is in 16th place with 478 hits per day and a number of Linux distributions range between them.
The prevalence of OpenBSD as the default operating system to use in the United States, as well as its use as a default Unix system, has created a considerable body of public-facing information that is incomplete and not representative of the overall popularity of open source systems in the U.S. and around the world, particularly in developed markets. To help improve this information, the OpenBSD Project maintains a detailed compilation of usage statistics, the OpenBSD ISO code, and other resources. The project will also publish OpenBSD, the GNU Arch Linux ISO, and the Linux Foundation’s OpenBSD Manual and the OpenBSD Documentation Web page. The first six pages of this article are available in the Public Interest Edition of the OSS website.
The OpenBSD Open Source License (or OSL) is a legally binding, copyright-free, non-profit organization whose goal is to promote and serve the interests of the open source community as a whole, by providing an open, free and open source operating system. OSL is an open source set of standards, distributed under a license in the general public domain under a license on open source by the copyright holders or third parties, at the cost of the users. The OSS Foundation is an educational organization, which has no formal organizational or business policy and thus cannot impose its own formal policies on other organizations. The OpenBSD Software Foundation operates under a copyright-neutral “license” or “license-grant basis” with respect to Linux and its derivatives and, hence, not intended to enforce its own policies or directives. More information about OpenBSD can be found at Wikipedia:OSL Licenses for the general public.
OpenBSD is the most widely used OpenBSD operating system in the world. At least 35.7% of the operating system’s total user base is members (nearly 4.5 billion individuals) of the OpenBSD community. Among all operating system users, OpenBSD was ranked the 11th most popular operating system for the number of open users (9.5 million users). The OpenBSD Operating System Program manual for the Linux operating system, available through the OpenBSD website, lists this as more than 30% of all Linux-related software installed on the Internet, and the OpenBSD Software Foundation has compiled a number of similar reports showing that around 30% of all Linux-related installations are Linux-based. The OpenBSD Operating System includes a number of Linux distributions (including Linux Mint and Gnome), including Linux Mint, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, OpenSolaris, OpenStack, Fedora Stretch, Solaris 8, FreeBSD, and Fedora N.
At any given time, over 1 billion users of all forms of operating systems distribute open source code for a common operating system and many, if not most, of these distributions use Linux by making their software available on the Internet. Linux has a rich ecosystem of open source libraries and has served to increase the availability of Linux in the United States. This has contributed to the large number of open source packages that are widely available and distributed using Linux, allowing many to build their operating systems on the hardware they use. The Linux Foundation has been criticized for making open-source software
[edit] Open source and open documentationWhen OpenBSD was created, Theo de Raadt decided that the source should be available for anyone to read at any time, so, with the assistance of Chuck Cranor,[14] he set up a public, anonymous CVS server. This was the first of its kind in the software development world: at the time, the tradition was for only a small team of developers to have access to a projects source repository. This practice had downsides, notably that outside contributors had no way to closely follow a projects development and contributed work would often duplicate already completed efforts. This decision led to the name OpenBSD and signalled the projects insistence on open and public access to both source code and documentation.
A revealing incident regarding open documentation occurred in March 2005, when de Raadt posted a message[15] to the openbsd-misc mailing list. He announced that after four months of discussion, Adaptec had yet to disclose the required documentation to improve the OpenBSD drivers for its AAC RAID controllers. As in similar circumstances in the past, he encouraged the OpenBSD community to become involved and express their opinion to Adaptec. Shortly after this, FreeBSD committer, former Adaptec employee and author of the FreeBSD AAC RAID support Scott Long[16] castigated de Raadt[17] on the OSNews website for not contacting him directly regarding the issues with Adaptec. This caused the discussion to spill over onto the freebsd-questions mailing list, where the OpenBSD project leader countered[18] by claiming that he had received no previous offer of help from Scott Long nor been referred to him by Adaptec. The debate was amplified[19] by disagreements between members of the two camps regarding the use of binary blob drivers and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs): OpenBSD developers do not permit the inclusion of closed source binary drivers in the source tree and are reluctant to sign NDAs. However, the policy of the FreeBSD project has been less strict and much of the Adaptec RAID management code Scott Long proposed as assistance for OpenBSD was closed source or written under an NDA. As no documentation was forthcoming before the deadline for release of OpenBSD 3.7, support for Adaptec AAC RAID controllers was removed from the standard OpenBSD kernel.
The OpenBSD policy on openness extends to hardware documentation: in the slides for a December 2006 presentation, de Raadt explained that without it “developers often make mistakes writing drivers,” and pointed out that “the [oh my god, I got it to work] rush is harder to achieve, and some developers just give up.”[20] He went on to say that vendor binary drivers are unacceptable, as they cannot be trusted and there is “no way to fix [them] when they break,” that even vendor source is only “marginally acceptable” and still difficult to fix when problems occur, and further commented “if we cannot maintain a driver after the vendor stops caring, we … have a broken hardware [sic].”
₎⁘ₐₒ‒ the FreeBSD board also provides a means to fix, he went on to say: The OpenBSD board does provide a “stable” kernel for a number of Linux platforms. This is the kernel provided by the Debian project, while the current stable kernel is not even available; the kernel was written by the kernel vendor ⁘ₕand can have a small impact on Linux, although there is very little data on this subject (it has already been covered here) ὴ and a few more things are known about OpenBSD.ₕ The current stable kernel does not include a kernel which allows to do any kind of debugging, but it does have the ability to have the ability to do things like “detect the system call to opencv in a secure loop, or write a new, more secure program to read data”.ₕ⁄%
⁘ In the next part of this article I will discuss what kind of source we use when using the FreeBSD kernel. We will also be discussing how the kernel is being considered and used by Linux for many other features, such as debugging it. To read all about the FreeBSD source code file, click here.
The OS (kernel)
On June 4, 2009 BSD posted a series of blog posts about the FreeBSD Operating System, which outlines an overview of the main kernel components, and the rationale behind their implementation.
The kernel is a distributed, open source and widely used operating system, with one major feature of OS’s being open source code.
OS is designed to do multiple things:
Provide and perform hardware support to hardware devices.
Provide and perform software to hardware devices. Improve quality of life and security by supporting multiple sources of Linux operating system.
Requirements for open source software are a mixture of user friendly, extensibility, and interoperability.
Linux requires that anyone who wants to use Linux must have Linux installed (usually by boot loader-compat.el), as this is the way they should run the program. Any person who is interested in the OS can use the LTS package.
Operating System architecture
Before we start we need to outline the various aspects of operating system architecture. To read the following section on the subject and understand how it is done, click here.
OS has different major components, i.e.
OSA (OS Version and Architecture):
OSA represents a subset of the kernel
OSA is the largest part used by many operating systems:
[edit] LicensingOpenBSD 3.7 running X.Org with the JWM window managerOpenBSD 3.7 running X.Org with the JWM window managerA goal of the OpenBSD project is to “maintain the spirit of the original Berkeley Unix copyrights,” which permitted a “relatively un-encumbered Unix source distribution.”[21] To this end, the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) licence, a simplified version of the BSD licence with wording removed that is unnecessary under the Berne convention, is preferred for new code, but the MIT or BSD licences are accepted. The widely used GNU General Public License is considered overly restrictive in comparison with these:[22] code licensed under it, and other licences the project sees as undesirable, is no longer accepted for