What Is It?

OpenBSD is an open source operating system developed by volunteers. The current release is OpenBSD 4.2 which was released Nov 1, 2007, provides full source access to developers and users, including the ability to look at CVS tree changes directly. Users can even look at the source tree and changes directly on the web. One goal is to integrate good code from any source with acceptable copyright (ISC or Berkeley style preferred, GPL acceptable as a last recourse but not in the kernel, NDA never acceptable). They want to make available source code that anyone can use for any purpose, with no restrictions. They strive to make their software robust and secure, and encourage companies to use whichever pieces they desire.

Commercial spin-offs of OpenBSD exist. OpenBSD encourages companies and independent developers to create products for use with OpenBSD, or based on OpenBSD itself.

Who Is it For?

OpenBSD is freely available from FTP sites, and also available in an inexpensive 3-CD set. This system is very adaptable, and users from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to commercial applications to research and other non-commercial users have utilized OpenBSD in their operations. OpenBSD includes a list of ‘clients’ on their Web site that includes government entities such as the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. The list also contains information on how the enterprises and individual organizations use OpenBSD.

According to many users, OpenBSD has the most thorough, easy to follow native documentation of any Unix-like operating system. Users can find additional support online through the OpenBSD section of the BSD Forums Web site.

Features

OpenBSD provides uses that are very similar to FreeBSD, such as advanced networking, security and compatibility features, and storage and multiprocessing performance. Various facilities use this product for network monitoring, capacity planning, intranet servers, firewalls, and Internet gateways, DNS servers, squid proxies, file server, and much more.
OpenBSD uses a Korn shell (ksh) for root; Bourne shell (sh) for users; the C shell (csh) is also included by default, and several others are available as extra packages. The kernel is a 4.4BSD-based, monolithic, SMP-capable, does not support external kernel modules by default. OpenBSD doesn’t include much software in the default system, so users will add most of the programs that they need through either the Ports tree or through pre-compiled binary packages.

Compatibility

OpenBSD is supported on a number of platforms with “official” support. This support means that the release install media is known to work, that the architecture can self-compile and that most of the basic tools exist on the architecture. Usable platforms range from the Digital Alpha-based systems to AMD64-based systems and commercial systems such as Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, and Sun systems. Active porting efforts are not officially supported and are not on par with supported platforms. These ports include aviion, happa64, and solbourne. More information about compatibility is found at the OpenBSD Web site.

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